The news is filled with dismal tidings from the housing industry. You would think this would be a time for city and county government to take a breather from the boom of the past six years. In Miami-Dade County alone, the infrastructure deficit has piled up to more than $7 billion. But if you think government cares at all about the housing crash, or, the matter of taking a rest from listening only to the speculators, you would be wrong.
In the past six years, huge bets were made by land speculators, including some of the most politically connected developers in the county, outside the Urban Development Boundary. Land prices increased ten times, a hundred times, in anticipation of a development gold rush. Of course, there is no end in sight for the housing market crash-- it may only be just beginning--but changing the zoning and the Urban Development Boundary is absolutely critical to realizing some value from investments that have turned out, so far, to be bad bets indeed.
In the 2005 applications cycle for the county master development plan, every application by developers for land outside the UDB was rejected except for the Hialeah application.
It was a convoluted and highly manipulated process, stage-managed by then county commission chair Joe Martinez, who took apparent pride in trashing citizens, including thousands from his own district who took the time to write him and urge his opposition to moving the UDB.
Martinez was steaming mad--calling his opposition, liars and worse from the dais, and egged on by Natacha Seijas.
Although a majority of county commissioners voted to move the UDB, it was not by a majority capable of over-riding a promised veto by Mayor Carlos Alvarez. Moreover, Governor Jeb Bush put his foot down and informed Miami-Dade County that the applications would not receive state approval even if they were passed, on the basis of water availability and what we all know to be the killer of quality-of-life here: traffic.
Natacha Seijas was so contrite that she fired Bill Brandt, the director of Water and Sewer, for "not telling her the facts" about the water crisis. Of course, the last time Brandt had tried to tell her the 'facts' about water issues (asking for a rate hike to be applied to the rock mining industry, to build a new water treatment plant to account for cleaning up water polluted by its activities) Brandt was knee-capped by Seijas and the majority. (Anyone who paid attention knew that Brandt had done his level best communicating the dire condition of the county's water infrastructure. He took the fall and took a high paying job in private industry.)
Faced with limited water supplies, big developers suddenly got religion on the water re-use issue. Hialeah's application passed because the City of Hialeah and Armando Codina promised to put in its own water reuse infrastructure. Other developers are now singing the same tune: we will develop our own reuse capacity if you will only rezone our property outside the Urban Development Boundary.
What about traffic, the second Achilles heel of Miami Dade County?
Two years ago, Joe Martinez began touting the CSX rail line as the "solution" to Kendall's transit woes: it wasn't a true solution then, and it isn't true now because CSX take a very long and circuitous route to get anywhere close to where jobs are. But that is not going to stop the big developers, including Ed Easton, from claiming it to be so.
Engineers and consultants are busying and preparing plans for the next round of applications to move the UDB, due in only a few days. (The Easton project, in conjunction with Lennar, is moving along a separate permitting/planning path.)
You see, the game in solving the traffic problem is to claim that new capacity, like the CSX rail line or Krome Avenue, will absorb current needs (which are desperate) and future growth.
What is this all about, in the midst of a housing market collapse?
Politically connected land speculators are desperate to derive value from land purchased outside the UDB at the top of the housing boom: investments whose carrying costs are enormous.
Please help us, they will be saying to the county commission.
If we were to guess: the county commission will oblige, even though the county's own planning and zoning department, and the South Miami Dade Watershed Study, offer evidence that no expansion of the UDB is necessary--even to accomodate population growth--until 2050 at least. (Which is a main reason why Natacha Seijas is trying to kill the watershed study.)
The CSX will be held out as the "solution", and the developers will all claim to be 'green builders' now that the development patterns they crammed through local legislative zoning processes have throttled our quality of life, the environment, and even business investment.
We are now beginning to see that the building boom held as such a benefit by the South Florida business community during the past six years was based, to a very large extent, on fraudulent mortgages, liar loans, and outlandish land speculation.
But the big speculators who were frustrated by the decisions to reject the last round of UDB development applications in Miami-Dade County are readying their next assault on the process: we may be in the middle of the worst housing market collapse in modern history, but the land speculators are tied up in knots over their carrying costs.
Liberate us! will be their call, trotting out chamber's worth of citizens (paid, mostly) to attest that one more Lowe's is needed in far West Kendall, etc. etc. etc., fancy maps will show how the CSX rail line is the solution to the hundreds of thousands of commuters who spend hours a day locked in their cars in traffic.
Just wait a few weeks: you will see.
8 comments:
I support, in principle, extending Tri-Rail along the CSX line through South Dade, but not to be used as a lame excuse to extend the UDB.
i am out of breath Gimleteye...you tied up the package very nicely. The CSX line would be a good solution for transportation out west...the problem is, all these developments and roads and rail -- they border the Everglades, exactly where we DO NOT want people crammed in. How can you give them flood protection and fire protection? Look at Weston trying to build a school in a restoration area.
The Everglades is all about water and burns...it is an eco system...not a isolated area. Just what we need, condos bordering the Everglades.
Solve the East/ West Transit from Kendall to the US 1 corridor first, and improve Metrorail, so that it actually stops where people need it to stop.
Get that problem fixed BEFORE you do anything with CSX.
Why should taxpayers have to bail-out land speculators who made lousy investments outside the UDB based on unrealistic expectations that the boom would go on forever. They should all be doing penance for what they put us through in Miami Dade County!
The MetroRail system definitely needs improvement - great idea that just hasn't been fully utilized.
The MetroRail has to be made to work.
That line will cross every major east west road along its path.
Think about either paying for raised roads or tracks for it....otherwise you will have the gates dropping to allow a crossing every 15 minutes or so (for 10 minutes at a time)... That ought to help kendall traffic a whole bunch, don't you think?
I think the Kendall groups may support it. However, I can't get around the stopping traffic to accomandate the train. For those of you that live near the busway ... you know what the busway has done to traffic flow at those intersections.
A passenger train does not need 10 minutes to cross an individual intersection (Tri-Rail trains usually don't have more than 3 cars plus the locomotive). It's more like 45-60 seconds that a crossing gate would be down, about the same length of time that a regular traffic signal would be in the "red" phase before turning green.
The comparison to the busway isn't solid because buses have less capacity than trains (Tri-Rail cars are double-deckers) so naturally more buses have to run along the same corridor in order to attain the same level of service that a single train can achieve in one sweep.
Once the service becomes regular and they double-track the corridor, it should be fairly easy predict with a reasonable level of certainty when trains would reach a particular intersection.
Maybe the people "rationalizing" the CSX can explain, with all the stops, how long will it take a passenger from Ed Easton's planned development to get downtown?
What I see on this blog, are lobbyists and developers arguing for fake transportation solutions in order to permit new development, and ordinary citizens arguing that development must be stopped until current residents are served with transit solutions.
However this works out, the people know that they've been screwed. Cramming development into places that aren't served by reasonable transit to places of work has piled billions of dollars of costs on future taxpayers, allowing developers like Sergio Pino to fly to his Virginia horse estate on his Challenger jet. It's a beautiful country, isn't it?
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