Thursday, September 14, 2017

Dexter Filkins explains it all for you

Elegy for the Sunshine State
The New Yorker
By Dexter Filkins
September 10, 2017

If you grow up in Florida, you watch the natural world around you disappear. It’s just a fact you live with. The verdant, miles-long stretch of dune and palm, rustling to the beat of the waves? Paved over. The brackish stream that flows from ocean to intercoastal, giving life to manatees, alligators, and tarpon? Turned into a parking lot. The swath of live oak trees, the Spanish moss clinging to their branches like the mists from a Faulkner novel? It’s an apartment complex called Whispering Pines.

It doesn't matter when you moved to Florida. Ever since the nineteen-sixties, the stream of people pouring into the state has been relentless: an average of eight hundred newcomers a day. All of them need places to live. Where I grew up, in Cape Canaveral, the destruction of nature happened so fast that it was often disorienting; passing a stretch of woods for perhaps the eight-hundredth time, I would stare at the backhoes and cranes and wonder what had occupied that space only a week before. On a few occasions, my teen-age friends and I got so angry that we scaled the fences of construction sites and moved the survey points that were marking the spot for the next foundation—the next pour of cement. We failed, of course, to stop what the builders were building, or even to slow it down. The joke among us was that every housing development in Florida was named to memorialize the ecosystem it replaced: Crystal Cove, Mahogany Bay, The Bluffs. For about a year, I lived in an apartment complex, paved from end to end, called “In the Pines.”

It’s useful to remember this now, as Hurricane Irma lays waste to much of Florida: the destruction of the state has been unfolding for decades, and, for the most part, it wasn’t done by nature. It was done by us. In the nineteen-nineties, I covered the Miami-Dade county commissioners as a reporter for the Miami Herald. Miami is a vibrant, tumultuous city, remade every few years by the energy of its new arrivals. But, in the time I worked there, one thing never changed: the enthusiasm with which the elected commissioners greeted every new housing or commercial development unveiled before them. It was a kind of sad ritual: A new housing development would come up for a vote, and an earnest member of the county’s planning-and-zoning staff would warn about the development’s impact on the quality of the schools, on the phlegmatic pace of rush-hour traffic, on the erosion of beaches. Almost always, the pleas were ignored; the economy of modern Florida is a kind of Ponzi scheme, where tomorrow’s growth pays for today’s needs, and real estate is the largest employer. It was a confidence game, and the commissioners were only too happy to go along.

Once, following the approval of a housing development on an especially sensitive stretch of land near the Everglades, the Herald ran a story titled “The End of Nature.” Some of the commissioners called to protest the story, but the headline made no difference; the development rose anyway. Florida’s current governor, Rick Scott, is an apostle of the game: Scott has prohibited state environmental officials from using the terms “climate change,” “global warming,’’ or “sustainability” in their official communications.

It’s an old story: Florida, land of dreams. Leave your life behind in the cold, gray north—or in the hot, humid tropics—and come to Florida and start anew. Or buy a condo and retire. Your taxes will be lower, your home bigger, and your walls a lot thinner. The newcomer to Florida typically settles as close to the beach as he or she can—that is, as close as he or she can afford. Across the state, the development is especially heavy on the barrier islands—the thin, narrow strips of land that lie just off the mainland. The construction in places like Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale has been so heavy that, from a distance, the islands look like overloaded ships, so top-heavy that they are about to tip over and crash into the water.

Living in Florida, you didn’t have to be a genius to realize that what was happening wasn’t sustainable—that Florida wasn’t meant to have so many people, all jammed together, so near the coasts. On a typical Sunday afternoon in Miami Beach—or Fort Lauderdale, or Palm Beach, or Fort Myers, or Naples, or Destin—the causeways were so jammed that it would sometimes take hours to get off the island. What if everyone had to get out in a hurry? Every year, the beach washed away a little more, and every month a new condo tower rose. Much of Florida, including its largest cities, rests on a foundation of limestone, a porous rock, and when the big tides come in the seawater flows underneath the ground and floods into the streets. There’s little point in building seawalls; the land is literally floating away.

There have always been hurricanes in Florida, of course, but they usually taunt, threaten, and go somewhere else. One catastrophic storm that did not turn away—Hurricane Andrew, in 1992—destroyed more than sixty thousand homes in Miami and the surrounding area. After the storm, the Herald did a fascinating investigation in which it compared the pattern of destruction to the ages of the neighborhoods. It turned out that whether a house in Miami survived had very little to do with the speed of the wind. What mattered was the age of the house: the older ones—those built before the nineteen-sixties, when Florida’s boom began, survived almost anything. The new ones crumpled like cereal boxes. Following the storm, Miami’s building code was toughened considerably.

As I write, Hurricane Irma is bearing down on Naples on Florida’s west coast. Some meteorologists are predicting a storm surge of eighteen to twenty feet along a three-hundred-mile stretch of coast from Naples to Cedar Key, which would devastate St. Petersburg and Tampa. Many of Florida’s big coastal cities, like Miami Beach, are nearly empty now. The millions of people who are streaming north to get away are not just a measure of Irma’s power but a symbol of that moment, which comes in every Ponzi scheme, when the bluff is called. Maybe it will be different next time.

Dexter Filkins joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2011.

1 comment:

Geniusofdespair said...

Irma didn't hit hard enough to have an impact on the stream of developments approved at the county. Traffic is the only saving grace. When cars don't move, people do. They have to. Let's here it for higher gasoline prices!