The Red Balloons Miami housing crash by gimleteye

On days like today, the Miami Herald reads like a newspaper without the courage of its own convictions.

Do we really need to send red balloons high into the air, to reflect the height of proposed Related Groups towers at Mercy Hospital, for evidence that more zoning changes during a real estate crash is insane?

Unremarked misjudgements are par for this course.

A news story on the scandal at the county housing agency reports County Manager George Burgess demanding to see supporting documents on the federal HUD case against the agency, gleaned from his own department's files.

An independent opinion writer, Ben Burton, decries the destruction of affordable housing: “when will we learn that the purpose of economic development is to better the lives of our community’s residents, not simply to allow a business to make a profit?”

We will apparently learn these lessons when poor people hire a lobbyist, detailed in the A1 cover, “What it costs to be heard”, by Gary Fineout. “For the first time ever, there’s a known price tag for influencing the Florida Legislature: at least $58 million. And counting.”

How much lobbying money is spent to influence the Miami Dade County Commission? Why has the capacity for fraud, waste and mismanagement in some county agencies morphed from a job disqualifier to a job requirement?

Unremarked misjudgements is an awkward phrase, but nothing like the dissonance between the stories we read in the Miami Herald and the timidity of the editorial page. Maybe we have to go to another section of the paper for clues why.

In the Herald real estate, paid advertisement we read, “Caribe Homes continues to be instrumental in the dynamic transformation undergoing South Miami-Dade County, says a company official”.

The transformation of South Miami-Dade County into suburban tract housing by production home builders has been a disaster. And downtown Miami?

As reported in Sunday’s report on the real estate crash unfolding in South Florida, huge volumes of inventory in Homestead are unsold and unoccupied. The forest of construction cranes downtown preside over a Potemkin Village.

Traffic is saturated. In Miami neighborhoods need to be protected, not overshadowed by condo canyons supporting flight capital or Euro investments, if anything at all.

Yet, in all this cacaphony, the only sense the Herald editorial board can make is to write a mild editorial on the well-reasoned State of the County speech by newly strong mayor Carlos Alvarez. Judicious. Even tempered.

There is so much more.

We have yet to read investigative reports or editorials on the impact to the environment from turning Homestead into another Kendall, from Lennar siting homes on its new development outside the Urban Development Boundary in the corner of five acre lots so that at some point in the future those lots will be primed for tract housing.

Why hasn't the Herald editorial page written on the over-development of farmland, loss of historic watersheds, pollution and influence peddling in communities like Florida City where the importance of zoning for new tract housing obliterates everything in its path?

What we conclude is the Herald executive suite pays more attention to complaints from big developers than stories in its own paper.

The game is still on, for the lobbyists who influenced the County Commission to push zoning changes that allowed farmland to be plowed up for tract housing while the poor and needy and the environment and our quality of life were sacrificed.

Under the influence of an allergy to its own news reports, it also emerges that Miami Herald editors are missing the biggest aspect of this unfolding reality: a deep crisis in subprime mortgage derivatives, which have fueled much of the destructive growth in South Florida. On this subject, we haven't read a thing.

Even national media like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have been late to the story, but they are on it now.

Yesterday’s New York Times editorial board wrote about “Mortgage Insecurities”: “In 2005 and 2006, lenders wrote an estimated $3.2 trillion in new home mortgages, which was a record—and lowered their credit standards considerably to do it. In 2005 alone, 20 percent of the mortgages taken out were “subprime”—made to borrowers with poor credit—and many more had worrisome features like interest-only payments.”

Welcome to Miami Dade where lobbyists/developers are still offering “the future buyer to purchase a home with zero down payment, only a small deposit of $5000 is required, and 100 percent financing is available. As a bonus, at time of contract buyers will receive Caribe Credit, which translates into a $15,000 credit for to be used to reduce closing costs and/or for upgrades and extras.”

In the absence of thoughtfulness by the Miami Herald on the subject, we’ll go with the New York Times editorial board’s opinion:“if the bankers, investors and regulators who populate the global financial markets are not already anxious, they should be.” So are we.