No one knows anything, by gimleteye

On Sunday, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel reported on the dismal housing markets in the western suburbs of Broward and Palm Beach Counties, the latest suburbia built in the belt of farmland that buffers the Everglades from urban areas to the east.

Statistics on growth are notoriously unreliable. But if you go around and listen, businesses that depend on sunny Florida real estate markets are really hurting.

Sure, the earth is still being moved in places.

The Miracle Gro financial model for commercial construction in suburbs—that is to say, ready-mix pods of retail malls available to investors in sizes small, medium and large—is chugging along.

But not from rising demand. Triggers for these investments are less sensitive than tract homes.

In any case, Florida has always been a cheap date: the down-market, bottom-of-the-barrel here will always be better than in Cincinnati or Newark or Des Moines, if only because of the weather.

But the economic model that drives Florida is tied, entirely, to swiftly growing population. As long as the moving vans pile in from the borders of Georgia or Alabama, ad valorem tax base increases reliably enough to allow the costs of growth to be deferred, leaving people relatively happy even if springs vanish and algae blooms clog waterways.

"Keep building roads" should be Florida's motto.

But with housing markets crashing—and they are—something is changing that doesn’t show up in statistics.

There’s whispering from moving companies in Florida, that the tide of 1000 daily new residents trumpeted in growth models that drive local legislatures and permitting and zoning has reversed.

For small businesses built on the real estate trade, the natives are very restless: insurance companies and government take more money from them, than they can take themselves from their businesses.

This transformation has not been picked up by the mainstream media, fearful that bad news can be self-reinforcing. (It's fine to report disasters and calamities, as long as they are happening to someone else.)

Advertisers routinely complain to newspapers about negative news stories on real estate. So much of consumer confidence depends on perception.

If there ever was a moment in Florida's history to a plan for future growth based on a model for sustainability grounded in facts and in science, this would be it.

But bankers and builders in Florida are wed to how profitable it was, just a few years ago. Maybe not this month. Maybe not this year. Bring the boom back!

In Florida, despite teetering housing markets, a rapid rise in mortgage foreclosures, and weakening consumer demand, the builders’ lobby hasn't swerved an inch from advocating for more and speedier platted subdivisions in farmland and wetlands.

On this score, the disposition of elected officials toward development is as reliable as the 5 PM weather forecast.

Drive around Florida today, and you will see from the road that scrapers and road graders are still laying infrastructure for more of the same. Pipes and cables are still being layed and some bankers are still funding 100 percent mortgages.

Buried beneath the clamor for insurance and tax reform in Florida is the rigid unwillingness of the real estate growth industries to embrace anything other than the view in the rear mirror.

Just a week ago, elected officials of the state's most populous county verged on rejecting the most comprehensive, long-term planning effort ever to be undertaken toward the goal of balancing growth, protecting a crucial watershed, and natural resources.

The South Miami-Dade Watershed Study cost $3 million. In the end, the citizen advisory committee did not want to come to terms with what they had spent 6 years trying to decide: how to focus development away from platted subdivisions in land that serves a dual purpose: to recharge aquifers as well as grow food crops.

The failure is noteworthy to national audiences hoping for some example of progress in establishing metrics and policies to protect natural resources while accommodating anticipated growth.

It is one more example how a business elite becomes so insulated from change that it fails, in the end, to protect its own market.

Just like Detroit. In 2003, (the year President Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq) “Maximum Bob” Lutz now vice-chairman of General Motors, described Toyota’s Prius as a public relations stunt.

Today, Toyota has surpassed GM and Mr. Lutz has reversed course, embracing green technologies.

Seeing auto execs drive their industry into a wall like a crash dummy is a little different than what is happening in Florida.

Here, sprawl is cementing all of Florida's deficits in place, in ways that make them much harder to recover.

While Florida’s developers and builders’ lobby are racing to the future by protecting their prerogatives, Florida’s aquifers are draining.

In Hernando County, on Florida’s west coast, during the last pernicious drought—in 1998—a famous local spring, Weeki Wachee, took two years to draw down. Over the recent drought, Weeki Wachee has drawn down in little more than a year.

What changed was what happened above ground: a suburb called Spring Hill filled in over the aquifer that charges the spring.

In Pasco County, homeowner insurance rates are skyrocketing, but not because of hurricanes: it’s because of damage from sinkholes and soil subsidence. Aquifers are so close to the surface, and soils are so sandy, that home foundations shift when aquifers are drained.

Navigating hazards like these requires willpower far in excess of what zoning and permitting agencies, at any level of government, have been able to muster.

Of Miami-Dade County’s effort to plan the future, the Miami Herald writes, “Asked whether it was worth the time and money invested, Natacha Seijas, told the Miami Herald, “I don’t think so.” Seijas is the de facto chair of the county commission representing the building industry,

What is worth the time and money was outlined in a Saturday pull-out section on the bright prospects for real estate in Homestead and Florida City—the southernmost municipalities in Florida’s largest county where suburban sprawl marched to the tune of liar loans and mortgage fraud and, now, toward vacancies and rapidly escalating foreclosures.

In 2000, when the housing boom was still in the future, Homestead was where environmentalists succeeded in persuading federal agencies to prohibit the conversion of the Homestead Air Force Base into a privatized commercial airport, in large part because of secondary impacts of the development on nearby national parks and the pressure on the Urban Development Boundary.

But blocking the airbase redevelopment did not in any material way result in a better plan for the growth of south Florida.

At the time, national park managers asked for and received from the local county commission a chance to do long-term planning for the region: planning that the builders’ lobby has rejected, even though the crash in housing markets is visible in exactly the area environmentalists were trying to protect, a decade ago.

Of the South Miami-Dade Watershed Study, the Miami Herald reports, “A lead author said, ‘the study’s environmental recommendations—such as building storm-waer treatment plants and restorating wetlands—are not enough to protect the region’s water supply without also addressing where and how people live.’”

“Neither the builders nor their political supporters have rejected urban redevelopment, especially near train and bus depots. But they said too many buyers are insisting on a suburban dream house rather than a town house in a village square—even if it comes with a long commute over clogged roadways. “It’s not going to happen in the real world,” said Carter McDowell, the building industry’s representative on the (plan’s) advisory committee.”

The noted screenwriter William Goldman coined the phrase, “No one knows anything”, by way of explaining Hollywood's propensity to make flop after flop, but he might as well have been talking about the building and development lobby that runs Florida.

So far, their “real world” is full-steam ahead through the rear-view mirror, no different than what wrecked Detroit.