A city can’t be great without a park. It can’t even be a second tier city, without a good park. Miami doesn’t fall into either category, because its bayside parks have been orphaned by commerce.
I don’t know about other people’s reasons for objecting to museums in Bicentennial Park, but mine are based on the way that the City of Miami and Miami Dade County has turned its back on Biscayne Bay.
That’s the story of Bayside Marketplace: a mistake of a bad mall in the center of downtown's waterfront. Today we have Bayfront Park, separated by Bayside, separated by the Miami Heat Arena, separated from Bicentennial "Park", separated by 395, separted by the Carniverous Performing Arts Center.
(I'm not even going to touch the what is happening in the public space off Rickenbacker Causeway-- those beaches (if they can be called that) are a disgrace that confirms for visitors from Latin and South America that our claim to first world status does not always manifest in ways that matter to ordinary people.)
The original deal for Bayside included the creation of a trust that was supposedly for purchase of lands on the bay for the benefit of the public: a possibility that might have saved Coconut Grove’s shorefront but for inattentive city bureaucrats and private developers who can afford visiting Paris to see a great city and its parks.
But that's not what the Wall Street Journal trumpeted, yesterday.
“There’s a new status symbol for American cities and it’s not a soaring office tower or retro stadium. To many civic leaders, nothing says progressiveness and prosperity like an elaborate urban park.”
Miami’s business leaders presumably read yesterday's Journal. Whether or not they noticed, and if they noticed whether or not they cared about Miami’s absence on the list is another matter.
“On a scale not seen since the ‘City Beautiful’ movement of the 19th century, public green spaces are proliferating.” Not in Miami.
In addition to mismanaging its zoning and permitting—to benefit land speculators, condo developers and big lawyer lobbyists of the Growth Machine, like Greenberg Traurig—the City of Miami now finds itself staring down a fiscal crisis simply to provide infrastructure for the dozens of skyscrapers nearing completion, that will be mostly empty for the foreseeable future because of the glut and gluttony elected officials and the building lobby fed into. (Deficits will no doubt lead to cries for more zoning changes to benefit developers, to "increase the tax base".)
One of the interesting features of the Wall Street Journal story is the focus on the massive park designated for a closed Navy base in Southern Calfornia: El Toro.
El Toro is being redeveloped by Lennar Corp., that eyeonmiami has often highlighted for its role in undermining the public interest in protecting the Urban Boundary.
The closure of El Toro Navy Base was raised as a comparable to the conveyance of the Homestead Air Force Base. Today, fifteen years after Andrew, the base is empty for the most part.
Its development promise has been throttled by elected county officials, Natacha Seijas lead the charge, determined to avoid state and federal laws protecting two national parks nearby: Biscayne National Park and Everglades National Park.
Sometimes I think it must be something in the drinking water that leads to such strange paradoxes: here, in Miami, we have some of the closest access to unique national parks in the nation, and yet the city has turned its back on them. Here, too, we have a major corporation that can find the right way to develop elsewhere in the nation, but not in the suburbs of the place it calls home.
One difference is that in return for development rights at El Toro, Lennar was mandated to create a massive public park through the conveyance process, involving public input.
At Homestead Air Force Base, the county commission, (Seijas, in particular), not only ignored the public but routinely antagonized the public. Although the county promised a park for the air base, it would be interesting to know how much has been invested and what the usage of the air base park is, today.
At El Toro, according to the Journal, Lennar was give the development opportunity in exchange for a commitment of $200 million to the creation of the park, and another $201 million on infrastructure.
Biscayne National Park is gorgeous and peaceful and a place to get away from the pressures of the office for thousands of Miamians, every weekend, including Lennar CEO Stuart Miller. I wonder how much Lennar has contributed, or the family private foundation, to Biscayne National Park?
But Lennar is not alone.
In Miami corporations have turned their backs on Biscayne Bay, that could help define Miami as a great city--more than a performing arts center or a museum. In failing to use Biscayne Bay to its best advantage, business executives based in Miami have the attitude that a great city is somewhere they fly to visit but not to call their home.
5 comments:
I'm not a Miami native, but I've been to the area several times. I will offer a suggestion as to why there is no civic spirit in Miami.
Miami does not have the feel of an American city. Traveling through the airport makes you feel as if you are in a foreign country.
Perhaps the reason that there is so little philanthropy with regard to public spaces is that the wealthy class in Miami looks down upon the middle and lower classes in much the same way that the corrupt elite class in most South American countries does.
I am all for diversity, but there is value to having a shared culture. It's the culture in Miami that's the problem. It's been imported from a country so corrupt that it had a revolution.
I appreciate that this may not be a very popular sentiment with many of your readers, but it's what a lot of other Americans think about your city. I know, because I've asked.
We Should All Learn To Prove Ourselves First
1. Couples need to determine their economic position (present and future) before making plans to expand their family with more children or increasing the size of their home.
2. Cities should demonstrate their ability to operate public facility (at a profit or at least breaking even) before they are permitted to build more public facility that end up costing the taxpayers big bucks (Miami Arena, Knight Center, Performing Arts Center). Miami should not be thinking about spending even more funds on replacing museums that are not generating enough attendance any way.
3. Cities should demonstrate their abilities to serve the community by only permitting more development of housing that will better match the demands of consumers and not create a glut that will drive all housing values down.
Well said, Harry.
"The demands of consumers": the builders say that's exactly what they are doing with suburban sprawl. It's the same thing the auto manufacturers said, as they built profit by the pound of metal and plastic, and it's even what the tobacco mfgs said, to justify their poisoning of people.
The builders also said there was no glut: in fact, they said, there is a demand for more condos because more people are coming and more people are moving in from the suburbs.
Of course they didn't look at the declining school enrollment statistics. They didn't look at the average hourly wage statistics.
In Miami it has always been about more volume. Packing more people in. Laundering more money through real estate transactions.
And meanwhile, people have become compacent, passive, and unwilling to participate in any movements to change the status quo.
People don't go to public meetings, in the evenings, where such might be discussed-- because the traffic is so bad. Two wage earner families are too stressed, anyhow. This is called democracy?
For a start, the government is going to use the area outside base as an holding area for post-castro events. The neighborhoods have no clue about what is coming down the tracks. I imagine the Air Base Commander is thrilled to know that right outside the front gate is going to be chaos.
There is a mega high school and public park under construction there at sw 268-270 street and 127 ave. Of course, the public park is part of the post-castro plan. So, that ought to be fun for the community.
Mr. Book and the Miami Dade County Homeless Trust Director have 50 acres there that they are trying to convert the use (successfully, so far) from land held in the public trust for social services into land for Lennar-like entities. Seems that suddenly, there is no funding for transitional housing... only permanent.
Where is the Mayor and our 13 commissioners on these sort of things?
As a social worker, I know that getting zoning for social services is nearly impossible, yet our local and Federal elected officials is supporting the Trust selling the land already zoned for that???
Give us a break here. That is stinky business for the Homeless Trust.
PS: The more housing built along the base areas, the more likely the base will stop being a base. The Air Force does not like encroachment on it's boundaries. It is a public safety issue as well as a National Security issue.
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