The Aburdity of The NIMBY
Stuart and Martin County are known throughout Florida for being negative about any new development occurring.
Originally Palm City was worried that locating Costco on Martin Highway at the intersection with the Turnpike would result in sheer havoc to the community. They did their best to defeat it and they won. Instead of Costco they now have Wawa, Tractor Supply, a Car Wash, and other such businesses.
Even more naysayers tried to stop Costco from going in on a 50-acre property on Kanner Highway bordered by Willoughby and Indian Street in Stuart. It was going to be a traffic nightmare they claimed. The upshot now that it is open is that you do not even know it is there.
Some of the same people warn that once the apartment complex is built on the property, then the traffic will happen. All studies have shown that you won’t even notice any increase in traffic. Science and reality should never interfere with a good false narrative.
Undoubtedly as more and more things are built where nothing existed before, the traffic count will increase. Kanner Highway is a six-lane roadway. It will take more than several hundred additional autos to create backups. If anything, cars speed to the traffic lights where they may have to wait for them to change before proceeding. If you can drive more than the speed limit, then you are not caught in a traffic jam.
No matter how many times Chris Collins and his followers are corrected about the Brightline station, they continue to mislead the public. Stuart was never going to have to come up with the money to build the station. Their contribution would have been negligible and there were multiple outs built into the agreements. But why let the truth get in the way of a good narrative?
While we have not heard much about Brightline lately, it is far from dead. In fact, the chances of Martin County’s grant being approved look better and better every day. I just read that Rusty Roberts, once a V.P. at Brightline, was appointed Senior Policy Advisor to the Federal Railroad Administration.
Roberts led the lobbying efforts for the railroad as it rolled out between Miami and Orlando. Before that, he was the Chief of Staff for Representative John Mica for 17 years, the former House Transportation and Infrastructure Chair. There are other Brightline alumnae scattered through the FRA including people who worked on this very deal.
Fortress Group, the owner of Brightline in 2020, forgave a $120 million loan to one of Trumps’ companies. The company has also received multiple permits to build an LNG terminal and to transport LNG on Florida East Coast Rail. And while current CEO, Wes Edens, appears to be a Democrat, he is not a stranger to the president or his businesses.
The NIMBY crowd has continued to alarm people about major projects happening here. They fight everything instead of trying to make things better. That is a losing dead-end strategy.
Atlantic Fields, which was ridiculed for developing an old orange grove, could have resulted in 1000 homes ranging from $300,000 to $400,000. Instead, last year each lot was selling for $6 million. There will be 330 homes. That doesn’t count the value of the houses yet to be built. According to the property appraiser, the development contributed 2.9% of the increased market value and 4.8% to the taxable value in the county.
The footprint is minimal and the county services that will be needed are almost zero. Yet that didn’t stop the usual suspects from trying to stop it. Why…would they rather see more intense development and users of public resources?
When people say development doesn’t pay for itself that may be true if you choose the wrong development. Cookie cutter homes without commercial components are big users of government resources without a corresponding increase in needed tax revenue. That is the difference between Atlantic Fields and what I fear “Story” will be.
Middle Class tract housing is a huge local population booster with increases in the need for public safety, schools, and public works. That type of development never pays for itself. We need to stay away and steer in other directions.
Concentrated urban walkable development is a net revenue producer. If you have 100 single-family homes that will be spread over many acres then, public infrastructure investment is higher. If you put a hundred apartments in two or four buildings, the demand for infrastructure is less.
That is why developments such as Newfield, though built on tracts of open land, are concentrated around village centers. There are plenty of opportunities for real nature reserves and even farming, but residents can walk to jobs, schools, and shops within the village center.
While it may be a curse to Boss Collins, the entire idea about “New Urbanism” is just how increased population will not hurt our existing residents. At the Main Street event the other night, the renowned planner and designer of our downtown plan several decades ago, Andres Duany stressed that. That is what led to Stuart’s revival in the 1990s. If we had followed the Collins’ model of more cars and parking lots, the entire Downtown would have been bulldozed by now.
For Martin County and especially Stuart, the next stage is a successful rail system. Brightline gives us the best hope for achieving that. We will not only bring tourists to Stuart, but a percentage of us will get out of our cars and use trains to go south and north.
The future isn’t people in cars and single-family homes but rather more clustered living and public transit. Martin County wants to desperately not build over our empty lands. That can only be achieved by more concentrated development.
The state has already said that the Martin County way of excluding people from using their land through zoning will not be allowed. If not careful, the state will mandate one code for all. SB180, limiting changes to zoning and LDRs will take away local control in some instances. Most of the state is not nearly as indignant as Stuart is. That is because in Stuart Boss Collins attempted to take away extensive property rights by a rewrite of the codes. He is a bad legislator, and he doesn’t recognize it. But Tallahassee did and stopped it.
It is time to retire the rhetoric of “no” and substitute for a more can do YIMBYism. Our future and our children’s future demand it.
