The economy is tanking and Florida is ground zero
Bruce Stephenson | Special To The Sentinel
September 24, 2008
The sudden shift of free-enterprise conservatives into good socialists should come as no surprise. Taxpayers have financed the American Dream for years, and now we own its evil twin: the Bankers Nightmare.
Between 1995 and 2005, the yearly production of 1.5 million new housing units, most of them suburban single-family homes, was underwritten by massive government subsidies for mortgages and new roads. The housing boom has largely shaped Americans' material wealth and indebtedness, and now, just as in 1929, speculative greed has driven the economy into ruin, and into the hands of the federal government.
The economy is tanking, and Florida is ground zero. The real-estate market will never be the same because the love affair with the auto-oriented single-family-home subdivision is officially over. Our subsidized building spree produced enough homes on quarter-acre lots to meet demand for the next generation.
At the same time, $4-a-gallon gas is driving down real-estate values where people drive the most, and thanks to 50 years of suburban sprawl, Florida residents are being driven crazy. Add in the highest rate of mortgage fraud, plummeting home values and a decrepit state budget, and Florida has returned not to 1929, but to 1927, when the Great Florida Land Boom collapsed, and Florida became the precursor of the Great Depression.
During the 1920s land boom, financial skulduggery reached levels that still amaze. To sell vacant lots at top dollar, speculators petitioned municipal governments to extend streets to their outlying properties. Free enterprise reigned, and public funds were bonded to build roads. In St. Petersburg, a banking and paving conglomerate dominated politics, and by 1927, the city of 40,000 had built enough streets for a city of 250,000.
Free enterprise has its costs, and when the real-estate market collapsed, St. Petersburg defaulted on its loans, saddling citizens with the highest per-capita debt in the nation. Apologies were made, audits undertaken and laws rewritten, but St. Petersburg, like the rest of Florida, remained a financial basket case until 1947.
After 1947, cheap oil, cheap land and air conditioning turned Florida into a subtropical vision of the American Dream, but those days are over. Florida, though, still has potential. It has purchased more natural lands than any other state; the Everglades are being restored; and, despite rumors to the contrary, it has a growth-management system.
"It can reinvent itself once again," Time's Michael Grunwald writes, and show "the nation how to save water and energy, manage growth, restore ecosystems and retool economies in an age of less."
For this to happen, the federal government must not only bail out failed plutocrats; it must, as Democrats argue, invest in rebuilding the nation's infrastructure. This cannot be a mere jobs bill; the nation's infrastructure must be configured to support a housing market that is becoming more urban and less suburban. Fortunately, there is a model in Charlotte, N.C. Investors there are building a "new urbanism" in conjunction with a new light-rail and streetcar system, constructed with funds originally earmarked for Orlando.
In 1998, the Orange County Commission, with strong support from Winter Park, voted light rail down. Incensed, I wrote, "The commission's 1950s approach to transportation has reduced the region's potential to a sprawling mass of paved mediocrity."
Times are now too desperate to let the Ozzie-and-Harriet crowd define our future. Funding commuter rail is step one out of our present morass, and unless Orlando follows Charlotte's example, neither our city nor state will approach its potential.
Bruce Stephenson is a professor of environmental studies at Rollins College and a member of the Winter Park Commuter Rail Task Force.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/community/news/winterpark/orl-stephenson2408sep24,0,3377235.story
Said in 1999, $600 million slated for Orlando went to Charlotte instead, because Orlando dropped the light rail idea. Because Winter Park did not want a stop in their community.Charlotte's light rail ridership, after operating just 9 months ago, soared to levels aimed for by 2025.
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