Selling growth, not just houses
By Joel Engelhardt
Palm Beach Post Editorial Writer
Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Development is not inevitable.

If residents only knew how hard developers work to get all those suburbs that seem so, well, inevitable, they would be less likely to give up without a fight.
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It's not as easy as it seems. Take the four property owners who want to change the remote rural edge of populated Palm Beach County. It's not a given that they'll get to build out there. If they talk as though it is, however, it sure helps to line up the votes they need to make it happen.

Assuming development is inevitable helps, because it keeps residents from raising too much of a ruckus. Usually, the complaining is limited to the people who live nearby, a few environmentalists and a newspaper editorial or two. The bulk of the population turns away. Why get involved? After all, isn't development inevitable?

With that attitude, residents had better prepare for a cramped county. After these tracts get built on, there's not much undeveloped land left but the vast cane fields of the Everglades Agricultural Area. And most residents probably figure that development is inevitable there, too. The population is coming. The political and economic pressures are great. The population has to go somewhere.

But development is not inevitable. Some county commissioners may prefer that residents think development is inevitable; it deflects the pressure from them, especially when they do things like they did last Sept. 19.

That's when they said - just thinking out loud, mind you - that those last undeveloped properties ought to get the same suburban density that everyone else gets. It doesn't matter that nearby neighborhoods are anything but suburban. Development is inevitable. A majority of commissioners are agreeable.

But it's not inevitable, and the developers know it. They just don't want residents to know that they know it. Thus you have John Markey of EB Developers, who got the bright idea a few years ago to buy some of the most remote land in the county, when it was cheap, and bide his time to build out there.

The time, he figures, is now. But since Mr. Markey's company isn't the biggest builder with the most favored status among some commissioners, like his neighbor GL Homes, Mr. Markey figured that he'd need something more compelling to bring to this fight.

So last week, he laid on commissioners a plan to turn taxes generated by inevitable suburban development on the remote rural edge of the populated county into a windfall for Palm Beach County. Never mind that the tax revenue from this inevitable development wouldn't go into the general county budget. Instead, those taxes would go toward selling the idea of suburban development on the remote rural edge.

Pretty bright idea. As Commissioner Mary McCarty said, give him credit for thinking outside the box. Just don't give him too much credit.

If development were inevitable, the giant home-builders who hoped to cash in on The Scripps Research Institute by building at the Vavrus Ranch - Centex and Lennar Homes - wouldn't have backed down. If it were inevitable, Scripps would be going up at Mecca Farms. If it were inevitable, a large landowner, Callery-Judge Groves, wouldn't have hired a private eye to dig up dirt on the landowner's ex-nemesis on the commission, Tony Masilotti.

Developers don't want people to believe that Mr. Markey's approach amounts to a bluff. Will people really continue to move to big, new, suburban homes in Palm Beach County if there are no big, new suburban homes? Apparently, yes. "The pressure is coming," Mr. Markey told me, "whether anybody wants it or not."

Why would development stop at Mr. Markey's property? Why wouldn't it spread all the way to across the farm fields to Belle Glade? "At a certain point," Mr. Markey said, "you've got to trust government to draw a line." That line was drawn years ago. Mr. Markey's property is on the wrong side of it.

The fact that the county drew the line in the first place proves that, at one time, even commissioners acknowledged that development was anything but inevitable.