Miami, a third tier American city? by gimleteye

Business Monday in the Miami Herald takes on the dilapidated and rundown condition of downtown Miami among the sleek new skyscrapers, echoing recent criticism of leveled by Macy’s CEO Julie Greiner before a recent Chamber of Commerce luncheon.

The Herald misses the point by putting a sleepless a homeless person on a Flagler Street sidewalk, on the section's cover.

The better image would have been of the homeless panhandling at the entrance ramp taking cars away from the Carnivorous Center for the Performing Arts to the highway.

You can understand why a homeless person is camping out downtown, on an empty stoop.

But under the 95 underpass, the homeless are a constant reminder that nothing in the layout of downtown Miami makes any sense.

Forget about the broken sidewalk tiles on Flagler Street: what kind of city spends half a billion dollars on a Performing Arts Center that turns its back on Biscayne Bay, without planning for parking, or, any kind of entrance indicating we are in the public realm except as a convenient stoplight for panhandlers?

What a waste of imagination we have made of Miami!

You can patch all the sidewalks and take down all the metal grates in the Miami street grid: it won’t make a difference until the city grid is put together in a way that makes sense.

At the edges of Miami, there are three examples where appropriate scale has created neighborhoods that are functional and provide capacity for economic growth: the Art Deco District in Miami Beach, the Design District, and downtown Coral Gables.

But what is going to happen with Midtown Miami and its millions of square feet that now—as housing and condo markets are crashing—feels like a shoe ten sizes too big? (Fear for the FEC corridor!)

The misdirection of city enthusiasms for building and construction and not the enhancement of public assets—not even an iota of common sense for how the imperative for private profit is enhanced by building spaces with cohesive public purposes—is maddening.

It is, at the same time, what infuriates so many people about the city's "plan" for Bicentennial Park and more Museums like demonic signposts.

Miami needs infill development: but not development that blasted all sense of scale and balance to smithereens (and based, as eyeonmiami often points out, on mortgage fraud, liar loans, public corruption, and a perpetual sense of entitlement of land use lawyers who dominate local zoning and permitting processes, like Greenberg Traurig.)

Here is what could have been, Chamber of Commerce: only a decade ago, the Miami River could have been an arts district and focal point for the city's rejuvenation.

In the wise use of its riverfront, Miami could have been like Chattanooga, Tennessee or even Providence, Rhode Island: both small cities that have used water access as the key to economic rejuvenation.

Imagine if Miami had used the example of the riverfront of Guayaquil, Ecuador, instead of building to be just a more glorious haven for the world's flight capital?

Every time I go to the public beach on the Rickenbacker Causeway, the view from the nasty tideline where thousands of citizens recreate on weekends reminds me that not even third world cities treat their public spaces with as much carelessness as Miami.

Take a look at this very interesting website:The Project for Public Spaces.

Tell me, where does Miami fit?