Send us your tired, your poor, your electronic photos of half-completed subdivisions, empty tracts of poorly planned homes, your condos bereft of owners, stray cats slinking through abandoned sales offices. Harry Emilio Gottlieb did and is the winner of this week's Krome Gold Photo Contest! Yes, it's the city of Miami, but municipalities count! In the post section, rate these photos on the Krome Gold Point Scale. Read more, to learn why county commissioners deserve to be held accountable!
Perhaps you read, yesterday, about the county commission's quiet approval of a $30 million aquisition fund to purchase development rights from farmers. It is something that the environmentalists have been clamoring for, for two decades at least, but made far too much sense for this county commission, and perhaps in a fit of spite, environmentalists were excluded from any press opportunity to comment.
There are a couple of issues they might have commented on: for one, the county commission is poised to approve four applications to move the Urban Development Boundary, even though Miami Dade County is in the midst of the worst crash in construction markets in a century.
It would have been embarrassing if environmentalists had pointed this out, at a moment when the need to enhance land purchasing requirements is not on the order of $30 million but closer to $1 billion.
You see: the big farmers and land speculators have always opposed programs to purchase development rights, or, transferable development rights.
The reason that Harry Emilio Gottlieb's photos are important, is that they show the cost of allowing density at any price, anywhere, instead of the county and municipalities rationally zoning and permitting by creating incentives based on scarcity in targeted areas.
The flip side of farmers failing to support a transferable development rights program in Miami-Dade is municipalities who have greedily allowed zoning changes and building permits--so long as they were brought forward by politically influential development attorneys and engineering firms and lobbyists: Greenberg Traurig comes to mind.
The larger context for the problem is Florida, itself, where land speculators under the neon sign of property rights have dominated public discourse and public offices.
The result is obvious, and can been from one side of the state to another.
2 comments:
good photos...i give the 2 at top, one natacha each and one martinez each 140 points each.
Commissioners certainly should be held accountable as they approve, directly or indirectly, through council members strategically placed at certain Community Councils to approve projects previously blessed by the Commissioner in charge of that District. But how can we force SAO, Fernandez-Rundle to investigate and prosecute the same people that contribute to her reelection campaigns? It's well known that the same developers and lobbyiests contribute to their campaigns. Why would she be so dumb as to lose the flow of dollars provided through the BCC's intervention?
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