The Miami Herald today picks up the thread of our long-time subject: the "19,000 person near the Everglades" called Parkland. There is no market today for the "greenwashed" project supported by the county's biggest sprawl builders; no plan to deliver houses until 2014 by Lennar. So the only conceivable purpose of a zoning change, today, is to pretty up the investment so it can be flipped to vultures and ease the investors' pain, carrying land investments bought at exorbitant, speculative value.
The rationale, of course, for changing the zoning now is that these highly connected developers can do with a compliant county commission what ABC Vulture Fund from Wall Street, filled with investors from the Mideast or China or Russia, cannot do. After all, the locals all sat together in the front row-- arms crossed and might as well have been linked-- in the county commission chambers in support of the last successful effort to move the UDB. And they did, of course, push for the 2005 widening of Krome Avenue to support traffic concurrency: leading the unreformable county commission majority to kill the deal that had been worked out between county planning staff and environmental litigants who had sued to stop the widening of Krome Avenue because it violated state growth management rules that prohibit the use of highway construction to push development into environmentally sensitive areas like the Everglades.
(Remember our point: that the Urban Development Boundary serves to articulate all the political forces surrounding unsustainable development that has been the dominant model of South Florida for decades.)
Today, the Herald finds two of Miami's major developers, Armando Codina and Jorge Perez publicly voicing their opposition to the project. Jose Cancela represents the developers including Ed Easton, Rodney Barreto, Augustin Herran, Sergio Pino, and Ramon Rasco. The Herald doesn't say these are all big Republican campaign contributors. Perez is a prominent supporter of Democratic candidates.
Cancela charges that Codina doesn't have a leg to stand on, because he's already succeeded in moving the UDB line twice and Perez, whose self-interest is in the glut of condominiums in downtown Miami. (For interested readers click on our archive feature "Parkland", for detail.)
It is interesting that Perez, chairman of The Related Group, is speaking out publicly today. His opposition to previous moves of the UDB was known but he would not speak out. The code of silence reigned, during the construction boom. I'm serious: it is a tragic flaw of the builders' community that timidity reigns and that none speak out against the patterns of unsustainable growth that has drained the economic vitality from our region.
This phenomenon plagues Florida: developers move in lock-step on the issues of bad growth and particularly in Miami Dade where "all growth is good" has prevailed at the county commission precisely because the builder's lobby (the Latin Builders Association and South Florida Builders Association) has refused to take a stand against bad development. The best examples of this: the South Miami Dade Watershed Plan where builder lobbyists killed the plan at the last moment, after many thousands of hours of community involvement and volunteerism. Then, too, there is the work of the Charter Review Commission-- also killed by builder lobbyists.
And it is not just Miami Dade: read our post from yesterday on the big land owners/speculators in Martin County and Orange County who are doing the same as Parkland: priming the pump, taking the county commission out for a walk, exercising the muscles for zoning changes even though there is no market-- none-- for what they are selling.
I have a recommendation for those politically influential developers cited in the Herald report: first, support a ban on political contributions from developers, lobbyists or their affiliated interests if any have zoning issues before the county commission within a five year period of zoning change or building permit. If there is any moment in the past seventy years, where developers could use the cash instead of spend it on political campaigns: this is it.
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