Development Pressures In Central Florida — EATING FLORIDA

Here’s a question or two for inquisitive Readers, especially for those who are convinced that existing or future technology holds the answers to our environmental problems. What will our world be like when all the unspoiled, “natural” places have disappeared? When that happens will we be able to go outdoors and find places that fill us with awe and reverence? Consider a related problem. Is it possible to save the few remaining relatively natural places like the 875 square-mile Green Swamp and the Everglades from being altered beyond recognition by urban-related development? This section is a good place to skip the bullshit, lay the cards on the table, and talk about the realities of human occupance and population growth in Florida. What urban planners love to call development pressures.

Everyone who reads newspapers and magazines or watches TV has to know that for the past several decades Florida has been one of the fastest growing states in terms of human population. From 1950 to 2010, Florida’s population grew over 577 percent. That’s not a misprint; a population growth rate of almost 580 percent in 60 years or slightly less than ten percent each decade. That growth has occurred by adding residents from other states and countries rather than by an explosion of births over deaths.

A population influx of that dimension inevitably takes an enormous toll on the landscape. New residents, whether permanent or seasonal, have real-life needs that have to be met. Homes, jobs, food, water and sewer, utilities, roads, schools, libraries, medical care and hospitals, shopping, places of worship, entertainment, recreation, support services, etc., etc. I mean, what’s life without being able to hop into the car and drive to yet another squat an’ gobble fast food joint or one tasteless strip center after the other, all featuring the same depressing mix of second- and third-tier retail stores? Those human needs generate tremendous demands to convert what real estate agents call “raw” land, or simply “dirt,” into new cities, towns, subdivisions, and commercial strip centers, creating communities that are supposedly tailored to meet the needs of all groups in the economic and social spectrum but that destroy the environments in which they are built. What I’m talking about is that complex and ever fascinating process we call human occupance. Which brings us squarely back to the 600,000 acre region that is the Green Swamp.

The special character of the Green Swamp starts with its geological distinctiveness. Lying beneath the land surface, and occasionally outcropping at the surface, is the Suwannee Formation, which is basically a large limestone plateau that forms the top of the Floridan Aquifer. The highest point of the Aquifer, known as the Green Swamp High or Central Florida Ridge, is located in the vicinity of Interstate 4 and U.S. 27. Owing to its relatively high elevation, 132 feet above mean sea level, the water collected in the Swamp recharges and provides a hydrostatic head to the subsurface Floridan Aquifer, pushing fresh water from central Florida out to the Gulf of Mexico, Florida Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean through a complex web of five major rivers and numerous lakes, ponds, seeps, and wetlands. As a result of that higher elevation, lands around the Swamp contain the highest groundwater levels in peninsular Florida, levels that both protect and replenish the Floridan Aquifer and prevent saltwater intrusion in the heavily populated coastal areas.

It is no exaggeration to say that the Green Swamp constitutes the environmental heart of central and south-central Florida. This complex assembly of wetlands and uplands lies smack in the middle of the triangle formed by Interstate 75, Interstate 4, and Florida’s Turnpike. The Green Swamp shelters nearly 500 species of vascular plants, 330 wildlife species, almost 40 percent of Florida’s native vertebrate species, and more than 30 rare or endangered species, including the black bear and the always elusive and almost impossible to spot Florida panther. As an added attraction, about ten percent of the endangered wood storks remaining in Florida nest in the Green Swamp, but only when breeding conditions are favorable. That extraordinary wetland, which is actually a mosaic of gently rolling uplands, seasonally wet prairies, hardwood forests, sandhills, and pine flatwoods intermixed with a variety of wetland types including wooded swamps and open water lakes and marshes and is, without question, one of the most important environments in the entire State. Even more remarkable is the astounding fact that it survives today even in a partially natural condition.

Partially natural means that the Green Swamp wetlands were altered to make transportation to and on the Withlacoochee River easier and to drain land for development. Those drainage efforts included digging ditches and canals as well as channelizing various streams, all of which reduced the size and viability of the natural ecosystems to make timber harvesting, grazing, strip mining, and agriculture profitable. In the past several environmental consultants noted “water levels were much higher than present” and draining has caused “changes in regional hydrology and vegetative patterns.” Most likely the extent of open water lakes in the northeast section of the Swamp was considerably greater in the past with higher water levels.

The changes introduced via human occupance in the 20th Century included timbering of baldcypress and pine, establishment of pine plantations, grazing, citrus groves, agriculture, and mining sand, limestone, and peat. Those activities required substantial drainage to permanently lower the water table and a network of paved and unpaved roads and rail trams. Those adverse effects are still in place today and continue to negatively affect the Green Swamp.

The retention of water at the surface for extended periods in the Green Swamp provides three critical environmental benefits to central and southern Florida. First, that retention adds enormous quantities of moisture to the atmosphere in the form of water vapor. Second, the Swamp reduces the threat of downstream flooding by holding surface water in natural basins and releasing it slowly. And third, as mentioned above, the Swamp’s water-retention capabilities facilitate the slow percolation of surface water into the underlying Floridan Aquifer. The resulting all-important pressure head allows the Floridan Aquifer to flow as a natural artesian system and to serve as the source of the greater majority of central and southern Florida’s potable water supply. And that is an extraordinary critical element if people want to continue to live in those parts of the State.

As a result of the direct interconnection of surface and groundwater systems over much of the Green Swamp, protection of surface waters amounts to protection of the groundwater supply, since in the Swamp they are, for all practical purposes, one and the same. From a natural resource perspective, the primary challenges for groundwater protection in the Green Swamp revolve around two issues. First, the limitation of water consumption/use to ensure the health of the many and varied wetlands. And second, the protection of the existing relatively high-quality water that recharges the Floridan Aquifer. It should be obvious that even relatively clustered suburban-type development and the resulting habitat alteration and destruction constitute critical threats to the Green Swamp, the Floridan Aquifer, and, by extension, to the continued health and well-being of central and south Florida.

The Green Swamp not only functions as an enormous natural flood retention system but it also discharges some 75 percent of its water into the atmosphere via the intricacies of evapotranspiration. That means the far greater majority of Green Swamp’s water either evaporates directly to the skies or is taken up by vegetation and the resulting water vapor is transpired (breathed) by the plants into the air. Many ecologically-challenged people (especially but not only civil engineers, realtors, and land developers) might conclude that all that water is simply wasted. In other words, they believe that it is completely lost to more productive human use. Those people, who frequently lack the ability to understand the interconnectivity of the biogeophysical world with human occupance, rack their brains to identify far more efficient ways to use the land and the precious water now being “lost” through evapotranspiration. Meaning, they are determined to find ways to use that water, develop the land, and deposit the considerable economic returns directly in their pockets.

But that conclusion would be an error of monumental proportions to Florida’s future. If the atmosphere over central and southern Florida were not cooled by that enormous rate of evapotranspiration, the climate would quickly become much hotter and drier than it is today. And that enormous change would critically affect all human activities in central and south Florida. Agriculture and urban-oriented land uses as well as such natural functions as aquifer recharge would be drastically altered. Even though the specific meteorological mechanics remain poorly understood, what is certain is that local sources of evapotranspiration directly and indirectly moderate the weather and climate of all central and large parts of southern Florida. Drastic or even moderate changes to the Green Swamp microclimate would without doubt trigger significant, critical, and persistent weather and climatic changes over half the State’s land mass. Over the short-, mid-, and long-terms, none of those changes would be advantageous or beneficial to any party. Not even to myopic developers and real estate companies desperate to turn a buck, no matter what horrific and persistent damage they are willing and eager to do to a specific environment.

The more than 875-square mile Green Swamp is the source of five major rivers: the Withlacoochee (not to be confused with the river of the same name that rises in southern Georgia and joins the Suwannee River in northern Florida near Live Oak), Peace, Kissimmee, Hillsborough, and the Ocklawaha. All five provide wonderful canoeing and floating opportunities, especially the Ocklawaha, which is my personal favorite. The interrelated river systems of the Green Swamp almost certainly rank second only to the Kissimmee-Okeechobee-Everglades-Big Cypress Basin and ahead of the Apalachicola River/Bay system in terms of hydrologic and environmental significance to the entire State. As an extra added attraction, literally hundreds of lakes are sprinkled throughout the Green Swamp, the most prominent of which is Lake Tsala Apopka and the most infamous is the horrifically polluted Lake Apopka.

It should come as no surprise to those who keep a watchful eye on how we treat wetlands here in the U.S. that the first government purchase of land in the Green Swamp in 1961 was intended as the initial piece in a regional flood control program proposed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and sponsored by the Southwest Florida Water Management District (SWFWMD). A system of levees and water control structures known as the Four River Basins Project was intended to reduce flooding in the Tampa Bay metropolitan area. Although the various project purposes authorized by Congress included flood control, only a few structural works were completed — Tampa Bypass Canal, Lower Hillsborough Flood Detention Area, Lake Tsala Apopka Outlet Works, Lake Tarpon Outlet Works, Lake Griffin Outlet Works, and Masaryktown Canal. Lucky for the health of the Green Swamp, the Project was finally declared inactive in 1984 and the SWFWMD adopted a non-structural approach to flood protection and conservation in and around the Green Swamp. Another stroke of luck came in 1974 when the State recognized the statewide significance of the Green Swamp region and designated 322,000 acres of the Green Swamp Basin that were not already under public management as an Area of Critical State Concern.

But do not allow that designation to lull you into a false sense of security with regard to future urban development. All it means is that the fate of more than 320,000 acres of the Green Swamp is squarely in the hands of Florida bureaucrats and their political masters in the State Legislature. Many types of urban development are allowed under those regulations, which translates into more and more of the Swamp being eaten.

Florida’s ever growing population, especially in the nearby Tampa-St. Petersburg and Orlando metropolitan areas, has created increasing pressure to develop lands within the Green Swamp. Many municipalities at the edge of the Swamp that once were little more than one-horse towns have grown exponentially and have been annexing lands in the Area of Critical State Concern. Despite supposedly updated growth management policies and regulations by local municipal jurisdictions, proposals for large, multi-use developments and new home construction at the Swamp’s perimeters continue.

Another problem is historic agricultural practices that drained wetlands and channelized streams have not been mitigated, which means they are still in effect. The result, declining groundwater levels and decreasing water quality, continues to adversely affect natural Green Swamp communities and the Floridan Aquifer. A critical problem for all those who are concerned about preserving the ability of the Green Swamp to recharge the Floridan Aquifer is that the prime habitats from which surface water reaches the Aquifer are the higher ridges and hills typically covered by live oaks and mixed hardwood forests whose soils are well-drained that are found on the eastern, southern, and western fringes of the Swamp. It is precisely those well-drained, highly developable areas that are attract the greatest urban development pressure.

The Orlando metropolitan area has experienced nearly exponential growth in the last three decades, emerging as one of the premier urban places in Florida and in the entire Southeast. This growth has been jet propelled by the tourist-entertainment industry, recreating Orlando as one of the world’s leading tourist destinations. Almost everywhere you look in Orange County you find commercial, retail, light-industrial, institutional, and residential developments that are directly or indirectly related to the entertainment-tourist industry. Hotels, strip malls, theme parks, entertainment complexes, restaurants, more hotels, more strip malls, more entertainment complexes, more theme parks, more restaurants, etc.

Make no mistake, Orlando is a realtor’s version of Nirvana/Paradise. But for regional planners and environmentalists like me, depressing is the word that squarely hits home when we contemplate the shark feeding frenzy that typifies land development in and around Orange County. The really bad news is that in the past 15 to 20 years the entertainment-driven development in the greater Orlando area has spread like a cancer to adjacent counties. Take one guess where the Green Swamp is in relation to the great maw that is Orange County. 

 Here are a few pertinent details for your amusement and entertainment. From 1950 to 2000, hard to believe as it may be, the five Green Swamp Region counties out-performed the State’s tremendous population growth, recording a whooping 858 percent change in population, or a fourteen percent annual growth rate versus a 9.6 percent rate for the State. But what does that tremendous growth mean in real terms? Better yet, how does that population growth affect the landscape?

Let me try to make these impersonal statistics meaningful. We all have to lay down somewhere at night and go to sleep. In that most people aren’t homeless that means the overwhelming majority of us live in attached or detached houses, apartments, condominiums, or mobile homes. It should not surprise anyone that those necessities require land and the typical urban services we humans need to survive. And that’s what we call infrastructure.

Let’s look at two of the Green Swamp counties as examples of what development is doing to land in central Florida. In 1950, Lake County had 12,924 total housing units. According to the U.S. Census estimate, by 2010 that number had increased to 138,560 units. An increase of almost 125,636 housing units in 60 years. That’s a staggering increase for what had previously been an undeveloped rural area. Assuming that on the average each housing unit required about 8,000 square feet of land (a mid-range estimate), including streets and various rights-of-way, by 2010 a total of slightly more than 23,000 additional acres had been converted to a developed state (residential in this example) from some other use, most likely from open space or agricultural that previously had been wetlands. That’s more than 36 square miles of additional residential use in 50 years for Lake County alone.

Pasco County, which has recorded the highest housing growth of any county in the Green Swamp Region to this day, exploded from 7,600 housing units in 1950 to 216,817 units in 2010. That number is hard to believe, even for this old urban planner. Again, if you estimate a total of 8,000 square feet for each house/lot combination, that adds up to 38,424 acres of land converted from other types of usage, essentially wetlands to residential. That’s nearly 60 square miles of new housing, which adds up to one subdivision after another and another and another. Remember, we’re not even looking at the demand for commercial/retail, office, institutional, or industrial uses, or at the need for public property.

Although it’s true that most of the growth described for Pasco County has occurred between Interstate-75 and the Gulf Coast, the resulting pressure for open land suitable for development has spread outward from the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater metropolitan area north and east toward the Green Swamp. Obviously, that demand cannot be accommodated by moving to lands west of that metropolitan area. Unless you want to live underwater. A similar demand has been generated from Orlando south and west into Lake and Sumter Counties. In other words, development encroachment into areas immediately adjacent to the Green Swamp is a long-standing reality and comes from two separate sources: Orlando and Tampa.

According to a recent State of Florida Office of Economic and Demographic Research update, from 2000 to 2010, the State's population increased from 15,982,839 to 18,801,310, a 17.6 percent growth, and that’s considering the economic and housing disaster of 2007 through 2009. During the past decade, Florida as a whole recorded an average of 772 new residents each day. Once our national economy has recovered, if you add the decades-long procession of retirees to the steady stream of South America and Caribbean immigrants, Florida’s growth rate could eclipse the 1,000 people a day who moved to the State during the real-estate boom years of the 1980s.

If, over the past 60 years, each of the above five Green Swamp counties (Hernando, Lake, Pasco, Polk, and Sumter) averaged the conversion of 30 square miles of land from even a semi-natural state to a suburbanized condition you should easily be able to understand the nature of the problem. And that problem is that nearly 100,000 acres have been permanently removed from natural resource use (groundwater recharge and flood abatement). And that is a very conservative estimate.

Let’s be open and above-board about how the problem of urban development affects the Green Swamp. Those 100,000 acres that were previously dedicated to groundwater recharge, transpiration, and flood abatement for the benefit of central and south Florida citizens are gone forever with no realistic way to recover that loss. We’ve turned that development corner permanently. That train left the station and it ain’t coming back. Not ever. Not unless humans disappear from central Florida, a scenario fit only for science fiction novels.

Obviously, the Green Swamp is not growing at the expense of human settlement. The reverse is the case and that trend continues as you read this page. The Swamp is shrinking every year because it is being eaten by our insatiable demand for more. More theme parks. More hotels. More parking lots. More restaurants and cinemas. More residential subdivisions. More streets. More shopping opportunities. More parking lots. More schools and churches. More potable water consumption. More, more, more growth. Which means demand for more potable water and more sewage treatment rises as well as does the amount of run-off and pollution. Not to mention the resulting loss of natural areas and wildlife habitat. In addition, ecosystem fragmentation caused by transportation and utility projects can be a major threat to sensitive environments. Starting in the early 1960s through to completion in 1969, construction of Interstate 4 severed the hydrologic and ecologic connectivity of the southeastern portion from the remainder of the Green Swamp.

The major problem is that the urban development of critical wetlands has been an almost painless process that few ordinary citizens (meaning non-planning professionals) have noticed and even fewer have understood. That’s because it started slowly, with the easiest properties to develop in the Green Swamp counties. Those closest to previously existing development and possessing minimal drainage or topographic problems went under the development hammer first, leaving the more difficult sites that are only now starting to be absorbed as population growth and demand continue almost unabated. Development has occurred one small step at a time. Creeping, crawling, thoughtless incrementalism that started in the early 1960s when Walt Disney began buying land for his Plastic Kingdom and the Mini-Rat we all love so much.

Let me briefly explain how the land development process works. But before going any further, please remember that there is absolutely nothing inherently wrong with the process that will be described. Economic development across the U.S. and other countries is market-driven, as it must be if it is to succeed. The problem I’m concerned with here is the inappropriate application of those procedures to an environmentally fragile environment, such as the one on which central and southern Florida’s very future depends (sufficient potable water to support millions of people). Sustainability into the future for our grandchildren’s grandchildren is what I’m really talking about.

Land developers all across the country look for property that is first of all located in areas experiencing demand from a given population, either business firms or individuals possessing relatively high levels of investment capital or with significant disposable income. After establishing the existence of a legitimate market demand, developers identify land that is generally most easily accessible via existing, new, or proposed roads and that is served by urban-type utilities: water, sewer, gas, telecommunications, and electricity. After all those easily accessible properties are built up and demand continues, developers seek land with the next best locational attributes and as few physical development constraints as possible. After all, nobody wants to build in a wetland if they can help it because the costs tend to be prohibitive (until demand rises above that magical break-even point).

When all properties meeting those criteria are absorbed and demand continues, developers turn to the next tier of available land and after that the next in a continuing downward and outward spiral until demand decreases and as much land as can be developed is developed. Period. And sometimes that means all developable property in a given area is built up in those beautiful and architecturally stimulating residential subdivisions, malls, strip centers, big boxes, gargantuan parking lots, public institutions, etc., that we know and love so well. At this point you should be thinking in terms of the Los Angeles Basin.

Implications

Not to mislead anyone, the State already owns considerable chunks of the Green Swamp Basin. Approximately 110,000 acres of the swamp are managed as the Green Swamp Wilderness Preserve by the SWFWMD. The adjacent Richloam Wildlife Management Area, managed cooperatively for recreation uses by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the Division of Forestry, consists of more than 56,000 acres in Hernando, Pasco, Sumter, and Lake Counties. According to the SWFWMD, publicly owned land accounts for about one-third of the Green Swamp. Wherein lays the problem.

Potential hidden agendas and environmental rhetoric aside, the Green Swamp simply can not survive modern developers, no matter how ecologically sensitive they or the local political jurisdictions pretend they are. No matter how correct their projects are in relation to State of Florida regulations for Areas of Critical State Concern or Developments of Regional Impact. One small subdivision or retirement center leads to another and another and inevitably to a concatenation of strip centers and suburbs where previously only wetlands populated with majestic baldcypress and tupelo gum were found. If you don’t believe this scenario is a reality in central Florida all you have to do is visit the greater Orlando area or any of the five Green Swamp counties. Thirty-eight short years ago when I first visited the area, land that is now Disney World was part of a wetland system integrated with the Green Swamp. As the Swamp is ever so gradually absorbed by urban-suburban development, the ultimate losers are the residents of Florida and the United States. That’s us, people like you and me who need both drinking water and livable environments in order to survive. Sustainability, remember? It’s not a throwaway word used by half-crazed environmentalists.

The ease with which most of us blithely shrug off our stewardship of the Earth without thought or compunction has never ceased to amaze me. Specifically, what compelling reason is there for us to be willing to permit the relentless destruction of the last premier wetland in Florida unprotected by the State or Federal Governments? If you have that answer, please tell me. But it better not have one damn thing to do with the glories of the free-enterprise system. Or that sacred bug-a-boo, the private ownership of land. After contemplating with these two eyes what has happened to the Everglades, Big Cypress, and Key Marco in pursuit of those supposedly sacred ideals, I have lost all patience with those concepts as having anything of importance to contribute to environmental stewardship or to professional planning. Now it’s time for the State to step up to the plate and assume responsibility of that essential wetland system for all the people of Florida. That’s the only way the Green Swamp will be saved from slow, incremental development at its edges into boring subdivisions, tacky strip centers, and soul-numbing entertainment complexes.