RUNNING ON EMPTY
Land flippers played a great game, and elected officials facilitated the market with a rubber stamp
BY KEN WARD
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Ken Ward is opinion page editor of the Press Journal in Vero Beach, Fla. A Las Vegas resident from 1990-2002, he was a freelance columnist with the R-J and assistant managing editor at the Sun. E-mail him at [email protected] Other stories by Ken Ward
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Can it be mere coincidence that the nationwide housing recession coincides with spiking oil prices? When you think �subprime,� think �suburbia� � as in miles of streets and stucco boxes where there is no �there� there. Fueled by easy credit and once-low gasoline prices, the housing boom has gone bust. Nowhere is that more evident than in Florida�s suburbs.
Leveraging loose planning rules, developers went on an unprecedented building binge, and politicians were happy to go along in exchange for campaign contributions. This symbiotic arrangement worked as long as gas was (relatively) cheap.
But collapsing fuel and credit markets conspired to pop the housing bubble � especially in suburban areas where long commutes were required. Instead of the �good life,� suburbanites find themselves pumping their diminishing home equity into their gas tanks.
Cultural commentator James Kunstler has called American suburbs �the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.� With almost half of Americans living in suburbs, this country�s per-capita oil consumption is more than double that of the rest of the developed world.
Port St. Lucie, which, for a time, surpassed Las Vegas as the country�s fastest growing metropolitan area, is a sprawling suburban complex midway down Florida�s East Coast. And, like many places in the Sunshine State, it�s become an unsustainable, high-mile miasma.
Low-density lifestyles are manageable on five- and 10-acre ranchettes, where cattle outnumber people, but the rise of cookie-cutter, commuter-driven suburbia has become a blight on the landscape. Packing four or five houses onto an acre and pretending that surrounding �green belts� yield �low density� is oxymoronic. All you get there is density and sprawl.
While bulldozers tear at the periphery of urban service boundaries, development inside that line remains far below allowable densities. This artificially reduces residential capacity where it could be more efficient in terms of transportation, while increasing pressure to bust the urban service zone.
Developers and land flippers played their ground game well, and elected officials, with few exceptions, facilitated it with a rubber stamp.
Did it have to be this way? No. While local politicians can�t control gas prices, they do have police powers over planning and zoning regulations. If only they would put the public�s long-term best interests above short-term pecuniary desires.
Alas, Florida�s flaccid governments behave like Silly Putty. They have amended their local comprehensive plans 12,000 times a year during the past decade. Like greedy mortgage bundlers who waved through questionable subprime loans, local officials are complicit in a suburban meltdown.
Now, with gas prices soaring, the house of cards is teetering. Amid rising late payments, foreclosures and bankruptcies, the home market is dead. And suburban neighborhoods are particularly hard hit.
As transportation costs consume an ever-larger share of household budgets, suburban real estate looks increasingly problematic. While it�s a little late for elected officials to put the brakes on far-flung projects that today resemble ghost towns, local governments must start insisting on more sensible, more fuel-efficient models.
These include mixed-use enclaves that combine work and home inside urban-service boundaries, as well as well-situated local transit grids that wean residents off single-occupant cars.
It also would help if Floridians had a more meaningful say in their communities� future. In fact, more are.
In the past year, voters from St. Pete Beach to Sarasota County to tiny Yankeetown have approved super-majority or referendum requirements for all comprehensive-plan changes.
These initiatives aren�t slam-dunks, however. The development industry fights them at every turn and, in February, the big-moneyed national builders derailed a statewide petition drive that would have required growth referendums in every community.
Public officials � the ones who preside over suburban sprawl and hand out comp-plan changes like candy to developers � also abhorred the Hometown Democracy amendment because it threatened their power and their purse. Instead, as William Faulkner put it, these public servants slavishly follow the growth machine�s �furious beating of hollow drums toward nowhere.�
Someday it will dawn on them that, from the suburban perspective, the machine has run out of gas.