Tony Goldman, Developer ... by gimleteye

One of the First of Goldman's Wynwood Walls

I didn't know Tony Goldman, but I knew his work: finding profit in rehabilitating parts of Miami's urban core. The Miami Herald reported on Goldman's formula for success in Miami, after having made a fortune buying up dilapidated buildings in NYC's SoHo: "Flush with cash, Goldman came to a similar conclusion about Miami Beach during a visit in 1985. He’d already invested in Coconut Grove, and began buying one Art Deco property a month for 18 months along Ocean Drive. “I go into an area five to seven years before it happens,” Goldman said in 1986. “I like the smell of a property, and I like to be able to afford it. Advance real estate is undervalued. Miami Beach is undervalued.”

He explained that he’d gone into SoHo “when it was still raw. It had architectural integrity, a small scale and the community was obsessed with preservation. I see a vast similarity” to SoHo."

Goldman was right. I came to Florida at about the same time. In the late 1980's I found a small theater company to produce plays I had written and hoped to develop in emerging South Beach while working, at the same time, on Florida Everglades issues. I commuted from one small community that had retained its value, Key West, to Miami Beach.

Those ingredients: architectural integrity, a small scale and a community obsessed with preservation could have saved Florida's economy and the Everglades, too. It is a lesson that has imprinted on my experiences in the interim, as I became less involved in theater (and eventually turned off by Miami Beach) and more involved in communicating the essential irrationality of Florida surrendering its key economic assets -- the environment and a sense of place -- to suburban sprawl and the Growth Machine.

Developers like Tony Goldman created value at the same time they created profits. Their vision was the opposite of the zero lot line, platted subdivisions that bloomed like metatastic cancer across Florida at the same time.

Goldman's passing provides an opportunity to review. Today Tea Party activists charge through the political landscape like a bull in a china shop. One of their claims: that government should not pick winners and losers in the economy. But government -- in the case of Florida, that is primarily GOP government -- picks winners and losers ALL THE TIME.

In point of fact, the development model of suburban sprawl -- that is responsible for destroying Florida's economy and bringing down the national economy as well -- could not exist but for pressure by insiders promoting government subsidies. Roadways, like he SR 826 extension, are pushed toward lands owned by politically influential developers. These days, they have figured out how to put lipstick on the proverbial pig, renaming sprawl to fit the cliche du jour.

I regret that successful developers like Goldman who mined the urban core for profit did not also use their voices to advocate in public forums against the terrible subsidies and ultimate costs of suburban sprawl. Civic activists -- like the Hold the Line Coalition against moving the Urban Development Boundary-- could have used their help and still can.

What is remarkable is that developers like Tony Goldman succeeded in making profits and communities despite suburban sprawl.

When I first arrived in Miami in the late 1980's and began regular visits to rehearsals on Miami Beach, from my relatively fresh eyes the fact that Miami Beach had not been bulldozed seemed a joyous mistake. Walking down Ocean Drive, still dotted with SRO's and retirees gazing at the world from porches, I thought: "Thank God the bulldozers were all pointed the other way; outward from the beach." It did not escape my attention, either, that many of wealthy sprawl developers chose to live on Miami Beach where scale and community still existed and sow their evil spawn in Everglades wetlands where land was cheap and it was easier to "get things done" fast.

Driving my son to youth soccer tournaments in the wastelands of West Dade, it was simple to observe how the rush to build anonymous, soul-less places in Kendall and beyond had simply left Miami Beach behind. That's when Goldman came in.

Developers like Goldman intuitively understood the value of place and were rewarded for their hard work in bringing that value to life.

In remembering what Tony Goldman accomplished, it is also worthwhile to contemplate where Miami's politicians failed: succumbing to a builders' lobby, land use attorneys, and economic interests (US Century Bank comes to mind, its board of directors, and the unreformable majority of the county commission we frequently observe on Eye On Miami) who extracted massive wealth by commandeering government zoning and permitting to build cheap, crappy subdivisions in irreplaceable farmland and Everglades wetlands.

Tony Goldman will be remembered for South Beach and Wynwood. Although there will always be critics (and I am certainly a critic of what Miami Beach has become), no one can argue that Goldman built value. That is certainly something to applaud, through the cinders of a housing boom and bust that wouldn't have happened if only wiser minds had prevailed across America's blighted suburban landscapes.

More of Goldman's Wynwood Walls