Land in Florida-The Wealth of Generations

Miami's Spanish Monastery (circa 1152)


No great treasures were discover when the first Spanish soldiers arrived with Ponce De Leon in 1513.  Nor was their silver and gold to be had when the French came, or the English, or the Spanish again.  Actually there was wealth and untold riches to be had even back then in the form of the coastal properties and the vast inland peninsula called La Florida.  Celebrating both the native and the Spanish history of Miami today stands a quiet Spanish monastery as seen in the above video.  The video is a sort of metaphor to the overlooked wealth of South Florida that would for the next 500 years be fraught with the decimation of native tribes, revolutionary, civil and "indian" wars.

This blog is dedicated to the land of Florida, its wealthy position in the International community and the unique legal facility given to it in 1962, 449 years after the fateful day when Ponce De Leon step on shore somewhere near St. Augustine in search of the fountain of youth.  Why 1962?

In 1962 the Florida Legislature passed a remedial law "to make right" a law on the books that had been carried over from English Common Law.  Florida had adopted, as had most of the original states that preceded Florida Statehood, a "Statute of Uses" for Florida Property.  Property ownership in Florida was encumbered (and still is) by a stipulation of Florida Statehood in 1843 that allowed Spanish Land Grant holders to retain their property under the new United States rule.  Along with the Spanish Ownership addendum also came the Statute of Uses rule written in 1538 by King Henry VIII of England.  The short version of the law is this.  If you have both legal ownership and use of Florida property there is no other ownership that can exist.  Think about that for a moment.

If allowed to stand under Henry VIII then or in the new State of Florida at its inception no one would have the right to lease property because everyone who owned property was considered to have its personal use.  The Chancery Court of England did battle with the King over the "statute of uses" and overthrew the law over 50 years of courtroom rulings and battles.  This courtroom battle gave rise to what we know in England and the US as "Trust Law".  Since the Florida legislature was looking to correct the errors of Florida's Statute of Uses, they expanded the corrections to include a series of significant complementary benefits for Florida property owners based on the legal documentation found in Illinois' Land Trust Law.