Is Florida Just One New Development Away From Environmental Ruin?

By Stan Cox, AlterNet. Posted January 15, 2009.

In South Florida, problems often have a way of coming down to a matter of water. The region leads the nation in water use per person. The most heroic efforts to square the circle, to keep both the remaining natural lands and the accelerating commercial development of South Florida supplied with clean water, are doomed from the start. There simply is not enough to go around.  

Short-Run Economics

Their famous can-do spirit intact, despite a real-estate market that was hit early and hard by the big pop of the national housing bubble, southwest Florida developers continue to demand the freedom to pave and build ever farther inland from the Gulf of Mexico and its bright-white beaches. Asked about the region's building boom in 2002, Al Hoffman, then-CEO of WCI Communities, told the Washington Post, "There's no power on earth that can stop it!"  So far, no one has proved him wrong.

At the time of Hoffman's prophecy, WCI had done as much as any company to make Naples the second-fastest metro area in the country. Today, Hoffman is gone, WCI is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and board chairman Carl Icahn recently sold his 6 million company shares for a total of 2 cents (not 2 cents per share, just 2 cents). 

The march of suburbia hasn't stopped, but it has slowed. And Florida's real-estate and construction barons are now clamoring for a healthy share of federal bailout money to get them through hard times. 

Naples currently ranks 11th among 350 cities nationwide in mortgage foreclosures (Fort Myers just up the coast is No. 1); despite that, it's still in seventh place for population growth. It also has the second-highest per capita income in the nation, so there's plenty of cash in the system to help push roads and subdivisions into new territory. The Bonita Bay Group, a dominant force among developers in the region, saw its new home sales shoot up in the crash of 2008, exceeding 2007 sales by 38 percent.

Since the 1950s, when Northerners looking for a future home in the sun would shell out the widely advertised "$10 down and $10 a month" for southwest Florida swampland that might one day be dredged, drained and built upon, the region's energies have been focused on the manufacture of real estate. Writer John Rothchild put it best: "as Detroit must sell cars, Florida must sell property."

From 1980 to 2000, an average of 400 people per day moved out of Florida. Most of them, according to Mormino, were fed up with runaway growth and sprawl. But each day during those same years, 1,000 people moved into the state.

Whatever happens to the national economy, South Florida will march on in its pursuit of growth. The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, approved in 2000, is meant to save South Florida's ecosystems while keeping its humans supplied with water. But it emphasizes water supplies for cities and suburbs and gives mainly lip service to the natural hydraulic flow that keeps the Everglades alive. Based as it is on the assumption that the region's population will double by 2050, CERP faces an uphill battle, to say the least. 

And it's not just living space that will be needed. Doubling the population will mean, at minimum, doubling the population of golfers. As of a year ago, Lee and Collier counties were already home to 152 golf courses -- one of the densest concentrations of fairways in the country -- and given the demand, space certainly could be made for 150 more.  

The fast eastward creep of southwest Florida's development is mirrored by continued inland creep from the state's east coast. Grunwald wrote The Swamp, "In coming decades … South Florida could become an uninterrupted asphalt megalopolis stretching from Naples to Palm Beach. Perhaps it could be called Napalm Beach."

A Paler Shade of Green

Ave Maria is not hanging out there totally alone in eastern Collier County. It was preceded a century ago by the town of Immokalee, 8 miles to the north. Lying amid orange groves and fields of tomatoes and other vegetables, Immokalee is home to 20,000 people, many of them immigrant agricultural workers. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers has won headline-making victories in recent years, pushing Subway, Taco Bell and other fast-food chains to pay more for tomatoes. But the people who pick the tomatoes go home each day to trailer parks that present a shocking contrast to the condos and McMansions just over the horizon in Ave Maria. 

Half of all mobile homes in the United States can be found in the southern half of Florida. Those occupied by well-heeled retirees can be quite luxurious, but the trailers in Immokalee are clearly unfit for human habitation. Clustered in dusty lots at the center of town or scattered around its fringes, the bare aluminum boxes have windows hardly bigger than slits, and many have no functioning air conditioner. 

See more stories tagged with: water, florida, growth, development

Stan Cox is a plant breeder and writer in Salina, Kansas. His book, Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine, was just published by Pluto Press.

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