Empty TV news and more foreclosures by gimleteye

The TV news loves car crashes, fires, and disasters. So why don’t decisions by elected officials on local zoning and permitting matters or their relation to massive infrastructure deficits attract as much attention as lightning strikes do?

Without question, zoning and permitting decisions by Miami city commissioners or Miami-Dade county commissioners create more mayhem than a thunderstorm ever will.

A man standing next to a truck is struck by lightning. TV trucks instantly materialize. But even with advance notice, TV is indifferent when elected officials voted to allow downtown Miami to be transformed into an empty condo canyon or the rural character of West and South Dade was transformed into a congested and ugly mess.

In the late 1990’s, at one public hearing in Little Havana over the Homestead Air Force Base, —there was a memorable moment when the forces arrayed in support of the no-bid private deal called on union members to push around students and retirees who were waving signs against the deal, outside the meeting hall.

At the appointed hour, with union members angrily confronting frightened protesters, Natacha Seijas, the county commissioner who engineered the deal, materialized.

She expected Spanish language TV to be there to record the clash, as had been arranged during earlier confrontational meetings in South Dade.

But this time, her opposition had called in news of another train wreck in another part of the city. The TV trucks had been diverted. Without cameras to perform in front of, to spew vitriol and bile, Seijas left in a fit of pique.

Quietly, the Miami Dade County Commission is preparing to cycle through another round of applications by the building lobby to bust through the Urban Development Boundary.

So the question arises: Why anyone should listen to the building lobby, at this point in time? The St. Petersburg Times reported yesterday that Florida leads the nation in foreclosures.

“Mark Vitner, senior economist at Wachovia Corp., cites two key reasons why the state stands out today: an abundance of properties owned by speculators. The relative ease and speed with which mortgage lenders can obtain a court-ordered foreclosure here.”

But economics is nothing, without politics. TV news mishandles the connection, by keeping viewers and consumers placid and quiescent as cattle in a chute.

Florida leads the nation in housing foreclosures because in 1998 the fuel of campaign contributions from the builder lobby in Florida elected Governor Jeb Bush and two years later his brother, to president, and burnt the public interest to a crisp.

Reinforced by historic low interest rates and the need to “rescue” the economy from the implosion of the dot.com bubble, the president appealed to the Federal Reserve to prime the growth machine, allowing the merry jig of rampant sprawl to overwhelm the state of Florida.

For the following decade, the Florida legislature and local legislatures knocked down one regulatory barrier after another to free the growth machine to chew up outlying areas and coastal real estate.

That is why Florida leads the nation in foreclosures, today.

Even in the last cycle of Urban Development Boundary amendments, more than a dozen died on the vine—but not through affirmative votes to stop the applications by Miami-Dade county commissioners: they failed because the applications came one vote short of being able to over-ride the likely veto by Mayor Carlos Alvarez if they passed.

Natacha Seijas and the unreformable majority sat and fumed, but TV news has never held a single pro-development city or county commissioner accountable.

And what we have turned into, in Florida today, is this: number one in the nation for homes entering the foreclosure process, number on in the share of homes entering foreclosure that were either condos or townhomes, number 2 in the proportion of homes entering foreclosure, and fourth in the rate of increase since April (22 percent). Source: Bargain.com

If Miami City Commissioners, Mayor Manny Diaz, or Miami-Dade County Commissioners have confessed to their role in the chain of causality—through allowing our communities and neighborhoods to be rolled over by the builders’ lobby—we haven’t heard it.

In the meantime—if you were listening—the Miami Dade County School Board meeting yesterday had a heated discussion about $12 million allocated to a new technical school in Homestead—a city where suburban sprawl has vanquished any semblance of common sense, pretty much destroying the place.

Board member Ana Rivas Logan made veiled references to a decision based on politics (without saying, whose) and owned up to statistics we’d like to see published and reported in the mainstream press: a dramatic decline in school enrollments, virtually across the board.

Between the foreclosure rate, declining school enrollments, mounting costs of infrastructure related to transportation and water, bullying rock miners, taxes and costs of insurance: you would think there is enough to get voters angry.

But you won’t hear it on TV news. Moo.