In 1992 Hurricane Andrew stripped Florida City and Homestead clean. I drove through the morning after. It looked like a bomb had gone off. Familiar landmarks had been erased overnight. Dazed residents sat outside, trying to make sense of debris that had been their homes.
Within weeks, a group of architects and urban planners, lead by the chair of the University of Miami School of Architecture--Elizabeth Plater Zyberk--volunteered to help design the destroyed commercial zone-- the same architects and planners have been involved in the rebuilding of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
Although a few public areas in Homestead reflect design recommendations, the lasting result is better reflected by the US 1 business district in Florida City: the one route into the Florida Keys.
It’s only a mile long. Before Andrew, the strip was a hodge podge of fast food franchises, a family owned restaurant and motel indifferent to the surrounding billboards advertising the Florida Keys. The designers proposed, as part of a grander theme, that the business zone embrace the surrounding national parks: Everglades and Biscayne National Park and the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.
The softer design never happened.
When time came to put money into the ground, the new approach was rejected by the local power brokers, mainly local bankers, their surrogates on local development councils and elected officials. Various excuses were made (ie. the building code wouldn't allow it, Florida transportation wouldn't pay for it), but none explained sufficiently how deeply antagonistic the Growth Machine is to the imposition of any standard other than the highest and best use of private property: ie. suburban sprawl.
What emerged on the strip stands today as a defiant swagger: bigger signage, bigger fast food franchises, more of the same but in bolder type.
And that was before the housing boom. Now that the housing boom raced through South Dade, turning farmland into the most desperate shapes of low-cost production housing, little can be done except to sift through what is left by the bust, after the fact--including a new "slow growth" majority on the Homestead city commission.
If the world wide credit crisis was triggered by the prevalence of lenders to lure the last tranche of borrowers to the home buying frenzy in 2004 and 2005, the sprawl covering South Dade today represents the last dregs of the housing boom in Miami housing markets, once on fire and now in cinders.
The builders—major production home builders like Lennar in conjunction with local team players of the Latin Builders Association and assorted land speculators and land use lobbyists—rushed into South Dade like a tsunami. They were brimming with confidence that they could control local county zoning and permitting processes.
After all, they had already succeeded in using the hurricane and the open purse of taxpayers to mask the privatization of the Homestead Motorsports Complex where, today, NASCAR and its thousands runs circles oblivious to the circumstances that put them there.
They meant to use that model in privatizing the wrecked Homestead Air Force Base, but after 2001, all they needed was Alan Greenspan and serial hacking at the Federal Reserve benchmark rate. The “free” market did the rest.
Yesterday, the Miami Herald “Homestead rebuffs townhomes plan” reports that citizens and their newly elected “slow growth” city commission have scored a minor victory against the overdevelopment that took the rural quality of life of South Dade and cut it straight to marl.
The council voted unanimously to rezone a roughly 26-acre property from agricultural to town house district, but below the density that the developer said would be economically feasible.
Homestead elected officials may have found a voice to reject what the Growth Machine wants, but make no mistake: the horses left the barn so long ago, that the barn itself has fallen down. The nation is gripped by a bust in housing markets. In Homestead, some of the key players in the Growth Machine have picked up their marbles, sold their bank shares and retreated to the quiet comfort of their Bertram yachts.
This is the historical pattern of Florida's development. It reflects human nature more than geography: the Growth Machine wins on promises of jobs and economic opportunity, and when the boom collapses under the weight of greed, voters wake up and start electing a new majority that promises reform, “smart growth” and “slow growth”.
But the damage has been done.
South Dade is a ripe example where growth smashed through regulatory barriers and turned state, federal, and local environmental agencies into empty shells of their original purpose.
And it is for this reason that Floridians will vote in 2008 for the constitutional amendment called Florida Hometown Democracy if they are given the chance.
30 days remain for the grass roots movement to collect the 650,000 signatures its needs to qualify (you can download a petition to sign, under Florida Hometown Democracy in the column to the right).
The measure would require the Growth Machine to persuade voters, before the fact of overdevelopment, that changes to local comprehensive development plans are necessary.
In some cases changes may be necessary, but voters would decide. And in giving voters the choice—yes or no—Floridians would not be in the situation as they are today, like the people of Homestead, sifting through the wreckage of a landscape ruined by a building and construction frenzy that many people knew was wrong-headed and unsustainable, but no one could stop.
As the credit crisis mounts and losses total in the hundreds of billions of dollars (including a run, last week, on a state of Florida investment fund), what Florida voters should remember is that in one crucial way it is too late: profits from yesterday’s building boom were banked long ago by the Growth Machine and you are paying the price.
6 comments:
I seem to recall that the "new urbanist" architects have been tossed out of a significant portion of the Gulf Coast post-Katrina rebuilding as well.
Excerpt from interesting article about Biloxi from the NY Times Magazine:
New Urbanism is like Whole Foods: it's meant to be good for you, but it's expensive, at least on the front end, and it comes with a set of cultural connotations that generally play best among the prosperous and the self-consciously progressive. At Tyrone's Barber and Beauty Shop, Bernice Catchings had flipped through the plan, with its spiffy little houses and tasteful storefronts, and said: "A poor lady like me, what the hell am I going to do with that? Walk by it and admire it? We can't buy it. The white man will always have us pushed to where we have to just . . . go by and admire it and then go home somewhere and eat them old beans and bread and be thankful."
A number of people involved in the Mississippi Renewal Forum referred to the Gulf Coast as a blank slate, but of course it wasn't, exactly. There were lives and mores at work there, which persisted even when most of the buildings were leveled. There are, for example, several thousand Vietnamese in Biloxi: they came to work on the shrimp boats and stayed to build houses and raise families. According to Uyen Le, who works for a Vietnamese community organization, many of them left behind a world where only poor people walk everywhere and a car is a sign of success. "That's the American dream: you get your own lot, and you get your own little house, and you get your own car," she explained. "And now you're talking about these walkable neighborhoods, and some people will say, 'I came to America so I could drive.' Some of these New Urbanist ideas don't really match up for this area." In the 65-page, 28,000-word "Reconstruction Plan for Biloxi," the word "Vietnamese" appears just once.
In the wealthier sections of Biloxi, the problem was control. Most of the New Urbanists I talked to seemed vexed by the very idea that anyone could disagree with a creed they found self-evident, but the movement does have its critics, especially among architects. They find its principles overbearing and the result sentimental — a mawkish nostalgia for a middle-class, middle-American life that never really existed and wouldn't be worth yearning for even if it had. To its adversaries, New Urbanism is regressive, authoritarian and hidebound. SmartCode, for example, calls for the regulation of elements that most zoning laws leave up for grabs — how trees may be planted or what shape windows can be. One section of the SmartCode reads: "Pitched roofs, if provided, shall be symmetrically sloped no less than 5:12, except that porches may be attached sheds with slopes no less than 2:12."
Moreover, the movement can come across as faintly cultish, with converts rather than mere adherents, proselytizers instead of spokesmen and an air of Manichaeism that can seem both self-aggrandizing and somewhat paranoid. Leland Speed, who is neither, nevertheless put it plainly: "I have drunk the Kool-Aid," he said cheerfully. But not everyone drank from the same cup. One city councilman, Mike Fitzpatrick, was immediately suspicious of the New Urbanist style and reluctant to take its commandments to his constituents. "You know," he said to me, "that's that person's property. I would never say you have to build this way. You can build what you want, because that's the American way."
New Urbanist makes me think of Stepford Wives. If Disney's Celebration is an example you can have it. I saw the same kind of stuff at the Villages near Leesburg, it reminded me of Disneyland.
New Urbanism really just means a common-sense approach to land use planning. It's not for everyone and shouldn't be sold as such, but it does provide an opportunity to try something different - or at least reflects a model that worked before.
The model of suburban land use planning between "old urbanism" and the new stuff chunked whole sections of cities - people live over here, businesses go way over there, and the industries are pushed off far over there. Nothing connected - except by car. As gas hits $3+ a gallon, the general principles of "new urbanism" which are already at work in older neighborhoods of Miami, some spots in the Gables, Miami Lakes, and certainly Miami Beach, will become more appealing to a wider audience.
Again, it isn't a solution for everything, but it has to be a part of it. And really the beauty of new urban concepts like live/work buildings with storefronts and small apartments can help those on the economic margins. If you have a small business and live within walking distance, or right above, you save big bucks on gas, insurance, tires, tolls, etc. We forget how much of our disposable income goes into those cars we depend on so much.
I agree that new urbanist principles are worthy and make alot of sense at least when it comes to the macro ideas of mixed uses, etc. I think the design limitations are architectural fascism.
My point, to the extent I had one, is that resistance to these precepts comes from all sides. Sure, developers want to stick with what has been proven to work. To imply that developers are the only ones stopping this wonderful new urbanist dream from being realized is silly in my view. Sure, people love the idea of "Smart Growth", until, of course, someone tries to locate intense development in infill neighborhoods. What many people really prefer is "No Growth," as long as they have their single family house, of course.
The system of Euclidean zoning started in the 1930s, which generally seeks to avoid the mixing of uses, set the stage for our post-war suburban development pattern.
Although many like to stick their noses up at new subdivisions, older areas, such as Coral Gables, etc. suffer from the exact same issues. Very little of Dade is not vehicular dependent. Even areas that are less vehicle dependent now, such as areas along the Metrorail, were certainly heavily vehicle dependent when they were built.
If, as Gimleteye seems to believe, the suburban model is broken (and it may well be), it was broken when most of the homes in Dade were constructed following World War II, not in the last three, or even twenty years.
Those of us sitting in our single family homes in homogeneous residential enclaves, which is the vast majority of Dade's development, should not be surprised that many others want to join us.
I agree that new urbanist principles are worthy and make alot of sense at least when it comes to the macro ideas of mixed uses, etc. I think the design limitations are architectural fascism.
My point, to the extent I had one, is that resistance to these precepts comes from all sides. Sure, developers want to stick with what has been proven to work. To imply that developers are the only ones stopping this wonderful new urbanist dream from being realized is silly in my view. Sure, people love the idea of "Smart Growth", until, of course, someone tries to locate intense development in infill neighborhoods. What many people really prefer is "No Growth," as long as they have their single family house, of course.
The system of Euclidean zoning started in the 1930s, which generally seeks to avoid the mixing of uses, set the stage for our post-war suburban development pattern.
Although many like to stick their noses up at new subdivisions, older areas, such as Coral Gables, etc. suffer from the exact same issues. Very little of Dade is not vehicular dependent. Even areas that are less vehicle dependent now, such as areas along the Metrorail, were certainly heavily vehicle dependent when they were built.
If, as Gimleteye seems to believe, the suburban model is broken (and it may well be), it was broken when most of the homes in Dade were constructed following World War II, not in the last three, or even twenty years.
Those of us sitting in our single family homes in homogeneous residential enclaves, which is the vast majority of Dade's development, should not be surprised that many others want to join us.
The "no growth" mantra is based less on " I have mine" than it is on sustainability. We can't grow any more and maintain quality-of-life and sustainability (water and environmental degradation are perfect examples). I remember several years ago the county held a series of interactive workshops (called Urban Density, as I recall) to measure people's feelings about density increases.
When asked why they might oppose density increase, the response was NOT a desire to maintain sameness neighborhoods but rather concerns about crime and traffic. There was NOT a cry against mixed neighborhoods. People wanted to be safe and be able to move about easily. The "not in my backyard" is an argument used by developers to make the "no growth" proponents seem selfish and spoiled. Not in my backyard should not be confused with a desire to maintain neighborhood integrity; something people of all strata desire!
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