Is Florida better off with a shrinking population? by gimleteye

A front page article in the Sunday New York Times addressed Florida's shrinking population. "Choked by a record level of foreclosures and unemployment, along with a helping of disillusionment, the state’s population declined by 58,000 people from April 2008 to April 2009, according to the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research. Except for the years around World Wars I and II, it was the state’s first population loss since at least 1900." The article is a follow-up to an earlier piece, summoning the image of Florida as a "broken down piece of meat". The New York Times is onto something that local newspapers like The Miami Herald are loathe to touch.

If tax policy is the third rail in Florida politics, its foundation is the assumption of expanding tax base from population increase. For a hundred years, bringing more people to Florida is the fuel for growth that chewed up the state's quality of life and natural resources like logs in a wood chipper. But it goes beyond considerations of Florida's environment. Accommodating the tens of millions of Floridians required an ever greater miscalculation of risk: risk to existing quality of life, to the unabsorbed costs and unfunded mandates of suburban sprawl; in other words, chasing the Florida dream on the cheap. It is no surprise that an online poll by the Orlando Sentinel discloses: so far, nearly 80 percent of respondents say that Florida will be better off with less people. It is a potent majority, but one that no politicians appear willing to embrace. In fact I can't think of one candidate for state-wide office willing to grasp the opportunity.

At a recent candidates' forum hosted by the Florida realtors, for instance, Democratic candidate for governor Alex Sink lamely avoided Florda Hometown Democracy, the citizens' effort to amend the Florida Constitution by ballot referendum. According to a Sentinel blog, Sink used the tired canard that local elected representatives are best positioned to make land use decisions. What Eyeonmiami, the blog, has done-- for years now-- is to show how and why local elected officials are the least capable of independent thinking with respect to growth; ie. the unreformable majority of the Miami-Dade County Commission. Of course it is not just the M-D county commission: in Palm Beach, a quorum could be met in a federal penitentiary, of former local county commissioners who committed crimes because of the pressure from land use decisions.

Obviously, it is all about the money on the other side; Associated Industries, Florida realtors, Big Ag, the Chambers of Commerce. All these interests are somehow considered to be sober arbiters of the public good. They are more like drunken sailors, sobbing in their cups about the disappearance of growth-at-any-cost. What Gov. Charlie Crist stands for, was tellingly signaled in June by his willingness to throw growth management in Florida overboard and sign into law new measures to revive the growth machine, even when demand has dried up. What the speculators and development lobby wants is to rev up the nail guns and particle board as easily and quickly as possible, never mind that the market is fleeing the state. It is not just the absence of jobs and economic opportunity: Florida has been so careless about growth, the state has literally cooked its own goose.

If there is no candidate who will grab the chance to energize Floridians around the issue of growth that turned cancerous, destroying so much of Florida and imposing huge liabilities on taxpayers--then there is at least one issue on 2010 ballot where Floridians can vote on the Growth Machine: Florida Hometown Democracy that will give voters the last word on changes to local growth plans. That's an idea who's time has definitely come.