Biscayne Landings Sinks and Stinks and civic opposition is still at a loss ... by gimleteye

New Times reports that Credit Suisse is within weeks of taking over the troubled North Miami development, Biscayne Landings, from failing Boca Developers. Boca supplied the middle end on the spectrum of condominium values, topped by now-failed Jorge Perez' Related Group in South Florida. We've written quite a lot about Biscayne Landings and its ambitious plans for 6,000 residences. The project started as a Superfund toxic waste dump called Munisport, whose odors still plague the area, to a part of the Swerdlow empire dominating North Miami politics, to its current, sad state where victims are everywhere; not the least of which, taxpayers and the environment.

Biscayne Landings, touted as an example of how to remediate environmental damage AND provide compatible urban infill balancing the needs of the economy and nature, should send policy makers shrieking from botched logic like parents grabbing children from a house on fire. But no such response appears anywhere. Instead: indifference and shrugged shoulders. Biscayne Landing should also trigger introspection about opposition strategies of the environmental movement. Snookered by the failure of laws to protect the environment, everyone is going to pay for Biscayne Landings but no one is going to take responsibility.

From a sunnier day--during the housing market bubble, Boca Developers boasts, "Biscayne Landing is a $3 billion mixed-use residential community and is a public/private venture being developed in cooperation with the City of North Miami. It is the vision of one of South Florida's largest and most respected development companies-- Boca Developers."

From another perspective, Boca Developers clogged local politics and the Gold Coast, too, with its cookie-cutter versions of paradise on the ocean. Written in the blinding sun of irrational exuberance that swept up the whole of Florida in unsustainable growth, its website claimes, "Boca Developers has become one of the most successful development companies in the southeastern unied States. It currently has a porfolio of over 16,000 residences with projected sales in excess of $10 billion."

In April, 2008, Boca CEO Brian Street said the company "would still pursue projects. ... The three-year residential downturn has compromised all of the projects planned or completed by Boca Developers in the last five years, Street told a reporter at an April 21 town hall meeting to discuss the developer's Biscayne Landing project in North Miami. Jeff Scott, Boca Developers' VP and project manager for Biscayne Landing, said up to a dozen projects could be returned to lenders." (Boca Developers want to give back projects, South Fl Business Journal, April 25, 2008)

Now, Biscayne Landings will vanish inside Credit Suisse's cavernous losses. "Too big to fail" Credit Suisse holds so many billions in losses, no one knows the real scope of the bank's solvency or insolvency as the case may be. Who knows how this pimple on the side of Credit Suisse's butt will emerge and in what form. But it is likely to emerge at some deep discount in a vulture's portfolio, waiting for return of the glue guns and sheet rock.

In the 1980's, there was plenty of civic opposition to the conversion of the former Munisport dump without a required clean-up, according to EPA rules, first. The civic opposition--waged by environmental groups like Tropical Audubon-- was steam-rollered as it would be throughout the housing asset bubble. The project, like so many thousands of others in Florida, jumped over environmental obstacles because of all the zeroes attached to the dollar signs.

Today, environmental groups are trying to wage common sense arguments against other equally ill-fated projects like FPL's new nuclear reactors planned at Turkey Point. Those will be a $20 billion mistake.

The groups are mired in any number of brush fires in the permitting struggle, but they are overwhelmed and out-gunned by hundreds of millions of dollars in "marketing costs" that FPL is already foisting on ratepayers. The latest: whether or not the federal government should grant FPL a right-of-way to use land in Everglades National Park for new power transmission lines. The company is pitting environmental groups against the public, that vociferously opposed the use of the US 1 corridor as an alternative.

Biscayne Landing is the abject example of failure from all sides and all directions. Is it possible to learn from our mistakes?