Coral Gables Environment, Politics and Government
July 19, 2010 Leave a comment
…is a disaster. In the middle of a detailed presentation by a lawyer representing neighborhood interests against a charter school, a Spanish language news program was broadcast simultaneously. What a shame and what incompetence.
July 19, 2010 Leave a comment
I decided to walk around the 100 and 200 blocks of Miracle Mile today. I was taken back at the sad shape of the patch worked sidewalks, broken walks, discolored transitions to store fronts, a feeling of dirty storefronts, many closed businesses. There were one or two two new businesses “opening soon” (I guess they are new to the City’s permitting procedures). One may wonder how the new businesses will do with the crumby look of the city.
I compare Coral Gables to a walk around I had in Washington, D.C. and Chevy Chase, MD where one was struck by the culture of organization, cleanliness and a feeling of invitation into stores and businesses (although there were clear signs of the Great Recession). Coral Gables has a long ways to go to bring the City up to national standards even though the City Managers claims this is the best place in the country. We may excuse him for this hyperbole.
July 19, 2010 Leave a comment
According to Paul Krugman, Obama will pay the price of playing politics with the stimulus package:
The best way for Mr. Obama to have avoided an electoral setback this fall would have been enacting a stimulus that matched the scale of the economic crisis. Obviously, he didn’t do that. Maybe he couldn’t have passed an adequate-sized plan, but the fact is that he didn’t even try. True, senior economic officials reportedly downplayed the need for a really big effort, in effect overruling their staff; but it’s also clear that political advisers believed that a smaller package would get more friendly headlines, and that the administration would look better if it won its first big Congressional test.
In short, it looks as if the administration itself was taken in by the pundit delusion, focusing on how its policies would play in the news rather than on their actual impact on the economy.
Taxpayers in Coral Gables will pay the price for the Commissioners believing in the real estate optimism (called marketing) that the Coral Gables economy will come back in the next year, or so. The “or so” is the most likely, and trained observes say that it will not take months, but years, for the economy to come back. There is nothing special about Coral Gables that makes it exceptional.
Hence the Commissioners should push for a bigger budget tightening than they are doing now to fit with the new culture of austerity.
July 19, 2010 Leave a comment
I cite here a recent post in the Economist that shows how long it might take for the US economy to return to full employment. You may read it there but the numbers are not encouraging.
And at the rates generally experienced over the past two decades, full employment would seem to be somewhere between 5 years and more than 10 years away.
…it could be 5 to 8 years before banks sell off their entire stock of foreclosed upon housing inventory.
…we have a problem here beyond the sheer pain of the slow expected recovery—this recovery might run headlong into the next recession.
If I had anything to recommend to the Commissioners of the City of Coral Gables is to expect many months and years of economic stagnation, little or no real estate investments and taxpayers too burdened by the pattern of year-by-year property tax and fee increases.
It is time for real austerity, if this is surely proven by the Biltmore Hotel situation and persistent declining property values.
Coral Gables Watch 