Underline is more than a park. It’s just what Miami needs | Opinion

We spend a lot of time talking about how Miami wants to be the city of the future. Every once in a while, we even act like it.

Let’s talk about The Underline. The second phase of the 10-mile-long strip of a park — transforming unused land beneath the elevated Metrorail tracks into a multi-use community space and bike trail — opened this week. It’s a sophisticated and smart use of public land in a place not always known for that. It’s a feat of determination and ingenuity and years of sustained focus, something else we’re not always known for here, in quick-fix, shiny-new-object South Florida.

Sure, it cost a lot (an estimated $140 million in federal, state, local and private funds) and suffered from delays at times. (Construction began in fall 2021.) There’s one more stretch to be completed next year or in early 2026: seven miles through Coconut Grove, Coral Gables and South Miami.

But this park is the kind of thing we need more of, from the city, Miami-Dade County, the philanthropic community, our leaders and even our residents. We need more public-private partnerships and more creative use of space to help bring us together to form a real community. We need places for people to walk and bike safely, and to meet their neighbors, and to connect them — via a walking path or bike lane — to other parts of this vast county. In a fractured place like South Florida, amid the nation’s divisive political landscape, that physical and social connection is more important than ever before.

As Friends of The Underline founder Meg Daly told us, we need places that make us feel like our neighborhoods after a hurricane — that moment after the worst has passed, when the social barriers come down and we emerge into the altered world, stand in the street or parking lot, talk to each other, share food and become, for a while, a community.

South Florida is becoming a more vertical place. We have more high-rises, more density, more people in less space — and that’s going to keep happening. To handle that, we have to work on a number of issues, notably, creating a better transportation system and promoting alternative ways to get around. Linear parks with bike lanes that connect across the county can help.

Also, we need to factor in more green space, spots where people can walk or ride and see each other in real life and just breathe, amid nature. The Underline is planted with native trees and shrubs that screen it from the road and provide habitat for monarchs and other butterflies. We need places like this that contribute to our quality of life — not simply to bring people and businesses here, but to keep them.

South Florida and Florida in general have always been subject to short-timer syndrome. People flock here but, often, this isn’t “home.” It should be. Places like The Underline — and the Underdeck, another linear park to be built in Overtown beneath I-395 after a span is rebuilt and elevated — can help. They can offer us a chance to feel good about being here, and about staying here.

And not just for a job — although competitive wages are incredibly important — but because we actually like living here.

The idea of the Underline isn’t new. It’s part of a larger push to reclaim old industrial spaces for communities, with The High Line in New York City as perhaps the best known example. A decrepit elevated train track was turned into a breezy park that overlooks the lower end of Manhattan. It was wildly successful. Many communities took note.

As Daly told the Editorial Board, this sort of thing can create economic benefits, too, bringing more people to areas that were overlooked or fell out of fashion.

The Underline is more than a park. It’s what we need if we really are truly building a city to live in today and into the future.

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