Editorials

It’s too bad John MacDonald, who died in 1986, didn’t live long enough to say “I told you so”. He was a prolific and adept writer of mystery novels, many if not all of which were set in Florida. Lots of them were thrillers about tough-guys, many of them crooks , but one served to demonstrate that MacDonald actually had a Harvard MBA and that all the sleaze in Florida was not on boats. Title? Condominium!

I remember the exclamation point, but don’t see it now in online pictures of covers of later editions. Abe Books adds the subtitle “Political Swindles & Payoffs”, but since I’ve mislaid my own copy of the 1977 edition I’m not sure that’s original.

But in light of the tragic events of the last few days, I do remember that I learned more from this novel about swindles and payoffs in the development industry than I learned in law school or from my own reporting in the last 40-some years. 

Long, long ago I read a piece by William Greider which claimed that the majority of the money in politics supporting both Democrats and Republicans came from developers, and since then I’ve seen nothing to disprove that. And “Condominium” could serve as a roadmap to what went wrong 40 years ago when the death trap condominium in Surfside was built, or what’s been wrong since them with the obviously bogus inspections which failed to protect the residents, or whether the condo developers in the first instance ignored the environmental considerations which are so important in fragile Florida (as they are in California). 

In 1978, soon after Condominium came out, I went to Florida to report for New Times Magazine (a good, fearless, generously endowed but short-lived publication) on the (perfectly legal) shenanigans that accompanied developing Disney World in the 1970s, which blithely dodged environmental laws, zoning and all sorts of other regulations. Courtesy of New Times, I spent a couple of weeks in Kissimmee, adjacent to Orlando, getting the flavor of the local laissez-faire culture of what were at that time a couple of sleepy little southern towns where almost anything had its price. 

My main unidentified source for that story was an older county official, an agricultural agent, who had been battling to no avail against what he called the “Californication” of his beloved area. The Disney corporation was a lot bigger than he was, and they got what they paid for. 

He had a bunch of environmental worries, based on the fact that Florida sits on a network of underground sandstone aquifers. Most of the water for its expanding population comes from rainfall which is stored in them, and all too often they collapse, creating enormous sinkholes which can swallow cars and even buildings. And for powerful players like Disney, environmental law seldom applies. 

Here’s how it looked to me back then: 

“Disney's 43-square-mile Florida property (as big as San Francisco, twice the size of Manhattan, 275 times as big as Vatican City) is a feudal domain that has been legally themed, courtesy of the Florida Legislature, to present a clever imitation of a Democratic government. Or, to be precise, three governments. The Disney corporation and its friends and business associates are able to control this large piece of Florida at their pleasure by means of an amazing legal construct called the Reedy Creek Improvement District (RGID). Property, not people, votes in Reedy Creek, which has exactly the same boundaries as Walt Disney World. The five supervisors who run the district are elected by the peculiar principle of one acre, one vote. And Disney owns all but 25 of the acres and casts virtually all votes on Election Day. “ 

What this means is that in Florida what Disney wants, Disney gets. I expect that’s still true, even after four decades. The consequences as of 1978: 

“A Disney Vice-President explained that one of Walt's major goals at Disney World was to show that ‘you could take virgin land and develop it and enhance the environment, not take away from it. I think the classic example’ he said, ‘is the lagoon there that we built. That lagoon was a very large swamp, and I think we've really enhanced the environment, because that's a beautiful lagoon. It adds pleasure for a lot of people, and there's still a lot of trees you can see around.’ It seemed fruitless to explain to him that a lot of people would rather see a real swamp with real alligators than an artificial lagoon with motorboats and light-up electric simulated seals. But even if everything inside the borders of Disney's Florida domain is clean, beautiful and environmentally sound, as company press releases claim, there is a larger problem raised by its exemption from Florida environmental law: its impact on the region around it. Disney has plans for additional development, which the company hopes will almost double attendance-from 13 million to 20 million people a year.” 

In the forty years since I went there, Orlando and Kissimmee are no longer quaint little southern villages. Disney World attendance 40 years later, in 2018, was reported as 58 million—and it’s all been legal, I imagine, with no bothersome CEQA to slow it down. And the rest of Florida has grown at the same rate. 

Today’s press is full of hypotheses about what went wrong in Surfside. Just a few: shoddy materials, negligent inspection, construction of an unbalanced penthouse by granting an exception to the building code, a sinkhole, a swimming pool misdesigned, saltwater intrusion attributable to climate change….lots of choices of villains. John MacDonald foreshadowed them all in his 70s work. 

Carl Hiassen’s mystery novels are worthy heirs to the MacDonald tradition, but with a sardonic twist. Wikipedia quotes Hiassen’s introduction to a new edition of The Deep Blue Good-by: "Most readers loved MacDonald's work because he told a rip-roaring yarn. I loved it because he was the first modern writer to nail Florida dead-center, to capture all its languid sleaze, racy sense of promise, and breath-grabbing beauty." 

That’s all still there in Florida, especially its trademark sleaze (e.g. the current governor). But Florida does not have a monopoly on development corruption. Right here in Berkeley we had the 2015 Library Gardens disaster—a balcony on a new building collapsed with fatalities, though on a smaller scale, and no one in the City of Berkeley government has ever been held to account in that one, to my kmowledge, though civil suits by victims’ families have mandated changes to building codes.  

Meanwhile, Scott Wiener and his loyal henchpersons Toni Atkins and Nancy Skinner are laboring assiduously to get rid of what’s left of CEQA and of local oversight over building standards. They’ve invented SB9 and SB10 to facilitate construction of the same sort of shoddy but profitable apartment buildings, the current equivalent of the 40-year-old condominiums which now line the Miami area. Many are owned by investment firms like Blackstone, which owned Library Gardens. 

Now downtown Berkeley is filling up with the siblings of Library Gardens and worse. If Wiener et al. have their way, there will be more, with nary an affordable family home among them. Meanwhile, the “soft story” apartments which proliferated here before the intiative which produced the Neighborhood Preservation Ordinance in the early 70s are still around, and they’ve reached the dangerous age too. And we have earthquakes here. 

A generally accepted standard is that a reasonably carefully built “modern” multi-unit building will last just about 40 years, which is one reason that Florida is in trouble now. Many buildings are now reaching that limit, even the better ones. If you factor in corruption and eliminate oversight, things look even more dire, in both California and Florida. 

Miami-Dade County’s weakest spot is the many many condominiums which were built in towns like Surfside around 1980. Among other problems, all the numerous owners must agree to pay before needed repairs can be made. 

But there’s some modest good news. The way I first got on to the Disney World story is through the efforts of a Nevada City lawyer, Harold Berliner. He got wind of the Disney Corporation’s plans to turn a big chunk of the Sierra into another destination resort like Disney World. He’d been a prosecutor, and he smelled a rat, not just a cute mouse. He suspected that a completely legal takeover of local governments like the one in Florida was in the works in his 'hood, and he did everything possible to make sure that didn’t happen in California by publicizing what happened in Florida. 

It wasn’t just my story which stopped Disney’s plans, I’m sure, but let’s just say that the Sierras are still relatively pristine, for which we can be grateful to eternally vigilant citizens like the late Harold Berliner. 

Sometimes dark deeds can be stopped with daylight. It’s tragic that this couldn’t save the Florida condo victims this time around.