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© St. Petersburg Times, published December 18, 2002
An important question was left unanswered at the conclusion of the countywide Redevelopment Opportunities Summit in Clearwater on Friday: Will Pinellas County residents accept the changes that redevelopment may bring?
And if they don't, how quickly will loss of jobs and neighborhood decline follow?
There wasn't a lot of good news at the two-day summit, organized to put the subject of Pinellas County's looming need for redevelopment before public officials and residents.
Speakers noted that only small pockets of "greenfield," or vacant land, remain available for development here, and they estimate that by 2006, all of it will be gone. Also, many of the commercial and industrial buildings and homes are more than 40 years old and are reaching the end of their life span.
"Obviously, we have turned the corner toward redevelopment," said David Healey, executive director of the Pinellas Planning Council and one of the public officials who helped plan the summit.
William Fruth, an economic and business consultant from Palm City, sounded the alarm about what buildout does to a community. If aging buildings and homes are not renovated or replaced, they become shabby. The thriving businesses or well-heeled families that once occupied them move away to more prosperous communities, where they can build or buy newer digs. Businesses paying lower wages and residents with fewer resources move in, driving down property values and shrinking the local economy. Eventually, even they leave, and population decline sets in.
Look around Pinellas and you will see that in some places, this has begun.
Fruth has studied two counties where that scenario led to trouble. Lucas County, Ohio, and Denver County, Colo., reached buildout about 20 years ago, he said. With no more room to expand, companies began leaving. Lucas County lost 20,000 manufacturing jobs; many homes and buildings were left empty. Denver County has empty industrial buildings, abandoned neighborhoods and a higher crime rate, Fruth said.
At the summit, one speaker after another forecast those outcomes for Pinellas County, the first Florida county to reach buildout, unless a strategy is developed to prevent it and move us en masse to the next stage: redevelopment.
County officials are trying to start the conversation about that. They organized the summit, sending out hundreds of invitations to Pinellas elected officials, city managers and planners, business owners and neighborhood associations. Also, the Planning Council and the Pinellas County Economic Development Department hired a consulting firm to study how to promote discussion of redevelopment and nudge the county to create a new set of rules and goals for the redevelopment era.
The conversation at the summit was one-sided, as a parade of speakers who make their living from the development business told city and county officials what policy changes they must make to attract new businesses and home builders. In a nutshell, they want faster approval of projects and they want financial incentives.
The easier and cheaper it is to build here, they said, the more likely that Pinellas will be able to compete with the thousands of economic development groups in other states vying to attract high-wage businesses and clean industries.
People who earn a good living want nice housing and can afford to keep up their properties. People with money also want lots of goods and services, which helps diversify the local economy and keep it humming.
Few residents attended the summit. Perhaps they don't yet grasp how redevelopment could affect their lives. For example, it generally is more expensive to build on an already developed parcel than on a bare one. The old building must be knocked down, utilities torn out of the ground and replaced with modern materials, new building codes must be met, etc. Developers want to cut costs or improve their profits in these situations. They either look to government to reduce the cost of building -- perhaps by giving them a tax credit or waiving impact fees -- or they want to build more on the property than was there before. That often means taller buildings or more density.
Developers also want a streamlined process for getting project approvals, including less paperwork, fewer or no public hearings and fewer limitations on what they may build.
Consider all that, and it's easy to see why people who live in Pinellas need to join this conversation about a redevelopment plan.
Some residents who observed the summit Thursday and Friday wondered why there was so little talk about protecting the environment, preserving neighborhoods and improving what they consider the quality of life. After all, for many years the philosophy has been that if you maintain a pleasant and stable community, people and businesses will come.
It doesn't work that way anymore, to hear the development industry talk. There is too much competition for jobs and for the few businesses that are expanding in today's market, and they care about their bottom line, not about how many trees a city has or whether there is a nice mall nearby. Besides, some summit speakers said, if a community has plenty of great, high-paying jobs, the quality of life will follow.
Will Pinellas residents buy that? Will they accept, or even understand, that they may have to give up something to keep Pinellas County's economy healthy in the decades ahead? Will they tolerate taller buildings, stores near their subdivisions, a manufacturing plant where a neighborhood shopping center once stood, or will they demand that their elected officials keep things just the way they are?
One hundred years ago, Pinellas County was covered with farmland and pastures. It had only a couple hundred homes. Today, it is a fully developed, urban county with almost 1-million people.
Nothing stays the same. In the next 100 years, Pinellas will recycle itself. Will our children and grandchildren find opportunity here, or will they have moved away from a place that time passed by?
What will Pinellas look like in the year 2102? It is time to begin figuring that out.
-- Diane Steinle is editor of editorials for North Pinellas editions of the Times.