Blame political climate for our ailing paradise
Posted on Tue, Jul. 15, 2008
BY FRED GRIMM
Our original Time magazine obit was bloodier.
''So many bodies now fill the Miami morgue that Dade County Medical Examiner Joe Davis has rented a refrigerated hamburger van to house the overflow.'' Time filched that tidbit from The Miami Herald in the magazine's previous lament for a paradise spoiled.
We suffered all manner of civic failings, but what was killing South Florida, Time suggested 27 years ago, was South Floridians killing one another. Miami was America's murder capital in 1981. Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach were all ranked in the top 10 of the nation's most crime-ridden cities.
The current issue of Time dredges up the 1981 catchphrase Trouble in Paradise, but at least Florida's latest maladies don't include a shortage of morgue space. In retrospect, the bloody crime spree back in 1980 and 1981 only diverted attention from the fundamental flaw in paradise -- Florida's boom-bust business plan. Read this paragraph and guess whether it was taken from Time circa 1981 or 2008:
BOOM AND BUST
``The area's real estate boom, which doubled the price of an average one-family house between XXXX and XXXX, has virtually stopped dead. Even the environment, long the region's most attractive asset, is showing signs of wear. Decades of economic growth threaten to outstrip the water supply; water is occasionally rationed in some parts of the area.''
The missing dates are 1978 and 1980 -- the boom and the bust years before the next boom and bust cycle before the boom of 2006 before the bust of 2008.
Time, in 1981, seemed particularly worried about the flood of immigrants and South Florida's fast-changing demographics. (''Perhaps the saddest dilemma facing South Florida is the plight of the refugees from Haiti.'') Turns out that neither mass immigration nor a crime wave undid paradise. The population of South Florida doubled over the next 27 years. The suburbs boomed. The skyline went crazy.
The era's outlandish drug smugglers got a lot of ink in the original article -- the way they laundered dope money in local banks, spent millions on cars and jewelry and paid cash for waterfront mansions. Re-reading the story in 2008, after the one-time murder capital evolved into the nation's foreclosure capital, local economists must feel a tinge of nostalgia -- at least the rogues paid cash.
Time's 2008 version was as preoccupied with real estate speculators and the subprime mess as the 1981 article worried over cocaine cowboys and crime. But the modern piece, written by Miami Beach author Michael Grunwald, gets at Florida's longtime failure to solve crises with water, schools, insurance, taxes, the environment.
THE SAME PROBLEMS
Read both stories and you wonder why the same crippling problems persist in Florida. Go back to the original to find the answer.
The first story created a storm of local reaction -- anger, denial, even a bit of introspection. But hardly anyone paid much attention to a quote deep in the story from Dan Paul, Miami's great civic reformer. Twenty-seven years later, Paul's rhetorical question reads like a warning bell that never stopped ringing. He asked, ``How do you deal with these issues in a political climate that demands instant gratification?''
Until Paul's question gets resolved, Time magazine will have an endless opportunity to rediscover trouble in paradise.
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