A loaded question about growth

Central Florida is embarking on a seven-county venture called “How Shall We Grow?” The question and its implicit assumption — that we must grow — has major implications for the Treasure Coast.

Wedged between the sprawling metroplexes of Orlando and South Florida, our region is being squeezed like orange juice. Even in the midst of a real-estate market meltdown, planners and developers are mapping our future 

...literally.

One of the prophets of the greater new urbanism is Bruce Stephenson, a Rollins College professor who came to Vero Beach last month to speak about “Past Visions, Future Solutions: Solving the Conundrum of Suburban Sprawl.”

Like most academics, the environmental studies instructor is long on vision, and yet painfully myopic. His Ivory Tower in Winter Park apparently stands in a hermetically sealed political vacuum.

While Stephenson identifies the waste and non-sustainability of Florida’s ’50s-style growth, his proposed cure is equally stale. It’s also naive.

Resurrecting the works of John Nolen — an American planner who drew up city designs in the 1920s — Stephenson’s approach is more derivative than original. Indeed, a phalanx of new urban planners makes their living these days going around the country giving the same old lectures.

Stephenson hitches his wagon to Central Florida’s “How Shall We Grow” initiative, touting a vision of “smart,” compact communities connected by new road and rail corridors. In other words: density sprawl. 

Today’s planners attempt to reinvent the wheel as they lust for downtown trolleys and mixed-use living arrangements. It seems these avant-garde thinkers were born about a century too late.

But they’re not all wrong. They properly identify the automobile as the single biggest influence on community planning (such as it is). They’re right that the spiraling prices for fuel make suburbia evermore untenable. And they correctly compute the fiscal, social and environmental costs of random, cookie-cooker growth thrown up by the development machine.

Where Stephenson and his colleagues go astray is in thinking they can dismantle the existing order and move everyone into their new nirvana. In actuality, the planners are merely puppets for the same crew that got us into this mess.

“How Shall We Grow” is backed politically and financially by regional chambers of commerce, builders, Realtors and other development drivers who figure Florida needs a fresh marketing approach to stimulate sales. They’ve simply enlisted academics and planners as their salesmen and front men.

Listen to Stephenson & Co. long enough and they’ll have you believing places like Portland, Ore., and Seattle are our utopian models. (This requires you to also believe those cities don’t have sky-high property taxes and their own horrendous traffic jams.) The spiel exudes the planners’ conceit that Florida would be a perfect place, if only people will follow their blueprints.

Converts to this new urban religion are joined by elected officials, who just follow the money. Our public sector, at all levels, is still a government of the developers, for the developers and by the developers.

Most media are on board, too. Editorialists around the state applaud “smart” growth and “new urbanism” as the talisman of “consensus.” Across Indian River County’s northern border, Brevard County’s newspaper opines that the county’s “quality of life depends on plugging into Central Florida’s growth map.”

Pulleeze. By that logic, Martin County would be so much nicer if it would join up with Palm Beach County. (Subscribing to the bigger-is-better theory, the Miami Herald recently called on Palm Beach to collaborate with Broward and Miami-Dade counties to “think — and act — as a region.”)

Perhaps St. Lucie County could just lead its neighbors into a whole new three-county metropolitan complex of our own. Now there’s a nightmare. 

Regional synergy is the future, according to Stephenson. He praises the Treasure Coast Regional Planning Council, another avatar of new urbanism, for doing a “great job.”

Though that’s debatable, the good professor has a strong sense of what we should not do. When asked about Florida Hometown Democracy, he glibly and quickly replies: “It would be a disaster. Florida has enough trouble holding elections. Do we really want more of them?”

The answer speaks volumes about the anti-democratic, pro-corporate impulses of post-modern urban planners. The notion that the people — the unwashed masses — should have any meaningful say in what happens to their communities is completely noxious to university-trained “professionals” and county commissioners holding high-school diplomas.

A paucity of independent-minded elected representatives is the direct byproduct of Florida’s over-controlling growth machine. The “How Shall We Grow” set-up (like those planner-orchestrated charettes that pop up from time to time) is a counterfeit of democracy.

Promiscuous amendments to local comprehensive plans, rubber-stamping of development (which pumped up and pricked the real-estate bubble) and the growing influence of absentee builders are afflictions of a sick political economy. Today’s planners continue to nurse the fevered delusion that growth not only will pay its way, but that it brings prosperity and a better life. If that were true, Miami would be the richest and most livable city on Earth.

New-urbanism snake oil dispensed from old bottles won’t fix what ails Florida. If our communities are to survive, the people must wrest control from the public-private cartels that externalize costs for the profit of a few. Billions of tax dollars for rail lines? New toll roads to link new towns? Energy-guzzling desalination plants and empty rivers to slake a voracious thirst? No thanks.

Discerning taxpayers will see far-flung clustering schemes for what they really are — developer tools to bust up rural zoning, pave over more land and facilitate still more growth.

Contrary to what the “experts” claim, growth is a political decision, not an inevitability. For growth-beleaguered Floridians, the question is not “How shall we grow?” but shall we grow at all? 

Ken.Ward@scripps.com 