Florida State Legislators (just like some Hillsborough County Commissioners) are working to “streamline” — i.e. deregulate — the development industry. State lawmakers want to make it cheaper & easier for developers to build more subdivisions and strip malls, apparently ignorant of the widely reported fact that Florida has 300,000 vacant homes for sale — a [...]
Having seen the Tampa area featured in The New Yorker as America’s prime example of greedy, wrongheaded leadership driving us off the cliff of economic disaster, let’s take a look at how our county commissioners propose to lead us out of this mess shown in this New Yorker video as “ground zero of the foreclosure [...]
The February 9 issue of The New Yorker spotlights the Tampa Bay area as “ground zero of the foreclosure crisis,” and exposes us nationally as a prime example of the political and corporate greed and utter wrongheadedness that has ruined America’s economy and laid waste to Florida. In “The Ponzi State, Florida’s Foreclosure Disaster,” George Packer [...]
Let’s quit pretending. Tampa isn’t a city. St Petersburg isn’t a city. Clearwater and all the other municipalities in the Tampa bay region are not cities in the traditional sense. Lacking a coherent functioning core and distinct boundaries (other than saltwater), they are, or have become, no more than jurisdictional regions. The small urban cores of [...]
Tampa Bay isn’t that different from any other post-WW II collection of sunbelt suburbs in search of a city. LA, Phoenix, Albuquerque, El Paso, Houston, Orlando, Jacksonville – the built landscape is pretty much the same. Designed to isolate us in autos and ranchettes, these sprawls give us lawns and shopping malls and de facto [...]
Planning commissioners overwhelmingly rejected three developments proposed for outside the urban service boundary for high-density, city-like development. Alas, all they can do is recommend the denial to the Hillsborough County Board of County Commissioners. It will be up to the BOCC to actually nix this idea. I’m guessing it will be a close vote, [...]
