Transit Miami

It’s not often that our local politics gets featured in National news media (unless of course it has something to do with Cuba or an international custody battle), but Time Magazine featured an article this week on the UDB fight.

“One of the Lowe’s project’s biggest backers on the commission is Jose “Pepe” Diaz, who is under federal investigation for allegedly receiving gifts from developers whose plans he’d voted for. (He denies any wrongdoing.) Another, Natacha Seijas, who at one commission meeting voiced her dislike of manatees, one of Florida’s most beloved and endangered sea mammals, faced a recall vote in 2006 (which she defeated) due to public complaints that she also was too cozy with developers.”

Wow. ‘Nuff said…You can’t buy publicity like this. Maybe now when the Mayor vetoes this decision, some of the other commissioners will come to their senses and realize that this is a bad idea. The UDB line does not need to move for a long long time. We need to take advantage of the infrastructure that we already have rather than expand. Its very simple math: the more people living in one area the less it costs on a per person basis to provide public services. The same roads and sewers service sprawl neighborhoods at a density of 4 units per acre as they do at 200 units per acre. In a very direct way, our tax dollars go to subsidize neighborhoods whose tax base doesn’t break even.

Ana Menendez wrote a column today about this. She takes the argument a step further and describes the other hidden costs of living in a McMansion out in the sticks. The social costs of living in disconnected suburbs and the environmental costs of paving over the Everglades are never figured into the calculus of expansion.

Even the shortsighted politicians of the area should sympathize with this argument: it doesn’t make financial sense to develop this land. The further west you go, the lower real estate prices are per square foot. This is a trend you see in every major city across the country. Suburbs do not hold their value and end up costing municipalities more because their tax base doesn’t grow.

We need to worry about density and intensity in the parts of town that are served by transit. We need to develop our urban centers, and the mass transit necessary to support them, and we need to stop building so far west and south that we kill any chance we have of having a successful transit system. At a certain point, which we might have already passed, we become so far behind the ball and the city gets so big, that good projects get caught up in NIMBYism and political baggage (read: Baylink and the Orange Line).

Coincidentally, I found myself this weekend at my brother-in-law’s house off of 8th street and 152nd avenue. As I sat in the backyard, which fronts the Everglades, I realized that between the back of his house and the begging of Everglades National Park was only about 20 blocks. Eventually, by default, there will be no where else to expand to. We will have backed ourselves into a corner that no amount of good planning can undo.