Bad karma in Miami housing markets, by gimleteye

One by one, the candidates to be the next president of the United States are harvesting campaign contributions from South Florida with well-crafted speeches without notes.

But don’t count on the nation’s most important election or the mainstream media, like the Miami Herald, to disclose the impacts of the massive loss of farmland to suburban sprawl or the costs of infrastructure deficits during a sharp decline in housing markets that are choking taxpayers and throttling the region’s business growth.

On a recent weekend, the Herald put the subject in the hands of journalism students at the University of Miami in a pull-out, real estate section.

“It takes patience and perseverance” to be a farmer in Homestead, Florida, according to John Alger, a third-generation farmer who is on the board of director’s of the Dade County Farm Bureau.

Florida City Mayor Roscoe Warren tells another University of Miami student reporter, “Farmers sell land because they can’t compete in agriculture in Homestead and other places… they don’t want to sell, but if you can’t compete. I know they have no choice.”

No choice?

In other parts of congested America, farmers support land acquisition programs and policies to conserve farmland for future generations.

Miami-Dade farmers have thwarted farmland preservation at every turn, blocking efforts to support sustainable development practices and failing to encourage land acquisition programs.

But you wouldn’t know that from the Miami Herald, because it has never been reported.

On this blog, we have noted the political origins of the housing boom.

Miami is the index case for crashing housing markets. It is also a place where the power elite stands for quality of life or environmental concerns on one leg, while kicking citizen advocates in the ass with the other foot.

The most visible reason is real estate development is virtually the only game in South Florida. A fleet of law firms are organized to fight government agency efforts to protect public lands and the public interest. (These are called ‘environmental law practices’.)

But there is another reason that differentiates Miami from other regions in respect to the difficulty of preserving open space.

At the same time that sugar barons from Cuba started to dominate the landscape of South Florida in the 1960’s in farmland south of Lake Okeechobee (where they had been encouraged by the US government to farm), Cuban American entrepreneurs turned home builders and contractors began to dominate local legislatures.

One of the first business enterprises of the entrepreneurial Mas family (Jorge Mas Canosa was a founder of the Cuban American National Foundation) was to broker construction and farming equipment to sugar farmers in the Everglades Agricultural Area.

Inhibiting the conversion of farmland to suburban sprawl requires comprehensive land use planning by local government and with the support of state policies: measures fundamentally at odds with the late, great housing boom and the accumulation of wealth and political power.

In the New York Times recently, Paul Krugman noted the reluctance of the Bush White House to impose any sort of regulation, even regulation that the food industry wants, in the case of the poisonous leaf lettuce that recently roiled the nation’s food markets.

“Officials may fear that they would create a precedent for public-interest regulation of other industries. But they are also influenced by an ideology that says business should never be regulated, no matter what.”

Historian Rick Perlstein calls “E. coli conservatives”, ideologues who won’t accept even the most compelling case for government regulation.

But the battle for the last farmland in Miami-Dade County shows something more: that conservative ideology—cloaked in the message framing of private property rights—is purposely driven to dismantle social protections and those who are their advocates.

Mayor Warren, of Florida City, says, “I hate having to drive all the way to Dadeland or the Falls or to Cutler Ridge to get things I can’t find in my community.” He added, “A department store is coming: you just have to be patient.”

In other words, taxpayers will put off the costs of unsustainable growth for another day, another year, or another generation just so people don’t have to drive ten miles to another big-box retailer.

So there you have it: be patient for another department store, another zoning change—that’s all there is to governance in the age of the e. coli conservatives.

And what are homeowners getting for this trade-off? On this question, the University of Miami journalism students are nearly penetrating.

One home buyer says, “My biggest complaint would be that they have developed a lot of houses, but they have not developed a lot of places for families.” Another says the opposite, “…it is more family-oriented.”

One says, “I think this area will eventually be more like Kendall is now.” (Kendall, the abject model for early growth, suburban sprawl is immediately to the north of Homestead.) Another adds, “For 18 years I lived in Kendall and I do not remember one of my neighbors… I have been here for five years and I already know all my neighbors.”

Homestead City spokesoman Lillian Delgado told the University of Miami journalism students that the price of a new home, between $325,00 and $350,00 is “still approximately 30 percent less than the rest of Miami-Dade.”

Reported as fact, the arithmetic is wrong. Reported as "ideas", the ideas are all confused.

But getting facts wrong, and having the media repeat the mistakes, and failing to address the confusion of costs and benefits is also an integral part of e. coli conservatism and makes sprawl "an unstoppable force", as crowed in 2002 by Al Hoffman, by key Bush ally and then chairman of WCI Communities, to the Washington Post.

Of the problems facing farmers in protecting farmland, the Florida City mayor concludes, “Agriculture has been very good to Homestead. We’ll do anything we can do locally, but this is a national issue.”

Mark Wigley, dean of Columbia University’s graduate school of architecture, takes a different tack in a recent edition of the Sunday Magazine in the New York Times. On the future of green construction and building in America, Dean Wigley says, “My prediction is that if we have a change in America, it won’t be driven by politicians or architects, but by the developers. … I think the one group we associate most with greed and inefficiency, it will lead the way in the future.”

Dean Wigley should visit Homestead and, once he has seen the example of Florida's most populous county failing to deal with the relatively simple matter of regulating impacts of suburban sprawl, even during the worst housing crash since the 1920's, he should try to explain how humanity, under the influence of the development community in the United States, can adjust to global warming.