When the history is written of the plan to legalize full scale gaming in Miami, attention will be paid to the serial surrenders by elected officials to lavish construction schemes like the Heat Arena, the Performing Arsht Center, and the Miami Marlins stadium. What links these events is not simply a lack of community-minded leadership, but the failure of those minding the community to knit a coherent narrative for Miami.
That Miami failed to create its narrative around a public realm inviting Biscayne Bay and the Miami River was due to the speculator culture of the place. We burned up and chewed through both natural resources, surrendering access to private developers. Although the roots of that culture are 100 years old, it is nevertheless shameful that people who ought to have known better-- because of their exposure to real cities-- did not stand up and insist that attention be paid to sound planning.
The Genting billions turned to Miami for prospective full scale gaming because the case had clearly been made that the political landscape was ripe and fertile for exploitation. In this case, past performance is in fact a predictor of future results. That is the story, most recently, of the Miami Marlins stadium; proving to be the most lucrative exploitation of the public treasury by private industry in professional sports. But even the Marlins had precedent: the Homestead Motor Race Track and the tens of millions of public dollars that simply vanished into private stock owners portfolios. Not for nothing did R. Allen Stanford, the billion dollar Ponzi schemer, set up shop downtown where he had obtained the assurances of state (Jeb Bush) government to lay off its investigations.
There is still a chance for Miami to assert our right to a well-planned future. All we need to do is to hold up to the public the evidence of the casino culture and what it has done to Atlantic City or Las Vegas. The visible failures should be enough to mobilize the public against casinos. Support No Casinos.
2 comments:
Ah, I'm sorry, maybe I didn't read that correctly... did you say 'mobilize the public'?
The failure, as you point out, is lack of community-minded leadership and the failure of 'those minding the community'. But in the end, the failure is that of the citizenry itself. Rather than failure, it could more accurately be called acquiescence. It is a citizenry that understands on some fundamental level that they are not at home here. There is no foundation upon which to build a future. Our time in South Florida is very, very temporary and transient, in accordance with the rest of the ecosystem.
There is only so much blame one can place on business-people and their elected officials whose whole raison-d'etre is to maximize their advantage. Maximizing one's advantage is a universal behavior. So they scrape as much profit from the environment as they can and, for the most part, we don't care.
In some other cities, there was, at least at one time, historically a need or at least a desire for sensible urban planning aimed at maintaining a comfortable and sustainable city. This simply does not, and has not existed in Miami.
I will repeat my ongoing meme; by all long-term environmental and economic factors, Miami should never have been built, and to envision it as a world-class metropolis, on the scale of a Paris or Rome or New York is preposterous.
Mainland South Florida south of the El Portal elevation will be uninhabitable within 50 years.
You do very well, probably the best in South Florida, in denouncing the corruption and shallowness of our political and civic leaders. But you can do nothing against the rising waters engulfing an area that by it's very nature is shallow, and which we don't belong in in the first place.
Where is the leadership from our County Mayor Gimenez? Why isn't he leading the fight against this?
If Gimenez is for the casinos (as I suspect), this is an issue a well-funded candidate can run on.
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