THE BLOG OF COCONUT GROVE, FLORIDA  -  NEWS, VIEWS, OPINIONS AND GOSSIP        

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“We had agreed among ourselves not to relate what had passed to anyone except our most intimate friends.... Outwardly it was as though nothing had happened; the apparatus continued to work as it had worked until then, but within a chord had broken, and instead of splendid personal relations, dry, business-like relations prevailed, with a constant reckoning according to the principle: si vis pacem, para bellum.” [If you desire peace, prepare for war.]

— Vladimir Lenin, How the Spark Was Nearly Extinguished

Surely Miami Mayor Manny Diaz is no Leninist, but in his five-and-a-half years in office he has forged his own 21st-century variation on the old Soviet ruler’s anomaly: If you desire sustainable development, prepare for unbelievable overdevelopment. But the Diaz doctrine has now sparked an unprecedented wave of litigation aimed at stopping Miami’s high-rise condo revolution from sweeping through Coconut Grove.

Never had the mayor’s Leninesque paradox shone bigger and brighter than on Dinner Key on April 26. At about a quarter to noon that Thursday, the mayor stepped from the City Hall elevator, walked quickly through a crowd of people in the foyer watching commissioners on a flat-screen TV, and out the main entrance. He started to head for the nearby convention center where he was to deliver his 2007 State of the City speech, “Building a Sustainable City.” It was going to be an incredible, almost messianic speech, climaxing with phrases like “moral obligation,” “sense of urgency,” “honor” and “forging a new sustainable destiny that will leave our children a better city than was left to us.”

But a male TV reporter from WFOR was lurking in the mayor’s path. He had some questions about what was going on inside: a zoning matter that had drawn a standing-room-only crowd to the commission chambers. By a 3-2 vote, the commission had just passed a zoning change to allow Jorge Perez, CEO of the Related Group, to buy seven acres of Coconut Grove waterfront from Mercy Hospital for $96 million and build three high-rise condominium towers on the parcel. The change was highly controversial. The site is next to the Vizcaya national historic landmark and several neighborhoods with single-family homes and low-rise apartment buildings. The change — from GI (Government Institutional) to R-4 — also ushered the city’s highest-density residential zoning designation into the Grove for the first time. On the dais, Commissioner Marc Sarnoff, whose district includes Coconut Grove and who opposed the revision, had just warned: “It will establish a dangerous precedent for additional massive development in this single-family neighborhood.”

Outside, the reporter intercepted the mayor, muttered something about the city’s rampant condo growth and suggested that the new high-rise project — 300 Grove Bay — would harm Vizcaya’s ambiance and the natural beauty around it.

“The commission is beginning to impose some restrictions on it,” the mayor responded, cooly. Among them, he noted, was “a kind of canopy cover with trees and such” to block the view of the high-rises from Vizcaya’s historical gardens.

The TV reporter persisted. “But your personal opinion. Is it needed?”

“I’m going to respect the vote of the commission,” the mayor replied, adding, “We have property rights in this country that have to be honored.”

Such passivity was absent when Diaz took the podium on the convention center stage a short while later for his speech. Indeed he sounded like a different man altogether.

“Ours is not a battle between nations, isms or ideas. Ours is not a battle to sustain the fundamentals of democracy. Ours is a battle to sustain life itself,” he proclaimed to a crowd of several hundred senior and younger citizens seated before him. “While the previous generation saved us from the threat of nuclear weapons, the actions of our own generation pose a new threat. We are the only species that routinely and knowingly engages in the destruction of its habitat.”

For 20 minutes, he uttered words that would have made Al Gore proud. “Our message has been clear: Green is not a fad, green is our compass.” Yes, human activity is causing global warming and damaging our environment. “We paved our land, destroyed our natural areas.”

But there was hope. The city was implementing its “first-ever parks and public spaces master plan,” with “a new vision for Miami’s open spaces and the public realm, calling for more funding, a park within half a mile of every resident, and no net loss of park land. Our parks, open spaces, greenways and blueways will connect all of our neighborhoods. Already we have doubled park funding and are starting to acquire more park land. The Virginia Key, Coconut Grove waterfront and Museum Park master plans will serve as a guide to ensure that these pristine sites will achieve their rightful place in the public realm as great public spaces of regional pride.” We have “a moral obligation” to create a “greater, better, more beautiful and sustainable city,” the mayor concluded.

Fortunately for Jorge Perez, who was in the audience, his plans for the three-tower high-rise on the Coconut Grove waterfront meshed perfectly with the mayor’s bold new ecological vision. “What an unbelievable speech!” the real estate mogul raved to an acquaintance as he headed for the convention hall door at power-walk pace.

He was so pumped up he even spoke to a reporter, who could barely keep pace with him. “More and more people will be living in Miami. Either you open up the Everglades [to residential development] or you put them in high-rise buildings. One of the two options,” Perez said, without breaking stride. “If you listened to the mayor’s speech, either we open up the suburbs or we put ’em in the city. And the only way to put them in the city is with high-rise buildings!”

In fact, high-rise condos on the Coconut Grove waterfront were not only an ecological imperative, but the embodiment of popular democracy itself. “I think the water should be for the majority of the people. And high-rises provide the waterfront for the majority of the people,” the billionaire explained. And like any good citizen participating in a democratic process, he too had to compromise. “I didn’t love the fact that we got a 25 percent reduction,” Perez complained, referring to the commission’s decision that morning to reduce his proposed towers from 400 feet to 300 feet. “We have to go now in front of Mercy and figure out how we’re going to pay for the 25 percent reduction,” he added. He said it was the Related Group’s idea to plant huge trees to block the view of the towers from the Vizcaya gardens. “We need to figure out how we’re going to plant them and where,” he continued. “I think it was a great example of democracy working at its best.”

But to other citizens, it was a great example of how Miami’s merciless high-rise condo boom had crossed a very volatile line: the one that separates downtown Miami from Coconut Grove.

On April 27, Commissioner Sarnoff sent a letter to the mayor asking him to veto the zoning change. He included a long list of harms the waterfront condo project would cause the area, including the further destruction of Miami’s declining “natural and coastal resources.”

“Your words at the State of the City address were profound and with the deeds behind them we truly can create a sustainable city,” Sarnoff wrote. But the commissioner, who is also a lawyer, was clearly guided by another maxim: If you desire a mayoral veto, prepare for a big lawsuit. The letter had the trappings of a legal brief. The high-rise condo project was “not in harmony with the established land use pattern,” “did not relate to adjacent districts,” “is out of scale with the needs of the neighborhood,” “would negatively influence quality of life and living conditions in the immediate neighborhood as well as throughout the Grove.” The list went on.

Indeed, at least three lawyers desiring sustainable development are preparing for war on 300 Grove Bay. John C. Lukacs, a lawyer representing Grove Isle condominium owners, said there is “overwhelming competent evidence” that the commission violated the city’s zoning code on April 26. “It’s going to be a big deal,” he predicted.

John Hinson, co-chair of the special preservation committee of the Vizcayans — the group dedicated to protecting the national historic landmark — said they have resolved to “take all actions available to eliminate all R-4 zoning next to Vizcaya and to eliminate the threat to Vizcaya posed by Mr. Perez’s project.” The basis of the complaint, to be handled by lawyer Lynn Lewis, was that 300 Grove Bay would be “far too tall” and “out of scale with the surrounding neighborhood and with Vizcaya,” Hinson added.

Lawyer Patrick Goggins, who represents Constance Steen, a Coconut Grove resident who lives 500 feet from the proposed high-rise site, is also preparing for combat. “The comprehensive plan has high-rises downtown. It does not have high-rises in north Coconut Grove,” Goggins said. In addition, he is likely to employ another judicial weapon — the concept of spot-zoning, which involves “giving preferential treatment to one parcel at the expense of the zoning scheme as a whole,” he explained. “In an appeal I would argue that this change is exactly that. To put an R-4 in the middle of a low-rise to mid-rise residential neighborhood is exactly that — spot-zoning.” Then he added: “This threatens not just this seven-acre parcel, but it could lead to high-rises from Aviation [Avenue in Coconut Grove] up to Brickell.”

The Related Group and its allies are certain to be readying for conflict, too. In an eerily similar situation in Fort Lauderdale, the company has sued opponents of the 42-story Icon condo project for delaying construction of the building, which is now underway next to the historic Stranahan House, Broward County’s oldest structure. A big difference in that case: The city’s mayor, Jim Naugle, fought the high-rise.

Mayor Diaz insists he, too, would oppose high-rise condos on the Coconut Grove waterfront — if he could rebuild Miami from scratch. “Listen, I would prefer that the entire waterfront not have any structures on it,” he told me just after his state of the city speech. “And if I had to do it over again, and I could redesign the city, I wouldn’t have any of those condos on Brickell, if I could go back and say, ‘How do we change this?’ That’s what you would do. You would build off the water and allow the waterfront to be green. And you could have built those high-rises a block over.”  

Comments? E-mail letters@miamisunpost.com.