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America's First Eco-City: Doomed From the Start
An anonymous reader writes "Despite backing from the Clinton Climate Initiative, and a $111 million investment from Subway Restaurant mogul Fred DeLuca, a planned city for Central Florida called 'Destiny' was doomed from the start, according to memos retrieved from Florida's Department of Community Affairs. According to state officials, despite a great deal of hype about Destiny, Florida, becoming the first fully sustainable city in the U.S., plans to build the city were rejected almost immediately due to concerns over 'possible urban sprawl, energy inefficient land use patterns, the endangerment of natural resources, and the undermining of agriculture.'"
The batshit insane goverment there killed it because it involved environmentalism.
Magical libertarian thinking knows no bounds.
A lot of things get killed when they get in the way of this industry. Wasn't long ago Florida officials would show up at your house and cut down your citrus trees because of "undermining of agriculture".
You had me at Florida.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
What is the difference between a man and a parasite? A man builds, a parasite asks, 'Where's my share?' A man creates, a parasite says, 'What will the neighbors think?' A man invents, a parasite says, 'Watch out, or you might tread on the toes of God...'
I'm good at Sim City. Obviously they hired the wrong guy for the job.
Am I the only one who first read the title as "America's First Eco-City: Domed From the Start"?
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The city should have been domed, then it might not have been doomed. With a domed city nobody can get away, then they have to stay and make it work, and the city isn't doomed.
It is the logic of SciFi, it is the logic of the future.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/crime-law/delray-beach-developer-anthony-pugliese-charged-wi/nSpp7/
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
EPCOT stands for "Experimental Planned Community of Tomorrow." It was supposed to be a town, not a theme park. Funny how these things go.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The problem with trying any renewable/conservation experiment in a "real-world" scenario is that almost every angle is now covered by regulation. Green Groups/EPA/Agriculture/Neighborhood Groups/etc, etc. It's getting to the point that the only real way to test theories in a real world scenario is to buy a big Island, build your infrastructure and pay a bunch of people to move there. I think Blofeld may be able to help fund this though.
"Destiny," that's up there with Why, Arizona, or Idiotville, Oregon. I mean, a fully sustainable community blazing a path to the glorious Green future shouldn't have a name that makes you think about putting dollar bills in G strings, mkay?
A liberal experiment in central planning failed. I'm shocked.
an ill wind that blows no good
Should have been named 'Fate'
They allowed politicians to be a part of the process. Politicians know NOTHING about land use, management, etc.. Your city planner is a complete and utter moron when it comes to the job they have, city planning.
None of the homes need to be larger than 850 sq foot. Making a city self sustaining is certainly possible if you do three things.
1 - gather all leaders into one place.
2 - Lock all of them in a big room with no windows.
3 - let scientists and engineers do all the planning based on real data and real designs.
Sadly most people are dumb as a box of rocks and believe they cant be happy without a 5500 sq foot mc mansion and at least 2 acres of Kentucky Bluegrass that requires 10 gallons per square yard a day in water. So eliminate the people as well, at least the dumb ones.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
City designs YOU!
This is utterly unsurprising. Intentional communities with "vision" almost always fail. Most 60s communes failed. Many colonies failed, and not just because they were attacked by natives. Modern planned communities do a bit better, mostly because they stick to patterns learned the hard way. They don't have the staying power that "organically grown" cities do. To grow a city you need water, transportation, and people that think it's a good place for a city. Sometimes you can take a marginal place and push it towards becoming a city. Washington DC is such a place. It had the river going for it, but that's about it. It was perfectly miserable when built, and still is; but air conditioning makes it bearable. The determination of the government augmented the river with rail and highway. People wanted to be there because the government was there.
So anyway, it's not surprising that some canned idea of a city put together by "visionaries" attempting to break the mold of urban development failed. That doesn't mean it's not interesting to try though. Think of it as a start-up.
Let's make that happen already.
That's for sure - you wouldn't catch me standing between Zimmerman and some vigilante hell bent on "justice"! Poor guy is gonna be wearing a bullet-proof vest for the next 10 years.
Florida? That bastion of progressive thinking?
Dome Alaska has been around for a couple of centuries.
rewriting history since 2109
Each and everyday I become more convinced of this argument.
I've been to the location where this was planned to go. There's nothing there. Nothing. The nearest "place" is Yeehaw Junction. Seriously, that's actually the name of something. It's small and a little scary. I stopped there to get gas once. The location for Destiny is very near Kissimmee Prairie preserve. There's a campground there that's a great place to go to do astronomy as the skies are nice and dark. But that's the only reason I would ever want to go to this campground. It's just miles of scrub pine. Looks like this : Kissimmee Prairie Preserve.
Trying to bootstrap a city in a location like this seems to be very difficult. The only reason someone would want to move to this location in the first place would be to get away from it all, which would preclude the type of people that would want to get in on the ground floor of a new city.
I for one welcome our new ecoterrorist overlords
It's interesting that this is the second story about a failed master planned eco-city in Florida this month.
Full disclosure: I work for Nextera Energy. Parent Company of Florida Power & Light which this story references.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
It didn't fail despite backing from the Clinton Climate Initiative, and a $111 million investment from Subway Restaurant mogul Fred DeLuca. It failed because of those things. It failed because there was no intrinsic market-based demand for a new city so once the seed funding dried up, nobody could be bothered pushing it past the inevitable government planning obstacles. It failed because federal governments cannot effectively plan at a local level. So bad are the feds at planning that they didn't plan to get an environmentally friendly city past their own environment commissars.
What on earth makes you think it's reasonable that humans would have NO impact on the environment?
Your metric is fucked up.
They dished out a bunch of taxpayer money to well-connected political donors, which was all that really mattered.
Every single thing has an effect on the environment. Should we rip out our volcanoes for their carbon emissions? And kill every fish that shits in the ocean? And what about that whole earth rotation thingy, you know, the one that made the temperature go from 80 degrees every day to 20. We should stop that, because it changes the environment. Oh, and if you killed yourself, you'd decay and change the environment. You'd breed deadly bacteria that could hurt an innocent wolf that tried to eat your corpse.
The goal, believe it or not, is not to preserve the environment in its current state. The goal is to alter the way that we live so that our impact on the environment is one such that our planet will be able to sustain us indefinitely. This doesn't mean nothing will ever change. There are these things called evolution, and plate tectonics, and a whole host of other things that cause our planet to change. Our goal isn't to preserve everything, but to ensure our continued survival with the limited resources we have. So the voluntary human extinction movement seems to be the very opposite of achieving that goal.
It looks like the primary problem was they had all kinds of big ideas, and utterly failed to hire anybody with any land-use planning or large-scale development experience to put them on paper in a language likely to be approved.
Just like computer people have their own language and lingo when dealing with technology, so do government land-use officials when reviewing development plans. If your plans don't cover what they expect them to cover, fail to counter objections the planner is likely to have, etc., your proposed development is probably not going to be approved, no matter how meritorious.
Stop, would you kindly? 'Would you kindly'... Powerful phrase. Familiar phrase? Sit, would you kindly? Stand, would you kindly? Run! Stop! Turn. A man chooses, a slave obeys. Kill! A man chooses! A slave obeys! OBEY!
I bet it was a real blast, too.
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"Sustainable" doesn't mean "has no impact on the environment". For example, breeding von Neumann machines and converting the entire non-stellar mass of the Solar System to a Dyson cloud is sustainable, but has a wee bit of an environmental impact.
You first.
"negative impact on the environment"
With such a non-definition, OF COURSE we (and every living organism and many non-animate processes) have a negative impact.
The only appropriate answer to that is - so?
That pretty much sums it up in a nutshell the corruption in the world. All the above problems are only likely if there is no management. I don't think anyone was claiming this city shouldn't be a smart city and or have a mayor. Indeed, I don't think a sustainable smart city would even be taken on as a project unless there was general agreement that it should be very efficient in terms of resource usage. The smart cities will come long after we're gone, when our overmasters have reduced the global population, presumably.
Batshit insane federal environmental program (read: crony capitalism) killed by slightly less insane local regulators.
'possible urban sprawl, energy inefficient land use patterns, the endangerment of natural resources, and the undermining of agriculture.'
What did you expect? It's a land development project in South Florida. There's a long, long history of scams in that industry.
Also, the location sucks. From the rather vague map on their web site, it's south of Kissamee and due east of Brandon. There's about here. That's Indian Lake Estates, which, as you can see from the aerials, was supposed to be a large development with 300 city blocks. About 5% of the lots have houses. There's one area where houses were built along small canals, but the canals all dead-end, so there's no flow and they'll stagnate. Here's a street view. Nearby are remnants of other failed developments, a defunct Air Force base, and a a few modest farms.
It doesn't look like "regulation" was the problem. More like "reality".
Any land development project in Florida contains at least one scam.
The headline implies that the concept itself was doomed, rather than that regional politics are blocking its implementation.
Each and everyday I become more convinced of this argument.
Well, if you're convinced, then I'm convinced. baa! baa!
The fact is that the natives who lived in the pacific northwest had successful land management practices. They had rules for who could fish where and how much, they set fires yearly when moving between their summer and winter grounds which kept down the brush including poison oak, and they were able to subsist primarily on hunting and gathering because their land management was so very successful and the land so rich. Predictably, ol' whitey fucked it all up for them. First he murdered them wholesale, notably in the form of the U.S. 1st. Cavalry killing every man, woman, and child on an island in the lake (one of the larger settlements) in revenge for deeds by a distinctly different band of Pomo. Then he destroyed their way of life by attrition, granting their land to others and then paying them a dollar per tree planted to rip out the oaks and install black walnut. You can't live on walnuts alone, but you can live on acorns.
The point here is that humans are capable of responsible land management, the problem is which humans are chosen to make the decisions. Baa! Baa!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm sure there are other examples around, but here's one from my home state, the Minnesota Experimental City. For those who are not intimately familiar with Minnesota geography, the proposed location was about 90 miles west of Duluth and about 3 hours north of the Twin Cities. Nothing there but a map dot called Swatara, trees, and a few dairy farms. That pipe dream started back in the '60s and eventually fizzled out in the late '70s.
Real progress is impossible in the United States. A multitude of groups all coincidentally work towards goals that conspire to cripple this country. So what ends up happening is the government equivalent of spinning wheels. They'll dump millions of dollars into the least impactful project they can find so that they can pander to their constituents. Meanwhile, corruption at the municipal level, especially in struggling cities, ensures that development projects still get rammed through, but because there was no proper planning they often end up causing more problems than they solve.
Don't forget Florida's extremely conservative government. Doomed from the start only because they wanted to build it somewhere governed by the energy companies they're looking to put out of business.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiTM2HQ0g98
Have gnu, will travel.
So we are talking about taking a suburb of Orlando and creating a city bigger than Orlando around it. The ecosystem is very fragile, the infrastructure would have to be largely built from scratch, and at that point in time the politics in the area were at best semi-feudal. Come from the right family or know the right people and things are much easier to get done. This project was ambitious, but look at another one called Palm Coast which was also ambitious and you will see that there were empty streets for *years*. Although this area is now much more developed, it was possible to explore whole neighborhoods that had paved streets and infrastructure but no houses! Yes, I think a project like this was doomed form the start, but largely because of the local political environment and need to build basic city support.
"....plans to build the city were rejected almost immediately due to concerns over 'possible urban sprawl, energy inefficient land use patterns, the endangerment of natural resources, and the undermining of agriculture.'"
Isn't that the problem with every city?
Name a European planned city that exists where no previous village/town/population center already existed.
Its quite one thing to re-build on a site that has already proven itself conducive to settlement (close to a ford, river junctions, or more recently rail lines, highways, etc - essentially established trade routes) and quite another thing to design, plan and build a city where pretty much no one lives and expect people to move there.
The whole "build it and they will come" thingy is a childishly ridiculous phrase that is far more often wrong than right.
Sorry, but the first one was Arcosanti, in central AZ. Also a failure.