Some time back we described Amendment 4 as a bad idea whose time may have come. Upon reflection (and reflection is something scarce in this emotional debate) we amend our previous statement to say Amendment 4 is a bad idea in response to some bad zoning decisions. Despite understanding what motivates its proponents, we must admit this amendment’s time should never come. A lot of angry people, and some influential press types, are pushing the amendment, but we wonder how much reflection they have given the matter.
Land use and zoning are different animals. Zoning changes are the problem, not land use plans. We looked up some experts in land use and law, and got the views of people who know what they are talking about. In the words of one land use expert: “The constituency tends to mix them together, but they are distinctly different.” Now this is a man who gets involved in neighborhood zoning fights, where residents feel they are ignored by politicians approving development which harms their lifestyle. He is sympathetic to the little people, but says Amendment 4 will not solve the problem, and only put land use decisions in the hands of those whose backgrounds do not suit them for such decisions.
He sees a possible grave economic impact, and confusion and expense at the polling place if ballots are clogged with questions most people won’t understand, or even care about. This position echoes the business community fighting the amendment, even though our source disagrees with some of the zoning decisions made by politicians under the pressure of the same business community. He also adds that it would actually give cover to politicians who make the decisions that have led to this extraordinary movement.
The solution is at the ballot box, but not in the form of this amendment. It is the people we elect who are the problem. Politicians who champion neighborhoods in their campaign, but vote just the opposite when it comes to helping their developer buddies, are the real problem.
Forget Amendment 4. Throw the political bums out. They are responsible for their own dilemma.
This is how integration worked: The first black family moved into an all white neighborhood. If the whites were working class, there might be a riot. If they were more refined, someone called a neighborhood meeting and pleaded with everyone to stay calm, don't panic, be good democrats, welcome the new people, etc. As often as not, the person who called the meeting had secretly put their house up for sale, trying to be the first to escape before property values took a nose dive.
Soon most houses on the block were for sale, and within a few years the only white people left were elderly widows who could not manage a move, or families that for one reason or another - usually economic - were trapped in their homes. This was in the 1950s and 60s and it took place in cities all over the north. Visit most of those neighborhoods today, and it would seem the people who moved away had good sense. Their old houses are often shabby. Streets that were once neatly kept and tree lined now have little foliage, and amid well-maintained lawns are places filled with weeds and littered with junk. The neighborhood business streets look like third-world bazaars. Once popular stores are often boarded, and people hustle wares on the sidewalk. The local schools are dangerous places. It is the face of integration.
Fast-forward 40 to 50 years and there is a new face of integration. We saw this in Washington last week and Philadelphia this week. The inner-city neighborhoods which first went black a half century ago are undergoing reverse integration. Some call it gentrification. Or reintegration. Whatever you call it, it is the reversal of racial history.
Ironically, it began in the same once working-class neighborhoods close to the hearts of cities where residents panicked toward the suburbs years ago. Many of the reingegrationists are offspring of those who moved to the suburbs. But those suburbs are not the ideal living quarters they once seemed. Sprawl spawned fast roads, designed to make access to business sections easy. Unfortunately, they had the opposite effect. Those roads, as we see with I-95 in Florida, only generate more movement and more traffic, making the suburbs increasingly inconvenient for the white-collar professionals who often work in the downtowns. Doubly ironically, some of those suburbs, especially those right on the edge of these cities, are among the distressed neighborhoods mentioned above.
In the older downtown neighborhoods, it is a totally different story. Last week we reported on how Florida House, the only state embassy, helped launch a renewal of what was then a near slum virtually on top of the nation's capitol in Washington. Today young people (mostly white but also a mix of races) are spreading that urban redevelopment block by block, the same as years ago. But this time the black residents selling are not moving in panic of seeing their property depreciate; to the contrary they are getting handsome prices for modest houses they bought cheaply years ago. And there is little resentment of the new buyers, certainly not violence as of old. The streets in the old Capitol Hill section, originally built 100 or more years ago are, in a sense, the original American dream. Blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics and just about any group you can name, are all mixed up, and happily so.
The old institutions, churches and schools, have revived. The commercial streets are safe and alive with activity. And the people, believe it or not, use public transportation and walk a lot. Many survive without cars – using cabs a lot, renting for out-of-town trips.
We saw the same thing in sections of Philadelphia - those surrounding the downtown core. The streets of the original city, lined mostly with row houses, have seen much the same pattern as Washington - particularly near the Delaware River, where William Penn planned a place of Brotherly Love more than 300 years ago. The era of integration a half-century ago was not pleasant, not anything like old Billy's dream for a city. But reverse integration is the irony of our times, and block by block, buyer by buyer, it may just be the salvation of our cities.
Washington, D.C. - People in our nation's capital admire Florida for many reasons. They like our weather, the fact that none of our college teams wear uniforms as ugly as Boise State and Virginia Tech did last night, and the fact that we elect people before they go to jail. Also we have the only state embassy in Washington.
That would be Florida House, conceived in 1973 by Rhea Chiles, wife of then-senator Lawton Chiles.
"Her idea was to have an embassy, a place for mom and dad and the kids when they visited Washington," says Bart Hudson, president and CEO of Florida House. "And that's still our primary focus. We get hundreds of kids, especially in the spring. We've had up to 200 here at one time."
Here is a big old house on 2nd Street, which has been converted into what is effectively an elegant club. It is a location to die for. From his office window, directly across from the Supreme Court, Hudson can see the Capitol, and beyond it the Washington Memorial. It is the envy of other states, several of whom tried and failed to duplicate Florida House. And yet when Rhea Chiles found this house it was abandoned, with floors caved in, in a neighborhood on top of the Capitol that was close to a slum. The neighborhood, known as Capitol Hill, was a disgrace – a run down and dangerous place next to our seat of government.
Which is something Washingtonians owes Florida. Florida House was one of the first buildings in the area to be rehabbed. It showed the potential of the Capitol Hill section and served as a role model for what has become a classic example of gentrification, stretching for blocks southeast. The section now is filled with charming homes which were once dilapidated. It is a vibrant mix of races, with many residents being young couples or students who have chosen to live conveniently and reversed the suburban trend which has led to beltway traffic jams among the worst in the country.
Hudson, a fourth generation from Florida's Panhandle, arrived 11 years ago – a bit too soon.
"I moved to Maryland because I couldn't find a place in Washington where I wanted to live," he says. "Today I would buy in D.C. "The Capitol Hill neighborhood is a good investment."
How good are the prices? Similar homes in other cities that might sell for $200,000 bring $500,000 and over in Washington. A young former Florida couple just paid $360,000 for a 1880s-era row house that needed to be totally rebuilt. And that price was more than the bank, who had it in foreclosure, was asking. They are literally rebuilding from the ground up. The rotted floor had to be replaced and since there was no basement, they were looking at dirt. And yet comparable houses just doors away, which have already been rehabbed sell for more than $500,000. There has been no housing bubble in the nation’s capital.
Back to Florida House. Although Rhea Chiles’ concept of a place for families remains in place, Florida House has also welcomed businessmen and organizations doing business in Washington with Internet services and anything they might want. Additionally, it's a popular site for receptions, often used by Florida’s elected officials. It’s also a cultural center. It currently is showing a collection of paintings by Florida’s famous Highwaymen, on loan from a Canadian collector.
The best part of this achievement is that it was done totally through private funds. Hudson says several other states have attempted to build their own embassies, but did not follow Florida House’s model. “They wanted to use state money and that just doesn’t work,” Hudson says. What Rhea Chiles started four decades ago has been continued by other congressional wives, prominent among them is Emilie Shaw, wife of former congressman Clay E. Shaw. She supported Florida House during her 26 years in Washington, and there is now a fountain in the garden on the premises in appreciation for her work.
I do a weekly blog which nobody reads. Blogs are like awards: There are too many of them. Anyway, last week’s blog had a hard time getting past one of our young editors simply because I wrote that my first election was the JFK-Nixon 1960 race and that President Kennedy was later murdered by the United States intelligence community. Notice I didn’t say CIA because it took more than one agency to pull off the crime of the century. There was just too much coordination (including altering the autopsy of the president’s body) to have been the work of one group, much less one man. There had to be assistance from the Secret Service and very likely the Dallas police. The actual shooters will probably never be known; but who covered up the crime has become clear.
The young editor suggested I use a modifier, such as “likely,” because, she said, a conspiracy has never been proved. In response I gave her a copy of Gaeton Fonzi’s book, The Last Investigation, which appeared originally in Gold Coast in 1980. The book version did not come out until 1994, and two years ago it was republished with a foreword written by yours truly. Now, I am not an authority on the JFK murder, but I sure am an authority on the authority – Fonzi. I was with him the day in Wildwood, N.J., when a lawyer named Vince Salandria walked us through crucial evidence and convinced us both that the idea of a lone assassin was absurd. Not long after I heard the tape of Fonzi’s interview with Arlen Specter, the soon-to-be ex-senator from Pennsylvania and the man who came up with the “single-bullet theory.” Specter, who was surprised by Fonzi’s detailed knowledge of the president’s wounds, stumbled all over the place trying to explain the unexplainable.
Subsequently, for five years (1975-1980) I was looking over Fonzi’s shoulder when he was an investigator for the federal government when the assassination investigation was reopened by two government committees. I say again – federal government. He had access to documents and people that no outside investigator saw. He was also the man who discovered, through a Cuban exile who worked for the CIA for years, that Lee Harvey Oswald – the man who took the blame for the crime and then took a bullet to silence him – was a CIA operative himself. Fonzi also saw firsthand the disinformation campaign with CIA operatives, such as Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis, sending him on wild goose chases. Fonzi also saw the CIA pretending to cooperate by assigning a man to facilitate communication who, it was later learned, may have been deeply involved in the assassination coverup. It all struck Fonzi as a cover up of a cover up. So, he wrote the book.
His information has since been reinforced by other investigators who built on Fonzi’s work. Among other things, they have discovered that Robert Kennedy almost immediately sensed the nature of his brother’s killing. One of his first calls was to the CIA, and contrary to his public posture of accepting the Warren Commission, he got word through private sources to the Russians that he knew they were not involved. He wanted to defuse the tensions which followed when a disinformation campaign portrayed Oswald as a communist sympathizer. That was part of the game: Blame Castro (and by extension Russia) and possibly provoke a war.
I have written about this subject often, partly because it has been so close to this magazine for years, but mostly because the rest of the media continues to fail in its role. Just recently there was Chris Matthews on CNBC talking about the dangers of hate in this country and reminding us of 1963 and Lee Harvey Oswald. He has used such allusions before, reinforcing the great lie that a lone nut murdered a president. It is infuriating that someone who seems so well informed on political history – or at least pretends to be – does not seem to understand what happened that day in Dallas. Matthews is right in that there was hatred in the country in 1963; but it was not Oswald doing the hating. He was just a dupe. The real haters were highly placed people in what President Eisenhower called “the military industrial establishment.” In this case they were military and intelligence people who regarded JFK as a traitor who had sold out on Cuba – first at the Bay of Pigs, and secondly (and more importantly) the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The other thing annoying is the silence of the Kennedys. Last month marked the first anniversary of Sen. Edward Kennedy’s death. I had long been confident that Sen. Kennedy would have left behind some indication of what he thought about his brother’s murder. If Robert Kennedy knew what happened, Ted Kennedy had to know the same. But he died, long after the tragedy and after most of those involved are not around, without confronting the findings of the Warren Commission. Writers who tried to contact him late in life found him unwilling to even talk about the event. It was too painful, for him and the rest of the Kennedys.
So back to our young editor. Her mother was 2 days old when Kennedy died, and it bothers me that people like Matthews can influence new generations. I knew she would not read Fonzi’s book, at least not quickly for it is long and complex. So, I just told her to read my introduction, which is just a few pages, but makes the case. I am not sure if she has read it yet. But I am sure if Chris Matthews took the time to read the book, and a few of the books more recently published, he would not be so inclined to make a fool of himself on television.
I just voted, but I can’t tell you for whom because that might swing the election toward one of the lesser crooks on the ballot. Before I get into scandal, I am reminded of my first election. It was 1960, and a fellow named Kennedy who talked funny – but well – and was later murdered in a conspiracy orchestrated by United States intelligence community was running against Richard Nixon. I actually worked the polls that day, on behalf of a Republican named Dave Maxwell. He was running against a powerful Democratic machine in Philadelphia and got slaughtered. But he was a good man, and I would work for him again. The good news was that JFK carried our precinct by something like 148-10. And this wasn’t your classic Irish neighborhood. It wasn’t even overwhelmingly Catholic. The section was called Germantown. You won’t find too many Germans there today. There was a big battle in the Revolutionary War there in 1777, and you were safer between the lines of the two armies than you are walking those streets today.
Fast forward to the present, and the contrast between the 1960 election and today is depressing. In 1960 I voted for two good men from different parties. Today, I voted for the lesser of evils. I wish I could be registered in both parties so I could have voted against both of those rich guys, who are insulting our statewide intelligence. Thank God that we still have newspapers, which exposed them both. Television, being bought by the pair, would never have had the guts or the talent to do the job.
With a few exceptions, those running on the state and national level strike me as running because they believe in the nine commandments, with the one about stealing exempt. The local elections were not quite as bad, but the judge situation is awful. Lawyers with Jewish names, most of whom can’t make a living practicing law, have been running against black and Hispanic judges. This is because the Jewish condo vote tends to be a homer. There is nothing new about this. My mother, when she voted, usually went with the Irish names, and in so doing helped elect a lot of black people. What is bad is that candidates, including one putz who does not even live in Broward County, take advantage of this natural phenomenon to vote out of office some fine judges whose names suggest skin color or ethnic background other than their own.
On top of these trials, the ballot is ridiculous. We keep changing the system every election. In 1960, I was one of the rare ones who did not just pull a single lever. Now we have a new paper ballot which you can hardly see and fill in ovals which you can’t see. I thought I was back taking the freaking college boards. I left the polling place feeling down and diminished. But then, I dropped by to see Francis the broker, whose office was next to the polling place, and bought some of Wayne’s new stock.
I feel better already, and I haven’t even had lunch.
The big news today is that the annual U.S. News & World Report (or something like that) just released its list of the top colleges. Nobody reads this except everybody who reads this. Our computer has not worked for the last year, so we can only pick up snatches of the report. But we can say, based on past experience, that these ratings are stupid and meaningless. We can only guess the usual suspects are up there. They don’t change much from year to year, and when they do it is usually because the football team had a good year, or the basketball team made the Final Four.
However, just for the record, the papers have scooped us, reporting that the University of Miami has gone ahead of The University of Florida as the best school in the state. Both are rated in the top 1,000 schools. This is no great surprise. Growing up in the North, we thought Kutztown University was far superior to both of these Florida schools, which had reputations for offering courses in esoteric disciplines such as basket weaving and floral arrangements. The good news is that no athletes from either school have been indicted today –– but the day if only half over.
On the other hand, some say there are four great schools in the south. Tulane, Vanderbilt, Duke and, alas, Miami. Miami makes it because of its famous logo, the “U” on its football helmets. Lore has it that Howard Schnellenberger himself came up with that idea. Now, back to business, here are the unofficial Gold Coast ratings of the best schools. We only listed 10, so don’t be offended if your alma mater is ignored. It would surely be in the top thousand.
- London School of Economics. Purists might say this does not count because it is not a U.S. school. But JFK went there, and besides, we are talking about London, Ky. This school is located off I-75, or maybe I-65, but it’s up there in the hills, located in a small cave. It has only three students, but they are doing wall carvings, which when discovered 10,000 years from now, will explain how Howard Schnellenberger got the idea for the “U” on the Miami helmets.
- La Salle University. My late uncle, Brother Francis McCormick, F.S.C., used to say “somebody has to educate the sons of the truck drivers.” I am one of them. In retirement, after a career in insurance, my dad drove a flower truck during the holidays. I will put the sons of the truck drivers in there with Harvard any day.
- Harvard. It is only on this list because my nephew, Mike McCormick, was the winning pitcher for Columbia (c. 1985) against Harvard.
- Columbia. See number 3. It jumped four places on the list because of little Mike’s great day, and also because my brother (big Mike) taught there for 40 years.
- Notre Dame. The golden dome makes this list because my old school and Notre Dame are quite close. La Salle means Notre Dame in French. Also there are 10,000 advertisers in this magazine who are Fighting Irish.
- Nova Southeastern. Now known as NSU, it makes the list because half the litigators in town went to law school there. We don't need legal trouble. Also, they buy ads.
- Florida Atlantic. No ads lately, but as long as Howard runs the football program, it demands respect.
- Villanova. This is only listed because U.S. News usually ranks the Wildcats as a top "regional" university. This is B.S. Villanova is a national school, loaded with kids from Florida, and instead of No. 1 regionally, it would be in the top 1,000 if competing with the Ivies and ND. It cannot be a very good school. Two of my brothers got in there.
- Northwood University. Rollie Massimino, famous for coaching at the great Villanova University, and winning the NCAA Tournament, is now at the helm of a good little college program in West Palm Beach.
- University of Florida. We had to do this or the managing editor and half our Gator infested company would resign. Or kill the whole freaking blog. Don’t know which is better.
The newspaper carrier made a mistake this morning and dropped off a copy of The New York Times instead of one of our indigenous papers. We have decided not to sue because without that error, we would not have seen the front page piece on Portugal’s five year conversion from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy. The statistics are impressive. This year almost 45 percent of that country’s energy will come from a combination of renewable sources. That compares with 17 percent just five years ago. More to the point, it compares with just 4.3 percent in the U.S. That excludes large hydropower, which we guess means the Hoover Dam and such modern marvels.
Now, we have not been to Portugal, but never thought of it and other small European countries as models of modern marvels. And yet this reduction of dependence on coal and oil is a creative combination of several renewable energy sources, including solar, wind and hydro – the latter even involving ocean waves. They even developed a combination of wind and hydropower, using windmills to pump water uphill at night and then it rush down to generate electricity by day, when demand is greatest.
The Times reported that it just isn’t Portugal making us look third worldly. It quoted a report which said by 2025, Great Britain, Denmark and Ireland will also generate 40 percent of their power through renewable sources. With its usual thoroughness, the Times got into the economics of these energy efforts, pointing out that most of the countries leading the way are forced to by lack of fossil fuels such as oil and coal. These developments take on even greater importance with the advent of electric cars, which would have a renewable source of juice and eventually greatly reduce the use of oil for transportation, at the same time providing an urgent environmental benefit.
This story might not have made such an impression a year ago, but after the disastrous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the damage to the environment, which will only be known in coming years, coupled with the near panic as oil spread to our Panhandle beaches and threatened to reach the Gulf Stream, the urgency to alter our energy course seems compelling. Portugal speeds ahead; the U.S. moves glacially. Brazil got off the dime during the first oil crisis in the 1970s when it began to develop its ethanol industry. Today it leads the world in biofuels. It is one the most energy self-sufficient countries, with enough left over to be an important exporter of that nature-made fuel.
Last year Gulfstream Media’s Treasure Coast magazines, in a story on the Everglades restoration through the U.S. Sugar Corp. purchase, noted a report that a company specializing in ethanol technology was talking to U.S. Sugar about a major facility in the Okeechobee area. A la Brazil, it would use sugar cane to produce the fuel more cheaply than from other crops. We envisioned an “ethanol prairie” of plants creating good-paying technology jobs in an area that could use them, at the same time providing a very convenient source of fuel for Florida. Not long ago, we made some calls to see how the idea was progressing. A spokesman said there was nothing new to report. That sounds as if nothing is happening.
Maybe the country that put a man on the moon needs to import a few good men from Portugal.
What started out as separate neighborhood protests over Fort Lauderdale development appears to be coalescing into a movement that could change the political dynamic of the city. The three battles are in Colee Hammock, Idlewyld and Coral Ridge are quite different, but community leaders in the three neighborhoods are supporting each other in efforts to protect their quality of life.
The Colee Hammock dispute, which we coined “Civil War on Las Olas” is over the First Presbyterian Church’s plan to use a PUD to greatly expand the church along Las Olas Boulevard and the neighborhood just to the south. The plan includes a “family center” which, despite the church's repeated assurances, sounds suspiciously like a school and a five-story parking garage on Las Olas. Idlewyld’s mission is to stop the proposed Bahia Mar Marina redevelopment, which it contends is grossly out of scale and will greatly impact traffic in the area and destroy quality of life on the beach and the exclusive just across the Intracoastal.
Quite different is the situation in Coral Ridge, where neighbors of Cardinal Gibbons High School object to tall lights at the football field.
Jackie Scott, a Colee Hammock resident who has been active in community affairs for almost 30 years, calls the current situation unprecedented. She says:
“I don’t remember since the early 1980s any time that we had three different neighborhoods under pressure from development at the same time, with what appears to be very weak support from the commissioners to protect them.”
Scott has been a leader in rallying neighborhoods to oppose the Planned Unit Development concept (PUD), which is being used in both the First Presbyterian Church and the Bahia Mar projects. Neighbors view PUDs as a way for developers to circumvent existing zoning to build inappropriately large projects. To date, 17 civic associations are on board in the effort to have the city declare a moratorium on PUDS until the impact of such developments can be studied.
Mary Fertig, president of the Idlewyld Improvement Association, which initiated the moratorium movement, has joined Scott and others in the effort to bring the various groups together.
“We’ve received a wonderful reception,” Fertig says. “People have concerns about over development and preserving the environment, their tree canopy and quality of life. The response shows that everybody has the same concerns. They’re all worried about too much saturation. How much more can we handle and still maintain the quality of life that we came here for? I can’t remember anything like this happening. It’s not like all of Las Olas got together, it’s the whole city.”
“The culture of the city has drastically changed, and people are waking up and saying how did this happen," Jackie Scott adds. “When you look at the history of successful elected officials, people like Jim Naugle and Rob Dressler, they came from grassroots. Now we have a commission that’s totally different.”
One of the things the community activists are pushing is an unbiased study of the traffic implications of new developments.
“We’re asking that the city do its own traffic studies from scratch, not just accept the developer’s study,” Fertig says. “In the long run that can only benefit the city.”
The Bahia Mar and First Presbyterian Church matters have not yet reached the city commission, but neighbors opposed to the projects have an ominous sense that both have been orchestrated from the beginning. In the church vote, the Planning and Zoning Board had four members forced to recuse themselves on the grounds of possible conflicts of interest. Only five of the nine members voted last month. All five got religion, all voting for the church. Curiously, a similar proposal was voted down unanimously several years ago.
Although civic leaders are cautious in saying so before the final commission votes, they are clearly implying that they can vote too, against commissioners who run on platforms of supporting neighborhoods, and forget those pledges once in office. There is ample precedent for such political activity. Cindi Hutchinson, who served on the commission for nine years before dropping out of the mayor’s race in the last election, first came to office to oust a commissioner viewed as too close to developers. Ditto Christine Teel, who ran as a community preservation champion in the Coral Ridge area and served two terms before losing to former police chief Bruce Roberts.
The emerging alliance of civic groups transcends other factors. The Coral Ridge-Cardinal Gibbons fight is an example. According to published reports, the Coral Ridge community is divided on the lights. Those living near the football field are leading the fight. Others support the school. Many people in other civic associations are friends of the school, and sympathetic to Gibbons, which moved to its location in the early 1961 and has played football almost as long, but not at night under lights. At the time Coral Ridge was a developing neighborhood and many of those opposing the school had not arrived. But the attitude that neighborhood folks should stick together appears to be growing.
That’s especially true when voices as energetic as Scott’s and Fertig’s explain that if Fort Lauderdale’s beach becomes impassable near Las Olas Boulevard and the church’s expansion clogs up the boulevard at the other end, all the people living on the beach, the Las Olas Isles and Victoria Park are going to feel the impact.
The community leaders sense that public opinion is on their side. So is much of the press. Dan Christensen, whose Broward Bulldog blogs have been picked up by the newspapers, has covered the zoning struggles and the Cardinal Gibbons story in a balanced way. Other bloggers, such as Buddy Nevins’ Broward Beat and Bob Norman’s Daily Pulp in New Times Broward, have stridently condemned both the Bahia Mar and First Presbyterian Church projects. The neighbors in both instances wonder if city hall is listening.
Says Mary Fertig: “I don’t know how a city planner can approve that parking garage at an intersection that’s already so congested. You don’t even have to talk about neighborhood compatibility. It’s a question if we can even get in and out of our homes.”
