Miami Beach epitomizes the effort to sell land through the promotion of travel and tourism. Carl Fisher is the person most responsible for the selling the image of paradise on Miami Beach. Fisher, who made his fortune with Prest-O-Lite, the company he developed to manufacture headlights for automobiles, first visited Miami Beach in 1910 for a week-long vacation with his young wife, Jane. Both were entranced by the sultry climate, the lush landscape, and the sense of possibility the Beach held out.

Already enterprising developers including avocado plantation owner John Collins and bankers J.N. and J.E. Lummus were clearing land on the beach in an attempt to make it habitable and profitable. Yet it was not just the climate and tropical surroundings that enticed visitors; Fisher crafted a vacation paradise designed explicitly to sell travelers the dream of exclusivity and exoticism.

Fisher's hotels, including the Flamingo and the Nautilus, as well as those of other developers like N.B.T. Roney, catered to a well-heeled clientele. Many hotels barred Jews as guests, and Fisher signed restrictive covenants for his land holdings forbidding the sale of land to non-Caucasians.  By the 1930s, some landowners removed restrictions against Jews (but not Blacks) as the Great Depression brought with it the need to cater to a wider audience if Miami Beach was going to survive.

Developers hired architects such as Henry Wright, Henry Hohouser, and L. Murray Dixon who adapted modernist design to a tropical landscape. They built more modest hotels and apartment houses to shape what would become the largest district of Art Deco architecture in the world, and in the process encouraged a demographic shift in Miami Beach, with middle- and working-class Jews very soon becoming a significant presence in an area that just a decade before had been off limits to them.