Dear Washington Planner, Thanks for your answer, but actually, Fort Lauderdale's redevelopment area (like that of many Florida cities) has had one community visioning session after another. Some have been offered by the City, others by the nearby design departments of universities. At the current time, the City has been operating a community based planning effort to work with neighborhoods to identify their goals (improved code enforcement, more police patrols -- the whole gamut of services. This particular area asked for better zoning, among other requests.) While this has been going on, the Governor's office -- for reasons known only to the Governor -- has designated the area as one of his 'Front Porch Florida' areas. These are low income areas where a neighborhood group or groups works directly with the Gov's office -- bypassing local government -- and the group develops a list of programs that the Gov's office is supposed to approve and fund. Unfortunately, most of the 'Front Porch' communities have paid out expenses up front to do crime fighting or paint-up-fix up programs, and the Gov's office has advised later that many of the expenses weren't approved after all... To add to the problem, Fort L's redevelopment area recently experienced the shock of having a fraud committed by a group that bought up run down apartments and kept selling them back and forth among themselves at every increasing prices (much higher than the property values) and then defaulting on the mortgages. The banks took over the properties and low income renters who had paid their rent were, nonetheless, evicted.
In short (though this isn't short, is it?!), the community has strongly suggested to city staff that they've been all charetted and studied out and they want action to stop things like the mortgage fraud. The area's zoning dates from the 1940's, when pyramiding zoning was the thing, which explains why single family houses were approved to be built in industrially zoned areas now filled with warehouses. Zoning is not the only thing that got this area into its mess, but good zoning will be one of the ways to achieve the goals this community has identified in its many self studies. The land in the community is of value, being near both an interstate and an attractive river; we are still getting requests from outside property owners to rezone parts of the residential and business zoned property to industrial. It will be difficult to offer a "carrot" to someone to get him/her to fix up some apartments that they've been hoping to tear down and replace with a warehouse. And many of the absentee owners of low income, barracks-like apartments have made very good money out of the area for a very long time, without so much as planting a tree next to a building. The residents want the limited amount of city funds available to them to go into sewer, water, parks -- not into "carrots" to convince outside property owners to replace stenciled "no loitering" signs on buildings with more attractive signage, or plant a few shrubs. I think I am going to recommend to our 'Front Porch community we will do with this area what has been done citywide, and require property owners to retrofit some landscaping, improved signage and lighting, and institute a menu of options to remedy row after row of bleakly colored, prison-like boxes by requiring alternating colors, if nothing else. (In fact, at the charette I held in March, the community asked me to make it illegal to have anything colored green in the community if it wasn't a plant -- because row after row of these human warehouses are painted a militaristic spinach green.) I guess the color resists dirt well.....