FRED GRIMM

fgrimm@MiamiHerald.com

I t's as if two hulking stories of raw concrete block were frozen in time -- an unsightly monument to when the boom went bust.

Weeds flourish in sand dumped at the construction site two years before. Graffiti decorates interior walls. The forlorn, unfinished, abandoned duplex adds insult to injury along Southwest 16th Street where Stephanie Lavender lives.

She and her neighbors in the quaint low-rise Croissant Park community once dreaded the invaders whose looming town houses and lot-line-to-lot-line McMansions would blot out the sky.

Since the bust, the same builders are despised all over again. Now for the mess they've left behind.

Lavender hasn't seen an actual worker near the town houses on 16th Street in 14 months. Nor can she convince a city inspector to do something about flouted codes or the port-a-potty that has come to be a permanent fixture in the front yard. ''The builder has to keep that port-a-potty there to keep his permit open,'' said Lavender, who has lived in Croissant Park for a dozen years.

DREADFUL ANTICIPATION

For the second hurricane season in a row, she and her neighbors regard, with dreadful anticipation, a big stack of barrel tiles that was perched on the roof back in the spring of 2007 -- ready for the roofers who've never come.

She envisions storm winds scattering clay tiles like bomb shrapnel down on her modest one-story cottage. ''I guess I can live with the knee-high weeds and the ugliness,'' Lavender said. ``But that's really dangerous.''

Abandoned building projects have spread across Florida like wind-borne blight. Thousands of unfinished, unsightly, weed-infested projects have been dormant and rotting for more than a year. Swarms of real estate speculators have given way to swarms of mosquitoes that breed in algae-clogged swimming pools.

In a bit of dismal irony, erstwhile ''hot neighborhoods'' have become the very communities marred by so many deserted projects. Though not always so deserted. Vagrants have discovered that the gray concrete shells of unrealized mini-mansions present squatting opportunities at very attractive addresses.

Even along Lauderdale's swanky new beachfront, stymied projects have evolved into weedy lots surrounded by chain-link barriers. If green plastic sheeting hung on the fences was supposed to approximate a manicured hedge, it won't fool patrons of luxury hotels who pay $700 a night for the lovely view.

DODGING THE TAX MAN

Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jim Naugle said Florida cities have long complained that a quirk in state law allows builders to duck property taxes. ``Some developers delay the CO [certificate of occupancy] until January, and since property taxes are paid in arrears, they get 11 months of service, subsidized by all the neighbors, for free until the next calendar year.''

Now builders with a partially completed project have yet another incentive to delay that final CO. Why finish up and start paying taxes on a structure likely to linger for months in a dismal real estate market? Better to leave it in limbo and ride out the slump?

But Mayor Naugle figures some builders simply skipped out. ``I do think that some of the places today are unfinished today because the developer went broke and moved to Costa Rica to hide from all his creditors.''

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