EYE REPORT: Planned Road Improvements Lead to More Taxpayer Subsidized Sprawl. By Geniusofdespair & Gimleteye.

When you are trying to figure out development trends that benefit land speculators who crashed the economy, look no further than planned road improvements. Large scale development projects must solve the problem of "transportation concurrency". Endless games are played by lobbyists and so-called transportation planners to create rationale and formulas showing how the expansion of roadways at the fringe of suburbia solves the problem of moving prospective, new as well as old residents through new and existing communities. County commissioners (like Joe Martinez and Pepe Diaz and Natacha Seijas) beholden to their campaign contributors involve themselves in the minute details to transportation and roadway issues in order to lay the rails for majority approval of new developments outside the UDB. This like jig happens all over the county (like Lowe's or Beacon Lakes, to cite just two).

We get to see the jig at public hearings as part of the zoning process by local government. Lawyers making $750 an hour and planners and economists and other consultants get up in the speaker's pit with charts and Powerpoint presentations that overwhelm the few members of the public who purposefully offer counter-arguments to more suburban sprawl. Often, the speculators pay for rent-a-crowds to pack the commission chamber. They have no clue what they are doing there, beyond the box lunch and bus ride downtown. When Joe Martinez asks: "would all supporters of this project rise"; they dutifully stand up from their movie quality armchairs and sit down again once this irrefutable evidence of community support is demonstrated for the cameras.

There are two roadway projects that are in different stages of approval at County Boards who serve at the behest of the County Commissioners. These projects were conceived well before the housing market crash: putting down infrastructure to move hundreds of thousands of commuters around Miami-Dade takes years of planning and land buying. Both activities put developers, speculators, and government officials in virtual 24 hour Love Motels for Growth.

Both of these roadway "improvements" will give wind to Lennar's 1,000 acre mixed-use mega-development, Parkland, and to the Krome Gold partners who own hundreds of acres nearby. We've written a lot about Parkland and Krome Gold: check our archive. Their owners are the same big-time lobbyists and developers whose domination of local zoning councils and elected officials helped grease the gears of the Growth Machine that caused the housing bubble and, now, collapse.

It was reasonable to expect that many of these project would have drowned of their own weight and costs with the implosion of the nation's banking industry. But the Federal Reserve and US Department of Treasury have created "rescue" interventions that allow banks (and investors) the time to tread water with their speculative investments while the rest of taxpayers are gradually waking up to their liabilities-- in the form of rising taxes-- to fund the same government operations that allowed these manipulators to drive our quality of life and the economy into the ditch in the first place.

The tens of millions in speculative investments in Krome Gold and Parkland are now assets buried amidst trillions of dollars committed by US taxpayers that will make sure bad projects never die. Now that the "stimulus" funds are flowing, they are flowing as Eyeonmiami suspected they would in ways that will benefit the speculators. Far from being cleaned out, as they should have been, the speculators are lurking in the shadows for their return. In no small respect, this is also what is behind the effort to erase the Florida Department of Community Affairs: let local governments, ie. the Miami-Dade County Commission, "determine" concurrency requirements. It is the final realization of the Bush Doctrine: that local elected representatives are the best place to center regulatory power and authority. In fact, it is about using the current economic emergency to feather the nests of the land speculators. As the bumper sticker goes: if you are not outraged, you are not paying attention.

First, they need the roads. Hit on the the two aerials at left and you can see that both of these new planned roadways end at Parkland; thousands of new housing units planned in a region that is now surrounded by ghost town suburbs, many of which were also built by Lennar.

The MDX says about the 836 Expansion: "…the project is envisioned as a limited access expressway that will represent a physical barrier to discourage urban sprawl farther into the Everglades." What a crock of shit. It will do the exact opposite. From time to time, the South Florida builders have mumbled about using Krome Avenue as an "inviolable" border for growth that could only be breached for instance by the unanimous vote of the County Commission. It is a card that is lazily played when it seems that maybe the Growth Machine won't get its way, and the retracted when it does. The public has every right to be furious. When the widening of Krome Avenue was under mediation, authorized by the state and supervised by a mediator sympathetic to the Growth Machine, the County Commission rejected an agreement forged by its own planners with environmentalists that Krome widening would never be used to justify new population growth.

MDX is in the process of preparing a concept report to evaluate the feasibility of the 836 extension. The extension is known as MDX Project No. 83618. MDX wants to include this in the 2025 Master Transportation Plan. Cost? Who knows.

For the 157 Avenue expansion the County has to purchase 16 parcels from 152 Street to SW 184 Street as a "Public Necessity." The purchase was approved by the CITT on May 28th. The MDX website reports that the agency "Will complete a Concept Report in early 2009 to evaluate the potential of a new transportation corridor extending SR 836 to SW 136th Street in West Kendall with provision for an urban buffer". According to Tere Garcia of MDX: This potential project was identified when a needs assessment was done as we started to update MDX's Long Range Plan in 2007. We follow the same cycle as the MPO. The Concept Report being prepared is a very preliminary planning document being prepared to assess need. This document is still in draft form and in review. As soon as its completed we will post in our website as we do all our studies.

Here is the truth. The Miami-Dade land speculators care about only one thing: rescuing their net worth from investments that are now worth ten cents on the dollar or seventy cents. The difference will be worked out depending on getting their friggin roads.