The collapsed Homestead Raceway ... by gimleteye

South Florida environmentalists-- at least a handful-- recall bitterly the scam that caused a major construction project outside the Urban Development Boundary in the mid-1990's: the Homestead Raceway. Today's news, that the Raceway has lost its major event is reported without any mention by the Miami Herald whatsoever, of the sordid deal's background. That's just plain Wrong. At Eyeonmiami we remember, everything.

Miami's development machine, long before the housing boom took flight, had targeted farmland and wetlands near Biscayne National Park for suburban sprawl. Lennar, for example, could stare straight from Lakes By The Bay across a vast expanse to Florida City. Here is what a devastating hurricane did in 1992: made any argument for economic growth, an imperative. Not too long ago, ALL that property was wetlands and, as farmland, served the purpose of filtering groundwater running to the last undeveloped coastline in Miami-Dade. It was ripe to be mined for limestone, to be torn up for nuclear power plants, and platted subdivisions.

Putting the race track in involved the "heist" of $40 million (if my memory serves me) of Miami-Dade money in order to serve the plan dreamt up by Ralph Sanchez and Willy Bermello. Let me say it, again. The Miami-Dade County Commission actually put $40 million into the Homestead Racetrack and that money disappeared into private property as debt got folded into private equity when the racetrack was sold to Wayne Huizinga, a former city manager, and subsequently to the French corporate interests. Feh, what's $40 million?

Even then it was a racetrack mostly hyped in the mode of "build it, and they will come", although sentient observers knew then, as now, there is no market in South Florida to watch noisy cars spin around a track at the edge of a national park. Now the organizers say, "We don't draw very well here." Oh really?

Doesn't anyone remember anything? A race way spokesman ends the Herald story, "We have been contacted by outside parties'' about a street course race in South Florida and "We would be intrigued with the possibility.'' Are you freaking kidding? THAT'S how the race nonsense started in the first place: the Ralph Sanchez street race at Bayfront Park. BECAUSE of that, Homestead Race Track got a foothold in the imagination of the unreformable majority of the Miami-Dade County Commission. Then the money disappeared. And kept disappearing. And disappearing so deeply, that not even the city's only daily newspaper remembers.

Read more:
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/10/01/1853243_p2/last-lap-for-indy-racing-at-homestead.html#ixzz11CfR6fsp

The point, that the Herald still misses in its coverage, is that the race track was always meant as a wedge in the zoning processes in order to build even more: the Homestead Air Force Base fiasco comes to mind. It is all about suburban sprawl in South Florida; the growth model lying busted in the sinkhole of foreclosures.

I wish that once-- just once-- the Miami Herald would get the Homestead story, right. It is a story of arrogance, of small minds inflated with dreams of vast wealth, and of wasting irreplaceable natural resources. It is about inventing fig leafs to cover up base motives, spurring "I'll do with my property whatever the hell I damn well please", about wasting watersheds and future opportunities for economic growth and jobs.

So every day, for the next month, I will remind readers of this blog and those our readers will help us steer, here; with pictures of a fantastic photo essay by the Boston Globe that shows exactly why Amendment 4, Florida Hometown Democracy, deserves the support of 60 percent of Florida voters. When it passes, local voters will have a choice on changes to local plans. We would at least have a chance to make the argument to the public, that before allowing disasters like the Homestead Race Track to be built there should be a rational discussion about what comes next.