THE NEXT FLORIDA

Miami Herald, The (FL)
August 7, 1983
Author: AL BURT Herald Tropic Writer

John M. DeGrove is the messenger with news about what the future will do to us. He argues that we had better be prepared to cope with it.

The Next Florida preoccupies John M. DeGrove, a man with rare ties to the old one. The future he blueprints has some intriguing theoretical answers, but it will scare a lot of people.

DeGrove, a tall man with a weary face, understands this. He is patient about it. He knows that there are not any really popular solutions for Florida's flash-flood population growth.

So DeGrove, as head of the state's Department of Community Affairs, pursues what he perceives as the best available option. Simply put, he would reshape the state. He would make it more focussed, more orderly. All future development would be held within designated urban boundaries. It would be compacted.

He would bend still more the honored but already bent old dream of living in a single-family home. He would dampen the newer, escapist Florida dream of living on five rural acres. Virtually everybody would live in a city.

DeGrove is the messenger with news about what the future will do to us. He is more matter-of-fact than enthusiastic about it. He does not argue with the inevitable, but he argues that we should be prepared to cope with it.

DeGrove has superb credentials. He speaks of these things in the soft, true accents of Florida: A subtle blending that is one-part southern, one-part snowbird and two parts rebellion against the other two.

His family stretches back five generations in Florida, and his demeanor has the kind of unpretentious yet complex quality that marks native things. All his educational training, from BA to Ph.D., has zeroed in on the growth dilemma.

He was a leader in the 1970s struggles that sensitized Florida to its environmental jeopardy. He was director of the Joint Center for Environmental and Urban Problems at Florida Atlantic and Florida International universities. He has known and worked with Gov. Bob Graham for a quarter-century, since DeGrove was a professor and Graham an undergraduate at the University of Florida.

The governor, long a believer in new towns or urban clusters as the way for Florida to grow, drafted DeGrove as head of the DCA because they have shared this vision of the future for a number of years. The heart of the commitment that DeGrove (on leave of absence from Florida Atlantic University) took with him to Tallahassee was nothing less than the birthing of The Next Florida.

DeGrove spent much of the last 10 years studying the strategy of growth management in seven states: Hawaii, California, Oregon, Colorado, Vermont, North Carolina and Florida. Out of that study he has produced a book, Politics, Growth and Land, State And Local Governments In A New Role, soon to be published.

From that study, also, he reached conclusions about how Florida must compartmentalize to survive in an attractive form. Oregon tried it, with success, and DeGrove wants to adapt that experience to the Florida realities. "But our growth pressures are greater, and we'll need more imaginative ideas here," he said.

He does not talk of limiting growth, calling that impossible, but of managing it. He advocates an idea fast becoming popular among planners: the designation of urban areas into which all new development would be squeezed. He would accommodate the growth pressures there by permitting greater density in housing, more people per acre, cluster and highrise dwelling units. It would force urban redevelopment by denying space for development to sprawl across the countryside.

In effect he would challenge directly one of the nation's greatest problems: the structural blight, the strained public services, the social restlessness that burden the cities. In his view, this tight urban focus would lead to an easing of a range of those problems.

In return for that, he would bar development from prime agricultural lands, from wetlands and other environmentally sensitive or unique areas, and he would pledge the retention of open spaces and natural vistas. With this, he believes developers and environmentalists might realize a mutuality of interests, as happened in Oregon, and create a coalition of public support. It is an optimistic view.

He would couple this with statewide taxes, or standards that regulate local taxes, to make growth pay for what it demands in community services. He recommends a real estate transfer tax (documentary stamps tax) and state standards for locally applied impact fees.

DeGrove estimates that at present new growth pays for less than 60 per cent of what it requires in public services. He is saying, in other words, that for years Florida taxpayers have been subsidizing new residents.

"Reshaping the urban development pattern is a very controversial matter with citizen groups," DeGrove admitted. "What they fear is that they'll get the higher density but in the long run they won't get the tradeoff of open space and protection of environmental areas. They're afraid that the system finally will break down and they'll get the high density everywhere."

That is the nub of it. The Next Florida, whether DeGrove's innovation or somebody else's, will begin arriving only when Floridians' anger at what they see exceeds their fear of what they might see.

Edition: FINAL
Section: TROPIC MAG
Copyright (c) 1983 The Miami Herald