A Tale Of Two Counties
St. Lucie County recently approved a project for 8600 new homes.
Here in Martin County, we would never approve that many new home starts. If a project with a hundred homes comes forward, the pitchforks come out. How can two counties sitting side by side be so different?
St. Lucie and Martin Counties largely share the same history. We were both farming and ranching communities until quite recently. I guess the divergence came because General Development Corporation which bought 30,000 acres in the 1950s and then birthed the City of Port St. Lucie. It became a city that grew from a developer’s plan.
Martin County took a different track. It kept most of the agriculture around the county seat, Stuart, intact. The landowners sold their land off slowly so there never was a rush to development that our northern neighbor experienced. There were small incremental changes.
All in all, Martin County’s approach should have been the better one. There shouldn’t be the sprawl we associate with St. Lucie County. But we should have had a more planned approach where we had clustered development. Martin County instead allowed a hodge podge to happen.
It isn’t that farms and ranches have been preserved. No government can dictate that a ranch must run cattle, or a farm grows corn. Economics are still economics. There was no central plan to keep green space eternally green. Instead, it is only open space that hasn’t been built upon yet.
As time went on, every project became a fight. Some people’s rallying cry was that no project should ever be approved. We became a county not of good resource management but of anti-property rights. It has become so bad that our county commissioners, in a controversial 3–2 vote, bought a parcel from a builder so that 90 by-right units in a CRA would not be built.
Who is better…St. Lucie County who wants to slap a single-family house on every undeveloped piece of land or Martin County who has refused to have really planned for our future? Some will say we have a comprehensive plan, and we should stick to it as if it were a holy writ. It isn’t.
It is not a planning document as much as an aspirational approach to development. There was a high degree of “no” in it. Planning for our future meant we should have accepted 90 units in a CRA.
Instead of having hard-fought single-family home development sprawling wherever it could, we would have more targeted and clustered development. We should be buying ecologically sensitive lands to preserve not developable property because of a few protesters who live in or near a Palm City CRA.
We may end up with the same sprawl as St. Lucie County. It will take longer but because we have not adequately planned, the state will force our hand. To the north, they developed with their eyes open. In Martin County we stumbled and delayed but will likely have the same outcome.
