Just One More South Florida Land Boom. Please. Just One More, In Spite Of Reality . . . Please
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The lake, like so many others in Florida, began as a rock quarry. In the years since, it has served as a venue for boat races, a swimming hole for manatees, and a set for the 1960s TV show Flipper. More recently, as if to underscore the impermanence of South Florida’s geography, more than one developer has toyed with partially filling in the lake to build condos. Behrens is promoting a floating village with 29 private, artificial islands, each with a sleek, four-bedroom villa, a sandy beach, a pool, palm trees, and a dock long enough to accommodate an 80-foot yacht. The price: $12.5 million apiece. Dutch Docklands, Behrens’s firm, has optioned the lake and is marketing the islands as a rich man’s antidote to climate change. As for the risks from rising sea levels, well, that’s the beauty of floating homes. The islands would be anchored to the lake bottom with a telescoping tether similar to those that enable floating oil rigs to ride out the roughest hurricanes.
The floating-village plan is part of a frenetic building boom, fueled by wealthy South Americans and Europeans buying with cash, that is transforming Miami’s skyline. From our boat we can see construction cranes cluttering the sky along the barrier island of Sunny Isles, where crème de la crème luxury is the hot trend. In a real estate market that celebrates opulence—the $560 million Porsche Design Tower features glass-walled car elevators that stop at every apartment—it was probably inevitable that the greatest threat to South Florida’s existence would be used as a promotional strategy.
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Chris Bergh of the Nature Conservancy joins me at Big Pine Key. He arrived in the Keys from Pennsylvania as a toddler in the back of his parents’ 1973 Volkswagen bus and has no plans to move. “I’ve got a six-year-old,” he says. “I expect I’ll live out my days here, and he will not. At some point an economist is going to say, ‘Look, it’s going to cost one billion dollars to redo U.S. 1, and that’s only going to buy us 20 more years.’ The question is, What will it cost us to buy time so we can keep on keeping on?” The end of the line is Key West, closer to Havana than to Miami. At City Hall we meet up with Don Craig, a planner who’s worked for the city for more than two decades. The city has spent millions in recent years to add pumps, construct a fire station at a higher elevation, and rebuild portions of the seawall that nearly encircles the island. But options are limited.
Raising elevations on any large scale is out of reach. “We do not have a nearby source of fill material,” he says. “We’re 118 miles from the major rock quarries.” When Craig tells people that the Keys’ lifeline, the highway, will lie underwater someday, it elicits four responses. “Some become fearful,” he says. “Some say, ‘Well, I’ll be dead, so I don’t care.’ Others say, ‘There is not a consensus that this is going to happen, so why are you telling us this?’ The other reaction is mute silence.”
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http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/02/climate-change-economics/parker-text
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