(NOTE: Grove resident, Tom Boyce, wrote this important letter published in the Miami Herald yesterday.)
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The readers’ forum
Grove residents want more opens space
The challenge for American city planners and landscape architects
developing a new crop of river and other waterfront development
projects, and even parks like NYC Skyline Park, is to create open spaces
that will draw city dwellers to underutilized low-density areas that
have been marginalized by development geared toward industry, cars and
consumers. To meet these goals they often have to add expensive,
artificial, engineered open space.
What Miami commissioners are doing,
building on what city-owned open space that is left, is exactly the
opposite.
In Coconut Grove, like most of Miami, there is a high
density area pushing right up to privately owned waterfront that is
largely inaccessible for the majority of residents. What many residents
need, and most want for the few city-owned open spaces left, is access
to the waterfront and more open spaces in Miami, not more retail
opportunities under parking garages that can be anywhere. We don’t need
more expensive restaurants, or cheap chains like the ones at Bayside
that cater to tourists.
We want places with authenticity and soul
that capture the essence of the Grove, not expensive chain steak houses
that can already be found elsewhere in our community.
As professional yacht captains, my wife and I are all for boater
access and world-class destination marinas, but the marinas and most
yacht clubs are only able to be utilized by high-income citizens. These
facilities block access to the bay for most of the city waterfront in
Coconut Grove.
Miami city planners and officials who have the
well being of their entire constituency at stake would scale back the
proposed restaurants for Coconut Grove waterfront to replace and upgrade
what was there. There is certainly no need to expand the offering from
two restaurants to four, which apparently creates the need for more
parking just to attract more income for the city’s parking authority
which must also take on more debt to pay for it.
Instead of
selling off the citizens’ long-term rights to parks and open space for a
short-term goal of balancing the budget, turn the underutilized surface
parking into open park space. This is the essence of what Coconut Grove
residents thought we were getting after all the workshops held over the
last three years or so. Unfortunately the elitist, profit-driven
development that has left Miami with so little open space has found no
counterpoint in our elected officials.
Tom Boyce,
Coconut Grove
I was riding my bike through the Coconut Grove Convention Center and saw an exciting, new sculpture in the distance.
