Miami Herald
Posted May. 22, 2005

Development that threatens with underdevelopment
BY DANIEL SHOER ROTH
El Nuevo Herald
http://www.miami.com/mld/elnuevo/news/magazine/11706990.htm

In the classroom of urban development, Greater Miami is in danger of failing the final exam of progress.

Miami-Dade has advanced successfully with erecting buildings, revitalizing neighborhoods and healing its coffers with taxpayers’ gold, but the region ought to pay greater attention to the chaos in transportation, the danger of real estate expansion onto agricultural lands and the shortage of housing for low-income families.

“We are not moving rapidly enough in these three objectives,” alerted Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Miami.

While urban development in South Florida is going along smoothly, the area is becoming a more and more crowded place to live, putting in danger the health of the environment and of those who are living nervously trapped in the traffic jams of the expressways.

At stake is our quality of life.

Will we go on wasting 51 hours per year in rush hour traffic? Will we put in danger our water reserves to construct a neighborhood farther south of Homestead? Will we continue to tolerate that in the house next door there are three or four families piling up one on top of the other?

No one is opposed to the progress of real estate in Miami, to which the city is grateful for the splendid contribution it has made to the local economy and the rebirth of neighborhoods that had been in decadence for years. But one might wonder, what is the tax rate that the community must pay for development?

The most obvious is traffic. A report issued recently by a respected institute of transportation in Texas showed that the traffic situation in South Florida is the sixth most serious among the metropolitan areas of the country. Experts have advised that the solution is not in widening more roads, but in creating a more efficient system of public transportation.

The most abstract is the environment. The County is considering extending the urban boundaries of Greater Miami, penetrating agricultural lands in a move that would be “extremely hazardous,” in the words of environmental activist Alan Farago. Fewer lands to cultivate in a subtropical climate atypical in the United States is not precisely what ecologists recommend to combat global warming.

The saddest is housing. With property prices up in the clouds, the least advantaged families have been forced to displace themselves in still poorer neighborhoods, “creating new ghettos in the outskirts of the county, where gangs and crime are stirred up,” affirmed Daniella Levine, director of the Human Services Coalition of Miami-Dade. Experts have expressed that the solution is to guarantee that every tower that appears on the horizon offer an equitable proportion of housing for residents of medium and low salaries, and not only for those who can pay hundreds of thousands in a city where the mean income per family is an annual $23,774, according to the Census.

This whirlpool develops because in South Florida the supply of lands on which to build is limited. To that it must be added that this is a privileged place in the world where thousands of people move to annually, and for that they need new houses. The problem is established by price speculation provoked by the frenzy of investing in the real estate market, which “has led us to construct buildings and not communities,” declared Nancy Liebman, president of the Urban Environment League of Greater Miami.

Some efforts, nevertheless, have begun. The City of Miami has a proposal to combat an archaic zoning code with a development plan that contemplates pedestrian boulevards. The City of Miami Beach defended the historic character of its MiMo buildings before they might be harmed, as happened farther north, in Sunny Isles, with the motels that once distinguished the neighborhood with their picturesque facades.

We want a magnificent Greater Miami, not a massive one. To achieve this we must fight with zeal for the common good. Otherwise, the danger “is intolerable traffic; that people who need to have a job cannot live near their places of employment, and that an environment that is highly urbanized is lacking in green spaces,” concluded Bernard Zyscovich, a recognized urban planner.

There are thousands of millions of dollars invested in infrastructure. Prosperous growth, without any doubt, must continue, but it is time for those who drive it to remember that more important than the walls of concrete are the human beings that live within.