Lehigh Acres, Florida, United States

🇺🇸 Lehigh Acres is an unincorporated area and Municipal District in Lee County, Florida, United States. Lehigh Acres is part of the Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Florida Metropolitan Statistical Area. Lehigh Acres is also one of the fastest growing communities in the State of Florida as well as the United States.

A large portion of the community is served by the Lehigh Acres Municipal Services Improvement District, a special-purpose district created by the Florida Legislature which covers areas in Lee and neighbouring Hendry County.

Lehigh Acres is located in eastern Lee County. It is bordered to the north by Alva, to the north-west by Buckingham, and to the south-west by Gateway, all unincorporated. It is bordered on the west by the city of Fort Myers, the Lee county seat, and extends east to the Hendry County line.

Florida State Road 82 forms the southern border of the community; the highway leads west 15 miles (24 km) to the centre of Fort Myers and south-east 20 miles (32 km) to Immokalee. According to the United States Census Bureau, the Lehigh Acres CDP has a total area of 94.2 square miles (243.9 km²), of which 92.7 square miles (240.0 km²) are land and 1.5 square miles (3.9 km²), or 1.61%, are water.

Lehigh Acres was developed in the mid-1950s by Chicago businessman Lee Ratner. Seeking a tax shelter, Ratner had sold his pest control business and faced the possibility of losing most of his earnings to the high capital gains tax of that era. Ratner heard that cattle was a good investment for people in his predicament, and he bought 18,000 acres (73 km2) of land in eastern Lee County and named it the Lucky Lee Ranch. After ranching for a while, and despite having no prior development experience, Ratner joined with Gerald H. Gould, a Florida advertising executive, Manuel Riskin, a Chicago CPA, and Edward Shapiro, a former Chicagoan who was in the real estate business in California, and began land sales at Lehigh Acres.