Rod Thomson: Growth: The Policies Should Match the Realities

Growth: The Policies Should Match the Realities

Rod Thomson

Executive Editor

Growth is not a tragedy on the Gulf Coast. It is not even a problem. It is a reality, and not a bad one. Growth means we remain a more attractive place to live than most other places in the country. In the market of thousands of places where people can choose to live, a large number choose to pick up their lives and move here. That alone makes growth a leading indicator for our quality of life.

State Sen. Michael Bennett, R-Bradenton, got it exactly right recently while speaking at the annual meeting of Sarasota's Argus Foundation. He says the state needs to be planning for the growth that is coming, not trying to manage or limit growth, and he is working on bills that would do just that.

"The first thing we had to do to was to accept the fact that growth is going to come," he says. "You can't believe how hard that is."

Living in a region that periodically goes through spasms of "building moratorium" talk, most of us along the Gulf Coast actually can believe it. Between no-growth advocates, unbalanced environmentalists and those who want a community to stop in time right when they move to it, we continue to experience resistance to the notion that growth is a good reality.

"Growth management in the state of Florida has been a disaster," Bennett says.

He gets the basics so right. Growth management has become a tome of rules and regulations that acts to drive up the costs of living and eat up taxes.

But then Bennett went on to discuss the mind-numbing volume of laws that the Legislature worked on last session to try to control, direct, plan and regulate the oncoming growth. To be fair to Bennett, he seems to be trying to simplify and streamline processes associated with growth - a desperate need. Yet his list of laws all sounded suspiciously similar to the growth management he identified as being a disaster.

A quick search of Florida's Senate bills from the last session revealed references to "growth management" in 26 pieces of legislation. In the Florida House, 29 bills referred to growth management. That is a lot of lawmaking in one session.

Perhaps there is no way around ever more government "solutions" to growth, but there better be if we are ever going to handle growth correctly. One of the basic problems with our attitude toward managing growth is that many of us have forgotten a simple, foundational truth of our country: private property rights. We want to use our democratic rights as a cudgel against other people doing what they reasonably want to do with their property.

For instance, 1000 Friends of Florida is an influential environmental lobbying group in Tallahassee because it is not extreme in its advocacy. 1000 Friends represents a lot of thinking when it calls for planning decisions to be citizen-driven, not developer-driven. In this mindset, people who do not own properties in question, or even any properties at all, should be able to block the owners of those properties from reasonably developing them as they wish.

In a growth management position paper from 2004, 1000 Friends charges that growth management laws in the state " . . . are not meeting citizen expectations, creating sterile subdivisions and strip shopping centers rather than rich vibrant communities . . ."

But those expectations are based on the desire to control other people's properties. There is a better way, and oddly enough a good example comes from a church. First Baptist Church of Sarasota recently purchased a property adjacent to its downtown facility. Why? Church leaders knew that the property was zoned for a structure up to 10 stories and with Sarasota's booming downtown, that seemed possible. Rather than go to the city to get the land zoning changed and block the owner from reasonable development, the church bought the land, maintaining the integrity of property rights.

Further, the charge by 1000 Friends that the state is creating sterile subdivisions falls in the category of beauty being in the eye of the beholder. Apparently an awful lot of people like living in those subdivisions because Gulf Coast builders have hardly been able to put them up fast enough. Perhaps members of 1000 Friends would not like to live in such subdivisions, but they have the freedom not to. Should they also have the ability to deny the freedom of others to choose to live in those?

Most people agree we need to protect true environmental treasures such as the Everglades, Myakka River and other true treasures of the Gulf Coast. But a surprising proportion of the land in coastal counties already is protected for future generations. For instance, one-third of the land in Sarasota County is in public hands, and yet the county continues to buy more for protection. At least that much is preserved in Collier County also with Big Cypress National Preserve, Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve and other lands.

So with huge amounts of land already protected, and more in the process, should we not be looking more to allowing free markets - that is, people exercising their freedoms to choose and others to supply that choice - to determine what types of housing is built and in what shapes? By continually adding more restrictions, to conform growth to the views of 1000 Friends or others, we violate the principle of property rights and add tremendously to the cost of housing, ultimately threatening our economy.

We must have growth to maintain our way of life. Like it or not, that is reality.

Sarasota County released a study last year showing that it is only growth that allows taxes to remain relatively low. Contrary to popular conceptions, growth actually does pay for itself - more than we existing residents do - but not for long. At the time of the report, a new house needed to be more than $315,000 to pay its way for a year. The higher cost of the house, the longer it paid its way.

So here is the counterintuitive truth: To maintain current tax rates and services, we need growth, and we need it from rich people. Yes, those two great bogeymen are actually critical to our way of life. And they help drive an astonishingly strong economy.

With low taxes, a relatively friendly business climate and an attractive lifestyle, Florida's unemployment rate now stands at 3.3%. It is even lower along the Gulf Coast. South of Tampa Bay, which stood at about the state average, the rate dropped as low as 2.3% in Sarasota County and 2.5% in Manatee County.

The economy of our area, with growth as a major pillar, is smoking along, providing jobs for everyone who wants to work. Economists generally refer to unemployment this low as full employment.

This powerful economic engine includes all of the construction trades, many of the service trades, accountants, lawyers and surveyors, plus many in the service sector. If they suffer, we will all suffer with higher unemployment, much higher taxes and a crumbling economy.

Growth is simply an essential part of our economic quality of life. It is inevitable. We should embrace it and as much as possible allow market forces to determine the trends.

Rod Thomson can be contacted at [email protected]