A brief history. Nearly a decade ago, the City of Coral Gables supported the creation of a high-end mall and related development-- at US Route 1 and the busiest intersections in Miami: Lejeune Road and Ponce de Leon Boulevard. Any commuter by car who uses US 1 knows the result, painfully well. It is where traffic slows to a crawl.
For another Cartier and Williams Sonoma, Nordstroms and Neiman Marcus, Miami Dade commuters wrack up additional hours and hours and hours in cars: time that can never be recovered. Citizen objectors to the project were jeered by pro-development interests at local meetings. Traffic engineers at the time predicted no impact. The laughable benefit, to taxpayers inconvenienced by the new development?
Traffic circles. That's right: to pay for the "impact" of its development, the developer was obligated to put traffic "calming" circles in place.
Today, General Growth Properties Inc, the company that took over the mall from the original developer who promised great benefits to the community (The Rouse Company and its main local lobbyist-- Spillis Candela) declared bankruptcy.
General Growth closed at $1.05 in NYSE trading yesterday. The shares of the nation's second largest mall owner traded as high as $67 in March 2007. So it goes with the chase for "tax base" increase in places where quality of life is sacrificed for short-term gain: by lobbyists, engineering firms, cement manufacturers, and real estate developers paid one deal at a time.
We are living the hardest lesson ever, in the short history of Florida's rampant overdevelopment. If you read the news of what is happening, now, in the Florida legislature-- with anti-citizen, pro-development bills abounding-- what comes clear is that the economic crisis has brought out the reactionary elements in ways that might be as easily predicted as the way that Coral Gables rolled over for Village of Merrick Park.
6 comments:
An excellent connecting-of-the-dots. I knew when they closed The Palm restaurant that mall was in trouble.
So why don't you ask Maria Anderson why she approved the Gables Station Project (By Berkowitz) which proposes to build another high end mega-mall just 1 block away from Merrick Park on the old Deel Ford site at US1 and Le Juene?
m
http://www.berkowitzdevelopment.com/gablesstation.htm#plans
m
I don't know what they were thinking. We all saw what happened with Mayfair in the Grove, but no one cared. I also didn't like that the mall tried to stop the Gables High kids from walking home through the mall. Let's see, which kids were they referring to? Well, that would be the West Grove kids. If you're a white kid, then went unnoticed.
The Merrick Park mall was a loser from the outset. I never liked it, but I liked Nortstrom's. When Nordstrom's went into Dadeland, I never went back to Merrick Park.
I wonder if it could be turned into an office building? Not likely as a condo site as it's now configured. Or maybe they'll just bulldoze it. I would not notice.
Nordstrom in trouble as well. 2 of them within 5 miles? What were they thinking? The rich South Americans are not coming like they used to.
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