Monday, March 09, 2009

From The Annals of Florida's Unsustainable Growth: Page 42,121 ... by gimleteye

"Just five years ago, Port St. Lucie was America's fastest-growing large city. Then the foreclosure crisis slammed it like a hurricane. Today it sits in one of the hardest-hit counties in the nation. Thousands of houses are empty or unfinished. Neighborhoods are littered with for-sale and foreclosure signs and overgrown, neglected yards. Break-ins are on the rise. But one politician believes he has a unique solution: declare St. Lucie County a disaster area."This is a man-made disaster," County Commissioner Doug Coward acknowledged." (St. Pete Times, March 3, 2009)

Commissioner Coward is arguing that Port St. Lucie should be officially declared a "disaster area", to qualify the city for state and federal help. Thanks, but man-made disaster doesn't describe the half of it. Port St. Lucie has company throughout the state of Florida; West Kendall, Homestead, and Florida City's bereft platted subdivisions among local examples. This mostly happened because local politicians opened the larder for greedy developers over the interest of citizens and under the lazy eye of the mainstream media.

For their part, the politicians claim they were doing what the builders wanted. And the builders and their supply chain advertised in the newspapers; and the newspaper publishers waved their wand encrusted with stock options and said, let it be so.

They claimed they were building what the market wanted, but in fact they were only building what Wall Street needed: fresh acreage to feed into the Wall Street derivatives machine. You have to reach into the archives to understand why Port St. Lucie is a special case.

In 2003 the Palm Beach Post reported, "State regulators and environmental watchdogs are concerned about solid waste flowing from a (Port St. Lucie) city sewer plant into two deep-injection wells, especially after a plant operator said he was told not to worry about the discharges unless it was time for state overseers to conduct their weekly tests. The Northport Wastewater Treatment Plant on St. James Drive has been strained to capacity for months because of the city's intense building boom, reaching daily flows up to 2.4 million gallons in August despite a permitted capacity of 1.8 million gallons." (Complaints spark Port St. Lucie sewer plant probe, Palm Beach Post, Sunday, September 7, 2003)

The example bears further scrutiny. You don't get to unsustainable growth and a tulip bubble craze in housing without a lot of help from politicians who are supposed to protect the health, welfare and safety of citizens. One of the easiest ways to promote growth is to use cheap infrastructure to industrialize the disposal of solid waste and drinking water. Both require the use of wells; the one to inject effluent (ie. crap) and the other to extract water. In Miami-Dade County, trillions of gallons of scarcely treated municipal wastewater have been injected underneath Biscayne National Park into wells at the site of Mt. Trashmore, known as the South Dade Treatment Facility. Those wells are leaking under provisions of federal law (Safe Drinking Water Act) that was recently amended under pressure by Florida to legalize the pollution of underground aquifers. (In Miami-Dade, the cost for safely disposing of wastewater had been routinely ignored by the local environment and government operations committee of the county commission, led by Natacha Seijas.)

There are a hundred plot lines reaching out from the fact of unsustainable development; they have so permeated our lives we scarcely blink. At the state level, the shifting of cost that allowed suburban sprawl to proliferate was promoted by Florida's former Senate President, Ken Pruitt, who has received awards from Audubon of Florida for his support of investments to "protect" the St. Lucie River.

Pruitt, a Republican and former well driller, represents Port St. Lucie.

In 2005, Port St. Lucie West drinking water wells went bone dry. Do you think that the production homebuilders who were plowing thousands of units west of the Florida Turnpike cared an iota? Or, that they cared the reporting to the public by the State of Florida of aquifer exploitation was a deep, black hole of misinformation? Did Ken Pruitt of Port St. Lucie care?

According to the news report, some "politicians fear a disaster declaration could scare off investors and drive down the county's credit rating, which would make it more expensive to borrow money. But the idea has appeal among many home owners, particularly those in the construction trades, which have unemployment rates up to 40 percent."

Today's local leader, Commissioner Coward, says, "Clearly, the economic crisis of the country far exceeds the ability of local governments to solve it, but we're trying be a part of the solution."

Part of the solution? The only part of the solution is to wipe off the map the formulas of greed and fraud that supported the late, great housing boom. In that respect, there is no solution in sight.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

"greedy developers" ? Why don't you use such descriptive language when desribing the wallstreet bankers or politicians? You seem fixated on Developers.
"Part of the solution? The only part of the solution is to wipe off the map the formulas of greed and fraud that supported the late, great housing boom. In that respect, there is no solution in sight."
You would have to re construct human nature, history is filled with boom and bust (you mentioned Tulipomania there's also South Seas Bubble, Mississippi Bubble, Latin American Loan Bubble (more than one), railroad Bubble (both here and UK) etc etc etc) After each crash many lessons are learned but few adhered to.
One culprit present at each of these bubbles (aside from human credulity) is easy money and credit, those with their hand on the spigot(the ability to print or create money) are more often than not the guilty party.

Anonymous said...

Oh, give it a rest wudja? Not going back to the federal reserve and the printing of easy money argument here, are we?

The one thing that really, truly marks all of these bubbles is a dearth of regulatory oversight. Even Adam Smith said that free markets function best when government plays its proper role of regulating the players.

It's when the players are able to subvert the regulatory process and are subject to very little scrutiny by the press that they manage to get away with everything short of murder.

Developer greed deserves all of our wrath, so can fault Eye on Miami not at all on that one. But, yes, shame on the politicians and the regulators -- and the lazy eye of the news media -- for letting the developers run amuck at our expense.

Anonymous said...

"Oh, give it a rest wudja? Not going back to the federal reserve and the printing of easy money argument here, are we?"

Federal reserve? Where they around during South seas, Mississippi Bubbles or Railroad Bubbles? And yes easy money is ussually the culprit wether it be the Romans, British, Dutch, French, Japanese, Chinese or us folk.

The only reason developers were...... well developing (I think thats what their supposed to do) is because a lot of folks were throwing all that easy money coming from banks who got it from the Fed at them.

Should they (developers) have calculated that the absorption rates necesary for this continued "growth" were impossible? YES
Should the buyers have done their homework and have calculated sustainable rental rates and realistic resale values? YES
Should banks have taken a closer look at some of their borrowers? YES
Should pension funds and other entities taken a closer loook at the derivitives beore buying them? YES
Should politicians have pushed for clearer and more open accounting? YES

See there's lots more blame to go around. Now give your fixation with developers a friggin break and go back to kissing Obama's big spending arse.

Anonymous said...

Gimleteye writes:

This post was very specific to a particularly foul example: Port St. Lucie and the issue of politicians allowing the area and aquifers to be wrecked by developers, under the eyes of a powerful state politician, senator from Port St. Lucie, and former well driller: Ken Pruitt.

If the commenter would read the archives under "housing crash", he or she would see many, many posts that fairly assess the responsibility for the economic meltdown to Wall Street bankerz. Believe me, we covered the field at Eyeonmiami and long before the mainstream media picked up the ball.

As to "kissing Obama's big spending arse", what exactly are you talking about?

I thought Frank Schaeffer captured that idiocy very well this morning, at Huffington:

Open Letter to the Republican Traitors (From a Former Republican)

Dear Republican Leaders: The Republican Party has become the party dedicated to sabotaging the American future. Check out the sermon I just delivered about the Republican Party on CNN when being interviewed by D.L. Hughley -- and/or read on.

You Republicans are the arsonists who burned down our national home. You combined the failed ideologies of the Religious Right, so-called free market deregulation and the Neoconservative love of war to light a fire that has consumed America. Now you have the nerve to criticize the "architect" America just hired -- President Obama -- to rebuild from the ashes. You do nothing constructive, just try to hinder the one person willing and able to fix the mess you created.

I used to be one of you. As recently as 2000 I worked to get Senator McCain elected in that year's primary. (McCain and Gen. Tommy Franks wrote glowing endorsements regarding my book about military service, AWOL.). I have a file of handwritten thank you notes from Presidents Ford, Reagan, Bush I and II. In the 1970s and early 80s I hung out with Jack Kemp and bought into his "supply side" myth and even wrote a book he endorsed pushing his ideas.) There's more, but take it from me; my parents (evangelical leaders Francis and Edith Schaeffer) and I were about as tight with -- and useful to -- the Republican Party as anyone. We played a big part creating the Religious Right.

In the mid 1980s I left the Religious Right, after I realized just how very anti-American they are, (the theme I explore in my book Crazy For God). They wanted America to fail in order to prove they were right about America's "moral decline." Soon after McCain lost in 2000 I re-registered as an independent in disgust with W. Bush. But I still respected many Republicans. Not today.

How can anyone who loves our country support the Republicans now? Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan defined the modern conservatism that used to be what the Republican Party I belonged to was about. Today no actual conservative can be a Republican. Reagan would despise today's wholly negative Republican Party. And can you picture the gentlemanly and always polite Ronald Reagan, endorsing a radio hate-jock slob who crudely mocked a man with Parkinson's and who now says he wants an American president to fail?!

With people like Limbaugh as the loudmouth image of the Republican Party -- you need no enemies. But something far more serious has happened than an image problem: the Republican Party has become the party of obstruction at just the time when all Americans should be pulling together for the good of our country. Instead, Republicans are today's fifth column sabotaging American renewal.

President Obama has been in office barely 45 days and the Republican Party has the nerve to blame him for the economic and military cataclysm he inherited. I say economic and military cataclysm because without the needless war in Iraq you all backed we would not be in the economic mess we're in today. If that money had been spent here at home on renovating our infrastructure, taking us toward a green economy, putting our health-care system in order we'd be a very different situation.

As the father of a Marine who served in George W. Bush's misbegotten wars let me say this: if President Obama's strategy to repair our economy, infrastructure and healthcare fails that will put our troops at far greater risk because the world will become a far more dangerous place. So for all you flag-waving Republicans who are trying to undermine the President at home -- if you succeed more of our troops will be killed abroad.

When your new leader Rush Limbaugh calls for President Obama to fail he's calling for more flag-draped coffins. Limbaugh is the new "Hanoi Jane."

For the party that created our crises of misbegotten war, mismanaged economy, the lack of regulation of our banking industry, handing our country to rich crooks... to obstruct the one person who is trying to repair the damage is obscene.

Just imagine where America would be today if the 14 to 20 million voters -- "the rube base" who slavishly follow the likes of Limbaugh -- had not voted as a block year after year thus empowering the Republican fiasco. We would have a regulated banking industry and would have avoided our current financial crisis; some 4000 of our killed military men and women would be alive; over to 35,000 wounded Americans would be whole; we would have been leaders in the environmental movement; we would be in the middle of a green technology boom fueling a huge expansion of our economy and stopping our dependence on foreign oil, and our health-care system would be reformed.

After Obama was elected, you Republican leaders had a unique last chance to send a patriotic message of unity to the world -- and to all Americans. You could have backed our president's economic recovery plan. Since we all know that half of our problem is one of lost confidence and perception, nothing would have done more to calm the markets and project resolve and confidence than if you had been big enough to take Obama's offered hand and had work with him -- even if you disagreed ideologically. You had the chance to put our country first. You utterly failed to rise to the occasion.

The worsening economic situation is your fault and your fault alone. The Republicans created this mess through 8 years of backing the worst president in our history and now, because you put partisan ideology ahead of the good of our country, you have blown your last chance to redeem yourselves. You deserve the banishment to the political wilderness that awaits all traitors.

Frank Schaeffer is the author of CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back Now in paperback.

Anonymous said...

Dude
No need to write a book (or is there) besides I NEVER VOTED FOR BUSH (Didn't vote for the other guys either). I think Rush is a clown, but I think this Administration is stupid for even bringing him or the Mad Money guy up (all just a big distraction).

OHHH now its MY fault? Me little ole Saint Suburb the Blasphemer? Even though I don't vote for Republicrats or Demoblicans?

What's next you take me out back and have me shot?

Since your in the reading mood may i Suggest
Joseph Schumpeters, Capitalism , Socialism and Democracy or Henry Hazlitts Economics in One Easy Lesson

Anonymous said...

Leave it to Michael Grunwald to come up with a poetic and short alegory for the Republicans in Washinton:

"It's hard to take Republican leaders too seriously when they criticize recovery plans for the economy; it's sort of like those geese criticizing evacuation plans for US Airways Flight 1549."

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1876535,00.html