The South Miami Dade Watershed Study by gimleteye

The final draft of the long-awaited South Miami-Dade Watershed Study is headed to Natacha Seijas’ Government Operations and Environment Committee on April 10th, and then to the county commission.

Special interests are rattling sabers: big landowners/farmers/land speculators, developers and their lobbyists, consultants, and land use law firms. These are the same who argued in 2005 that the flood of people into Miami-Dade county required moving the Urban Development Boundary. That was the top of the market.

The housing market crash has blown their powerpoint presentations to smithereens.

The watershed study is a multi-year work product to plan future growth so Biscayne Bay doesn’t turn into a cesspool and water supplies are adequate for future needs.

There is a lot of hand-wringing going on, but a careful analysis shows that the county commission would be making a very serious mistake if it tosses the study over the transom.

For one, the housing boom is turning into a full-fledged rout in Miami-Dade County. The bottom is not in sight.

Why kill a study that proposes to balance land use for future growth including the needs to protect and restore an ecosystem?

Take a drive, any early morning day of the week, down to South Dade and here is what you will see: a flood of traffic coming northbound, piling into more congestion piling downtown where jobs are.

You will also see empty platted subdivision, one after another, growing like a cash crop in row fields, surrounding the new Homestead General Hospital. They will be empty for a long time.

No wonder that land speculators and lobbyists want to monetize their property assets, especially if they are holding land at exorbitantly high prices. Land speculation in Florida might not be exactly like the tulip bulb mania in 1635, but it is not far from it.

Most of the land in question is outside the Urban Development Boundary—which was established by county policies in the 1970’s, and is guided by the state comprehensive land use planning process.

Land outside the UDB is marginally efficient as tract housing: it is far from job centers, requiring long commutes on severely overburdened roadways, and has mostly served the purpose of generating banking fees from farmers borrowing at speculative land values and loan origination fees to subprime borrowers.

In the three years since the watershed study was commissioned—(it is the most comprehensive, science-based report undertaken on any watershed in the United States)—the housing boom crested and broke.

Now that the boom is over, it is easy to see how the contortions of the county commission over opening land beyond the UDB have distracted from other critical missions, like affordable housing. Government deformed to to satisfy bottom of the barrel lenders and production home builders struggling today with excess inventory.

The truth is that the builders who control the county commission really don’t know what to do, or, they only know to do one thing: platted subdivisions in farmland.

In addition to the county commission, there are two centers of power that the builders' lobby cannot risk alienating at the same time.

The first center of power is Mayor Carlos Alvarez.

Mayor Alvarez is popular and straight as an arrow. The developers didn’t support him, and there is every reason to believe he understands the importance of sound planning for Miami-Dade’s water future, even if it means angering a few landowners in farm country.

The second center of power is Governor Charlie Crist. So far, Governor Crist appears to understand how the building boom of the last decade left Florida’s tax coffers full and citizens gasping as communities were overrun by suburban sprawl.

Right now, the special interests are blustering about the watershed study. Do they have a better plan? No.

The tired, old tactic of knocking down obstacles to more suburban sprawl is not going to play well in the Mayor's Office or with Governor Crist. Natacha Seijas and her majority need to be very careful how they proceed.

The housing boom is over. No foot stomping will bring it back.