Lehigh Acres is a census-designated place (CDP) in Lee County, Florida, United States.

Lehigh Acres is part of the Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Florida Metropolitan Statistical Area.

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.

[citation needed] Gerald Gould was the president of the corporation that developed Lehigh Acres, which began in 1954.

Since the days of the Lucky Lee Ranch, the boundaries of Lehigh Acres have stretched to cover 61,000 acres (250 km2), including the runways of the former Buckingham Army Airfield, a major Army Air Forces training base that was closed at the end of World War II.

The pasture land where Ratner's cattle roamed and the since broken up runways where military flight crews trained has been divided into some 152,000 0.25-and-0.5-acre (1,000 and 2,000 m2) lots for housing, along over 1,400 miles (2,300 km) of roads.

Strips of land along major thoroughfares, such as Homestead Road and Lee Boulevard, were set aside for commerce.

[citation needed] In 1992, Lee County, with the cooperation of a new developer, declared Lehigh Acres to be blighted,[citation needed] and authorized its Community Redevelopment Agency to take steps towards improving infrastructure and planning elements neglected by the original developer.

A reliance on construction jobs no longer available pushed the unemployment rate in the area of Lehigh Acres and Fort Myers to 14% by the summer of 2009.