Miami, the not so magic city

MIAMI – Hellish traffic. Public transportation: a bad joke. Green spaces? Few and far between, and some of those built on top of toxic waste. Streets safe for pedestrians and cyclists? Not here. Sight lines that give everyone a view of the city’s signature natural feature, the bay, the ocean? Dream on.

Think instead of condo canyons, massive high-rises that block the view of the water: ocean, bay, even Indian Creek. Even rich people who thought they had bought a view of the ocean watch to their dismay when an even more massive building goes up across the street, blotting out their precious and pricey view.

Miami, the Magic City. People here have diverse reactions to all this. The glass half-full people talk about the weather or the existence of worse places and say this is paradise. We never have to shovel snow, unlike folks in the Northeast and the Midwest. Los Angeles, Mexico City, Caracas have worse traffic. Northern California and the Pacific Northwest are gloomy with year-round grey skies and constant drizzle. Arizona is white-hot.

Others just shrug, or grin and bear it. Some get mad and take it out on other drivers or other race/ethnic groups. A few try to change things, work to make a better city, but most of the political/economic cards are stacked against them, their efforts often are pathetically modest and/or their perspective too narrow. In some cases, solutions implemented are selfish and counterproductive, like building a wall around an old neighborhood smack in the middle of the metropolitan area. Fear of the outsider drives such feudal delusions, but they are deadly to any sense of community.

Yet, despite such ironies, those who dream of a much more livable Miami are right. Another city is thinkable, even possible, even real. Cities like that actually do exist, all over the world, even in North America.

Food and every other kind of consumer goods are scarce in Havana, but the city does not and has never turned its back to the sea. Sight lines to the sea are everywhere, and then there is the glorious Malecόn, an endless seascape.

This has nothing to do with socialism. Santo Domingo also has its Malecόn, albeit a more modest version than Havana’s. Where, oh where, is Miami’s Malecόn? Nowhere. The view of the water has been privatized, monopolized, denied most people.

You don’t have to look south to find a radically different vision of what a city should be. Vancouver is the city in North America that comes closest to being Miami’s polar opposite. I don’t mean the weather, either. Vancouver’s is rainy but the temperatures are relatively mild. I don’t mean geographically, either, although Miami is the biggest city in the southeast of the United States and Vancouver is the largest metropolis in North America’s northwest. The larger point is that both are major, racially diverse cities. So we have that in common. With big cities tend to come big headaches. Yet somehow Vancouver has managed to avoid most of the headaches whereas Miami often feels like one gigantic migraine.

What has Vancouver gotten right that Miami has gotten wrong? Short answer: almost everything. Slightly longer answer: Vancouver has “no freeways breaking up the core city and few big-box superstores clogging up its arteries. And there’s a pronounced emphasis on expansive public space and sight lines – turn a corner in Vancouver and you’ll probably see the ocean or mountains, or both – and dedicated bikeways and pedestrian paths skirt every beach.”

Sound anything like Miami? Not exactly.

Just a couple of days ago, a court challenge against the building of a Walmart megastore in Midtown was thrown out. Talk about big box stores clogging the arteries, and not just the transit ones. The gigantic store will mean a fatal heart attack for at least some of the smaller businesses that contribute to whatever charm the area has only recently managed to acquire.

The magic word in the magic city is development, which here means not human development as the UN defines it but extracting the most money from whatever piece of land one owns or manages to acquire. Thus this city turns its back not only on the sea but also on its own minute slices of history and the fragile communities that emerge in places imbued with that history.

For instance, out of iconic watering holes – places where the locals hang out, where everybody knows your name and, which for that very reason, savvy tourists who want to experience “the real Miami” eagerly seek out – represent a form of community. Just this year, arguably the two most notable – Tobacco Road, which received the first liquor license from the newly coined city of Miami in the early twentieth century, and Fox’s, which has been in continuous operation since 1946 – succumbed to the magic word.

Yes, some prominent business and political honchos have begun to realize there is something rotten at the core here. According to a letter written by one of them that appeared in the Miami Herald, fifty-three big wheels went to Denver to learn why that city repeatedly receives top marks on quality of life. From the visit, which consisted of a 12-hour “whirlwind” stay, “the most profound takeaway is how transit improvements enhanced the livability and ‘sense of place’ for Denver communities from the urban core to the far suburbs.”

A fine lesson, but really? Twelve hours to learn to undo decades of following the wrong path? Are these guys and women serious? Twelve hours doesn’t count as a course even for the fly-by-night colleges proliferating faster than the python population of the Everglades.

Sure, lots of things could be incrementally improved, and some of that is taking place. The bike lines on the way to Key Biscayne, for instance, will probably reduce the carnage. But Miami needs a more fundamental change, a radical fix.

Is that even possible given the enormous institutionalized power of the forces hell-bent on following the same old route? One part of me, the reasoning side, thinks no. The other side, the affective one, feels yes. Because, after all, Miami is home.