Miami-Dade’s fight over farming, ‘agrihoods’ and the Everglades: A look at impacts

Miami-Dade County’s latest growth controversy involves a new trend in development: ‘agrihoods,’ the term for residential communities centered on farmland.

A Coral Gables developer wants to change county rules on developing farmland to allow for agrihoods, with lodging and restaurants in communities where 30% of the property would be reserved for farming. The county’s mayor, Daniella Levine Cava, opposes the plan, calling it a backdoor into converting farms into suburban subdivisions and eroding Miami-Dade’s agricultural industry.

Here is a quick look at some of the controversies surrounding the proposal:

▪ Environmental concerns: The proposal would allow residential and commercial developments outside the Urban Development Boundary, a planning buffer that divides the Everglades and some wetlands from Miami-Dade’s suburbs. The Hold the Line Coalition calls the changes a way to make the development boundary obsolete. The legal team behind developer Rishi Kapoor calls the argument misleading because residential development is already allowed on agricultural land outside the UDB.

▪ Damage to agriculture: The proposed agrihood rules reserve 30% of a project’s acreage to farming, while Miami-Dade’s planning staff recommends requiring 80% still be used for agriculture.

By allowing a relatively small footprint for farming, Miami-Dade could see “the loss of ‘economies of scale’ currently enjoyed by the agricultural industry and its support services and undermine the industry’s economic viability,” county planning staff wrote in a November report.

The development team counters the changes would help farming survive by discouraging slow transformation of farmland into the five-acre residential lots already allowed under county rules.

▪ Suburban sprawl: The UDB is designed to keep residential and commercial developments closer to urban centers in order to reduce infrastructure costs and mitigate traffic. In a memo to county commissioners Wednesday, Levine Cava said the proposal would let developers “leapfrog” into areas well outside the UDB with mixed-used developments currently not allowed under county rules.

In a presentation to a county planning board in December, the development team called the administration “dismissive” of the agrihood concept while over-hyping the effect of “combining current residential densities with a modest expansion of ancillary agritourism activities“ such as bed-and-breakfast lodging facilities and farm-to-table restaurants.

This story was originally published January 18, 2023 at 7:43 PM.