Downtown. Miami.

by Tony Chavira

Reading a city’s redevelopment agenda documents can be a very telling signal for how the people in it prioritize its development. For example, as part of the 2010 American Institute of Architects (AIA) Convention in Miami, I decided early on that I wanted to tour the Miami downtown area with guidance from the helpful folks at the Miami Downtown Development Authority. In the midst of romping through the sweltering tropical climate we overheard that the original plan for how the city was constructed referred to pedestrians as “non-vehicle traffic.” And this pretty much gave away the city’s development priority: when you see that the streets in the middle of the city have been widened for freight trucks and big rigs, you know there’s no chance people will walk along them.

Don’t be fooled by the Will Smith song: Miami Beach is a totally separate city from Miami proper. When you think about Miami Beach, you think about the shoreline, the gorgeous people everywhere, the amazing streets and culture, the condos and apartments no higher than a few floors, and the rows and rows of hotels along the long and sandy beach. If you’re from Miami Beach, you think about the cost of living there and the fact that the whole city is, in some ways, geared toward tourists. The drinks are expensive, out-of-towners keep the place running around the clock, and the economy rises and falls with the tourist-heavy seasons (which are usually fall, winter and early spring). One of the architects in our office casually referred to Miami Beach as “what Hollywood would be like if it had a beach next to it.” I completely and wholeheartedly agree with that assertion.

The city of Miami, on the other hand, is the land the drug money laundering cartel built. Since Florida doesn’t necessarily require proof of income to buy property, cash would be spilt into purchasing land under the guise that a city was being constructed practically from scratch. In reality, hundreds of millions of dollars would disappear in the process of developing each structure, and backdoor deals would constantly keep immense amounts of money hidden away from the public eye and conveniently absent from the accountant’s ledger. Despite this, the city of Miami still ended up being a place people had to live to make money, and the residential community was developed completely independently of the skyscraper community. In a lot of ways it reminded me of Dubai, with a district for skyscrapers and a district for suburban homes. In other ways, it reminded me of Los Angeles: no matter how incorporative they tried to make their redevelopment plan, it was always geared to be a city for car traffic (except when it was a city for heavy freight trains).

On the last day of the convention, our merry band of planners (all except me board-approved AIA members), met in the mid-afternoon sun with three tour guides: the head of marketing for the Miami DDA, the head planner at the Miami DDA, and a one of the planners at the Miami Zoning Office. They had recently developed a new “vision” document over the course of a year that was supposed to give developers and communities a gentle push toward how things were going to be organized from that point forward. Not to say that developers would really care, but it seems that people are just beginning to understand just how important it is to be able to walk on the streets of the city. In fact, it’s become a priority over the last several years for the city to require that new developments renovate and maintain their street scenes ... and so far it’s had general success.

With that in mind, I’d like to focus on some of the more universal problems regarding the current development of the city and how things can more-or-less easily develop for the better:

1. Miami’s Major Public Parks are Ugly and Badly Designed
   The largest park in the city, Bicentennial Park, is seen as a beacon for how the city’s political and design agendas play out. I had met the facilities manager, and proud as he may have been of the space, he had no choice but to acknowledge that the city had invested terribly when allowing the park to be designed by sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Each section of the park has hugely different plants, many of which are not indigenous to the area. Coral rock chosen for the ground has actually broken women’s ankles. A gigantic public fountain is not incorporated into the park and wastes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in maintenance. Wide walkways cook in the 100-degree weather, and you can almost pull the concrete up at that heat. And the park installed a laser which was confusing incoming air traffic, and therefore needed a Quasimodo-type character on guard 24 hours a day to switch it off and on as needed. The problem with this park isn’t just that it’s bad, but it’s that it incorporates all of the bad ideas used in every public park I walked through. Though each were meant as meeting and event spaces (which is admirable), each was ego-driven in its inception and design and none of them demonstrating the point that sometimes keeping things simple and incorporative is the way to make them accessible to the wider public. Needless to say, building parks without shade in a city that’s consistently 95 degrees shows a severe lack of attention to practical details. On that note ...
2. Miami has a Severe Lack of Shade
   And, really, the whole city is missing shade (unless you’re in the shadow of a skyscraper). Streets don’t have overhangs, trees don’t line any sidewalk, people just don’t step outside of them air-conditioned buildings between the hours of 11 am and 4 pm. Everyone thought I was crazy that I wanted to go on walking tours in the middle of the day, and I was warned several times to get myself a hat or three if I didn’t want to roast. But it’s hard when there are no creative solutions in a whole city full of people for how to achieve something as simple as shade. Even the most interesting public spaces lack this basic necessity, and it’s sad that so much time and effort is spent to manage the overwhelming cooling and air-flow systems as part of any new development, while shade from trees is completely overlooked.
3. Miami’s Streets have Little Design Consistency
   Along both Biscayne and Brickell, the main streets downtown, the city has this interesting design concept involving the arrangement of bricks and concrete to produce a sort of creative-looking walkway. Walk down a side street, it is just plain concrete. Walk down another street and it’s brick. Areas of downtown suddenly have height restrictions and then suddenly don’t. Parks can be dense with tropical lushness in one area while open and shade-free in others. The people-mover (i.e. the above ground, track-limited bus-like Miami Metro-Mover) that gets people through the city can just as easily spill people out in a dense urban space as nowhere at all. On the positive side, this hodgepodge of a city arrangement intermixes a wide range of social and economic classes. On the negative, I really don’t understand why the city (with all of the money that’s gone into it) doesn’t look pretty.
4. Miami Housing Has No Middle Ground
   This expands into a wider issue that all major cities have to deal with at some point (except Miami deals with it on an extreme level). The city of Miami is a focal point for a lot of trade that comes in from Latin America and the East Coast, and so the tourist and business traveler industries are huge. A plethora of five-star hotels spots the city skyline, and a bushel are still planned for completion over the next few years. But it’s hard to sell the city to a regular person, who just needs a job and has to move into the city to get one, when all of our entertainment and dining amenities are geared toward the highest 5% of consumers. On the flipside, in the process of advocating for public and affordable housing, the city has developed more housing spaces for low-income residents in the past few years than ever in its history. What the city is now realizing is that they have very few spaces in the urban areas for the typical middle-class family: no townhouses, no condos, nothing but lofts and high-rise apartments. Recently—because of the economic downturn—the apartment market has crashed and there is actually more supply than demand (which makes it great for young professionals who are interested in the urban atmosphere downtown Miami has to offer). But these spaces are still $1,200 or more monthly to rent, and that’s what people consider “affordable” (or at least more affordable than how much things would cost had the market not collapsed). But you just know that, once things turn around, most landowners will be looking to do what they had originally planned and sell those apartments or lofts. What then for the casual renting market, especially for a generation of professionals who may not be looking to invest in property in a city that suffers from such huge economic swings?
5. Miami’s Streets are Too Wide
   And this is the root cause for just about all the points above, cycling back to the first paragraph of this article: the city of Miami, though more dense than Los Angeles, was totally planned for cars. Biscayne Boulevard is four lanes wide on both sides with all the housing on one side and all the park space on the other. How exactly the park is supposed to be accessible was a mystery to all of us. Even the most densely-packed foot-traffic-heavy streets were two lanes each way, with the eventual intention of making them one or blocking out traffic altogether. As the port was the main economic driver for so many years and drug lords probably didn’t plan on walking down the streets with briefcases of money (despite whatever you see in films), the city had little need to accommodate pedestrians. In fact, the convenience for freight trucks to drive through the city deterred any interest in housing in the urban area, which only further reinforced the idea that the city would have to keep cutting into the Everglades in order to expand its suburban sprawl. Now that we know better, it’s clearly become very tough to take the existing arrangement of street spaces and condense them to accommodate pedestrians.

To their credit, the Downtown Development Authority has thought through each of these issues, and their vision document reflects how they need to figure it out. How they reach those goals will be an interesting and creative process on their part, but I want to be clear that they know exactly what’s wrong with their fair city. They even have a direction ... just not quite a map for how to get there. Needless to say, I hope they decide to walk.

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