Ten years in the past, Fort Myers was a midsized Florida metropolis with desires of getting larger, maybe changing into the “Second City” of the japanese Gulf Coast, behind Tampa.
Things have been going high quality till Hurricane Ian arrived final month, destroying tens of hundreds of properties and companies throughout Florida, with statewide property losses now estimated as excessive as $70 billion, in keeping with the catastrophe analytics agency CoreLogic.
In Lee County, which encompasses Fort Myers, officers say the Category 4 storm destroyed greater than 5,000 properties and broken 27,000, with projected losses of practically $6 billion. An extra 18,000 properties and properties have been affected by Ian, leading to $812 million extra in losses, in keeping with an online dashboard maintained by the county.
Yet on Tuesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis discovered a silver lining within the grim actuality. New growth, he stated, was making the Fort Myers space extra resilient to storms.
“You look at some of these subdivisions here in Lee County,” DeSantis stated throughout a press convention in Fort Myers to tout the start of rebuilding efforts on close by Sanibel Island. “Granted they got flooded, which is bad, but you didn’t see mass subdivisions of new construction just reduced to rubble. So, I think that’s something that’s really significant.”
Others, nonetheless, see a unique image.
Could the area have been spared among the harm with extra aggressive planning and zoning? “Yes,” planners and resilience consultants say. Sound land use planning builds stronger communities — bodily, socially and politically.
Yet Florida lawmakers successfully killed the state’s skill to examine city sprawl a decade in the past with the passage of a reform measure known as the 2011 Community Planning Act.
The law, handed by a Republican-controlled legislature with help from then-Gov. Rick Scott, rolled again a lot of Florida’s 1985 Growth Management Act, which for 25 years gave the state oversight and enforcement duties to make sure Florida cities and counties averted unplanned, unwise growth.
It additionally cleared a path for Scott’s dismantling of the Florida Department of Community Affairs, which was answerable for imposing the Growth Management Act and, amongst different issues, “plan[ning] for and respond[ing] to both natural and manmade disasters.”
“Essentially, we removed aggressive state oversight of comprehensive planning,” Whit Blanton, president-elect of the American Planning Association’s Florida chapter and govt director of Forward Pinellas, a public company guiding planning and zoning for twenty-four cities north and west of Tampa Bay, stated in a phone interview final week. “Nobody was minding the store anymore except the local officials. And while the local governments by and large are pretty good in Florida, there’s no backstop anymore.”
In truth, the taking part in subject throughout a lot of Florida is extensive open, consultants say, as builders flex their political muscle with mayors, councils and native planning commissions to construct subdivisions on what was as soon as thought of marginal land. In southwestern Florida, which means wetlands, farms or the fringes of conservation areas buffering the Everglades.
“You just had massive migration into these areas, and a lot of it happened after 2011,” Blanton stated. Under the brand new state coverage, “most of the oversight went away, and there was a shift to tell local governments they were on their own. So instead of doing more visioning and finding out what the community wanted, there was less.”
Jesse Keenan, an affiliate professor of sustainable actual property at Tulane University’s School of Architecture who has studied Florida growth patterns, stated southwestern Florida has greater than merely sprawled.
“There has been the creation of entire new towns that are on the northern frontier of the Everglades,” he stated.
Ave Maria, for instance, about 40 miles southeast of Fort Myers and simply north of Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, is among the latest census-designated locations in Florida. The master-planned city was established as the location of a Catholic faculty, Ave Maria University, in 2007, and at present boasts a inhabitants of greater than 6,200.
Ave Maria noticed solely minor harm from Ian, officers stated, and final week the city’s Facebook web page included the next reassurance: “We are happy to inform all builder sales centers are open during their regular business hours. Please reach out with any questions.”
The same theme is taking part in out in once-sleepy Fort Myers, although at a a lot bigger scale. If development tendencies proceed, town ought to surpass the 100,000 inhabitants mark earlier than 2030, constructing upon the 30,000 new residents that settled in Fort Myers between 2010 and 2020 decade, a 24 % enhance.
With inhabitants development, housing demand additionally has soared. Since 2000, town noticed 27,000 new properties constructed, largely alongside its japanese and southern flanks, in keeping with metropolis financial growth knowledge.
Yet with each subdivision platted and constructed, the chance of property losses from hurricanes rises, a degree Ian made abundantly clear.
It stays much less clear, nonetheless, whether or not the storm’s monumental harm would reshape native views towards growth and storm threat in locations like Lee County. And even sturdy planning and zoning laws received’t avoid wasting areas from climate-charged storms.
“There’s a strong environmental ethic down there in those counties, but they’re also very conservative politically and anti-regulation,” Blanton stated. “They tend to be very favorable toward growth and development. It’s been that way a long time.”