by Kenric Ward of Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers

Can it be mere coincidence that Florida’s housing depression coincides with spiking oil prices?

When you think "subprime," think "suburbia" — as in miles of streets and stucco boxes where there is no "there" there. Fueled by easy credit and once-low gasoline prices, Florida’s housing boom has gone bust. Nowhere is that more evident than in this state’s suburbs.

Leveraging Florida’s loose planning rules, developers have been on a decades-long building binge, and politicians were happy to go along in exchange for campaign contributions.

This symbiotic arrangement worked as long as gas was (relatively) cheap. But collapsing fuel and credit markets have conspired to pop the housing bubble — especially in suburban areas where long commutes are a daily ritual. Instead of the "good life," suburbanites find themselves pumping their diminishing home equity into their gas tanks.

Cultural commentator James Kunstler calls America’s suburbs "the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world." With almost half of Americans living in suburbs, this country’s per-capita oil consumption is more than double that of the rest of the developed world.

The Treasure Coast is one sprawling suburban complex. Like many exurban places in Florida, we have created an unsustainable, high-mile miasma.

Low-density lifestyles are manageable on five- and 10-acre ranchettes, where cattle outnumber people, but the rise of cookie-cutter, commuter-driven suburbia has become a blight on the landscape. Packing four or five houses onto an acre and pretending that surrounding "green belts" yield "low density" is oxymoronic. All you get there is density and sprawl.

While bulldozers tear at the frontiers of urban service boundaries, development inside that line remains far below allowable densities. This artificially reduces residential capacity where it could be more efficient in terms of transportation, while increasing pressure to bust the urban service zone.

Developers and land flippers adeptly played the ground game, and elected officials, with few exceptions, facilitated it with a rubber stamp.

Did it have to be this way? No. While local politicians can't control gas prices, they do have police powers over planning and zoning regulations. If only they would put the public's long-term best interests above short-term pecuniary desires.

Alas, Florida's flaccid governments behave like Silly Putty. They have amended their local comprehensive plans 12,000 times a year during the past decade. Like greedy mortgage bundlers who waved through questionable subprime loans, local officials are complicit in a suburban meltdown.

Now, with gas prices soaring, the house of cards is teetering. Amid rising late payments, foreclosures and bankruptcies, the home market is dead — and suburban neighborhoods are particularly hard hit.

As transportation costs consume an ever-larger share of household budgets, suburbia looks increasingly problematic. While it's a little late for elected officials to put the brakes on far-flung projects that resemble ghost towns, local governments must start insisting on more sensible, less energy-consumptive models. These include mixed-use enclaves that combine work and home inside urban service boundaries, along with well-situated local transit grids that wean residents off single-occupant cars.

Floridians also must have a meaningful say in their communities' future. In fact, more are.

In the past year, voters from St. Pete Beach to Sarasota County to tiny Yankeetown have approved super-majority or referendum requirements for all comprehensive-plan changes. In each case, taxpayers decided that size does matter, and that bigger is not better.

Statewide, Florida Hometown Democracy would give every community the right to referendums. If FHD (www.floridahometowndemocracy.org) gathers enough petition signatures by the end of this month, the constitutional question will be on the November ballot.

Elected officials —the ones who presided over suburban sprawl by handing out comp-plan changes like candy — abhor Hometown Democracy. These "public servants" don’t heed the rank-and-file citizenry that must pay for bad policy. Instead, as William Faulkner put it, they slavishly follow developers' "furious beating of hollow drums toward nowhere."

Faulker wrote those immortal words in 1946. But it’s not 1946 anymore. From the suburban perspective, today’s growth machine has run out of gas.

Thanks to Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers for permission to reprint.
Photo credit: Nathan Rein