One of our more entertaining blog entries has been a thread on Steve Shiver, the most unqualified county manager to ever serve Miami Dade County, who is now part-owner of a theme park in North Carolina's Maggie Valley called Ghost Town. Here's the post entry. Most of our North Carolina readers are earnestly focused on the legitimacy of "gun fighters" who roam the Maggie Valley entertainment pavilions. It's a God-fearing place, that Maggie Valley. I bet if Steve Shiver could get it through, there would be casino gambling there just like Miami is fixin' to do! Sounds like a good outpost for US Century Bank to hitch its horses to!Friday, September 26, 2008
From Steve Shiver's old stomping ground: hey there, Maggie Valley, we're listening to you! by gimleteye
One of our more entertaining blog entries has been a thread on Steve Shiver, the most unqualified county manager to ever serve Miami Dade County, who is now part-owner of a theme park in North Carolina's Maggie Valley called Ghost Town. Here's the post entry. Most of our North Carolina readers are earnestly focused on the legitimacy of "gun fighters" who roam the Maggie Valley entertainment pavilions. It's a God-fearing place, that Maggie Valley. I bet if Steve Shiver could get it through, there would be casino gambling there just like Miami is fixin' to do! Sounds like a good outpost for US Century Bank to hitch its horses to!
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9 comments:
The comments are very interesting on this post. The people writing think that you are trashing their beloved theme park. The people living there don't realize what we are really following here in Miami:
The next chapter in Steve Shiver's life.
Gimleteye writes:
Yes it is awfully bucolic and quiet in Western North Carolina after Labor Day. If I were a betting person, like the kind Miami is aiming to attract with new casinos, I would bet that Steve Shiver is in North Carolina for platted subdivisions-- only his timing is way, way off even if it is for high end condos for Miami refugees in a reverse migration.
I hope that Maggie Valley concerned citizens keep track of who is giving campaign contributions to their zoning officials. It's all happened before. Right here, in Homestead, sprawl capital of south Florida.
There is already a full-blown Casino about 30 minutes from Maggie Valley. The Cherokkee Harras.
m
Hey Gimlet,
Do you think any of the malfeasance that is being prosecuted on former chief executives of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac or other big losers in the Wall Street burnout can be connected directly to Shiver and company? Seems like if there was a paper trail the public would like to know.
How big of a black eye for Ghost Town would it be if they discovered
their CEO was a culpable accessory to the downfall of our economy?
I'm just asking.
I was curious about Ghost Town...and where it is located: Hence the map and photo. I was only 30 miles from it when I was in Asheville. Will have to go back...right.
Gimleteye writes:
I don't think I'd look at Steve Shiver for a connection to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, except that the whole gang was up in DC lobbying from one side of HUD to the other. No, for a good investigative story I'd put my chips on a connection with Senator Mel Martinez.
What about tax evasion for a good story! Anybody pissed the IRS off latley? Tony's Station
With reguard to the next chapter in Shivers life, lets hope it is a short one for ghost towns sake!tfrztyil
Gimleteye writes:
Dear Maggie Valley Friends,
To understand exactly how Steve Shiver operated on Homestead, please read an older post from our archive. During the housing boom, Shiver was first Mayor of Homestead then County Manager, when his patrons kicked him upstairs. Be careful.
Sifting through the wreckage of South Dade sprawl, by gimleteye
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.
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