The Miami Herald

Hold the line

Posted November 27, 2005

URBAN DEVELOPMENT BOUNDARY

BY KATY SORENSON Miami-Dade County commissioner

district8@miamidade.gov

We have the good fortune in South Florida of being located at the tip of a peninsula, wedged between the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. The bad news is that it's a narrow strip of land, and eventually we are going to run out of land to develop. Unlike Los Angeles, Atlanta or Houston, we cannot sprawl out indefinitely.

The visionary urban planners of Miami-Dade County recognized this and in the early 1980s created the Urban Development Boundary. They realized that our land was finite and proposed that we stop development before it destroyed the Everglades and our agricultural industry.

This line serves to limit urban sprawl, protect our drinking water, protect our wetlands, help with flood drainage and protect us from even more traffic congestion. Holding this line will help maintain the quality of life for all our residents.

Now, some developers want to move the line. They tell us that, in order to let families experience the American dream, we need more land to the west and south. Unfortunately, their vision of that dream is simply a house with some grass around it.

There is another American dream, however, and that's the dream of having a home, not just a house. It's the dream of a home in a walkable community where you know your neighbors, a home that doesn't require a two-hour commute to get to work. A dream of homes in communities with clean water, free of pollution, with shared open spaces.

Some developers don't have room for all this in their concept of the future of our community. They just want more houses on more land.

We hear that moving the line will create jobs. While it's true that any concentration of new residents will create the opportunity for more service jobs, this would happen anywhere. If we provide more residential development inside the UDB, we will create these same job opportunities. The problem with building beyond the UDB is that, while you are creating new jobs, you are also destroying existing jobs -- agricultural jobs.

Our local agricultural industry is Miami-Dade's third largest economic engine. Moving the line will hasten the demise of local agriculture, taking jobs away from farmers, agricultural workers and other ancillary industries. These jobs can't move into already developed areas. Once they are gone, they are lost forever.

Some developers claim that building more houses will make housing more affordable. With more land open to development, the argument goes, an increase in the number of housing units will bring home prices down. This isn't true. Over the last three years, over 60,000 new units of housing have been developed in our county. Has anyone noticed housing prices going down?

Moving the line won't make housing more affordable. In fact, if you think about the extra $400 a month it would cost to commute from land currently beyond the UDB, these houses would be even more expensive.

And moving the line would make life more expensive for all of us. As a county, our infrastructure -- including schools, police, parks, water and sewer lines -- is already overburdened. We already have an estimated $6.8 billion backlog of projects -- and no funding. If we expand beyond the developed areas of our county, these costs will just increase.

Beyond our quality of life and taxpayers' dollars, our most important concern should be the safety of our community and its residents. In the last three months, the two biggest advocates for holding the line have been Katrina and Rita.

Hurricanes' lessons

Katrina demonstrated how devastating a major storm can be when a city has given up its wetlands for development. New Orleans had lost its natural storm barrier, and the results were catastrophic.

Rita taught us a different lesson. The planned evacuation of the sprawling city of Houston caused traffic jams over 100 miles long, and some people spent 12 hours in their cars going 36 miles. That was a planned evacuation. Imagine an emergency with no warning, a terrorist attack or a nuclear accident -- we would be trapped. Urban sprawl isn't just poor planning. It puts people's lives at risk.

Thanks to Rita and Katrina, we don't have to imagine what may happen if we move the line. We have seen what will happen if we move the line. As elected officials, it would be governmental malpractice on our part to ignore the lessons of these two hurricanes.

It is up to all of us to protect the future of our community and all our residents. Call, write, e-mail or join us at the commission chambers on Wednesday and urge your commissioner to hold the line.

Katy Sorenson is Miami-Dade County commissioner for District Eight.