Lehigh Acres is an unincorporated area and Municipal District in Lee County, Florida, United States. As of the 2020 Census the population was 135,272. 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 neighboring Hendry County. Geography Lehigh Acres is located in eastern Lee County at (26.608333, -81.639167). It is bordered to the north by Alva, to the northwest by Buckingham, and to the southwest 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 to the center of Fort Myers and southeast to Immokalee. According to the United States Census Bureau, the Lehigh Acres CDP has a total area of , of which are land and , or 1.61%, are water. History 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 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. Gerald Gould was the president of the corporation that developed Lehigh Acres, which began in 1954. He remained as president until the company was sold in 1972. Since the days of the Lucky Lee Ranch, the boundaries of Lehigh Acres have stretched to cover , 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