As an education and research group that tries to span the

bridge between no-growthers and unbridled growth, the Urban Land

Institute-Southwest Florida District Council has grown with the region. Its

membership has nearly quadrupled in the past three years, jumping from 40 to

more than 150 people as planning for growth has become a hot topic. The mission

of the district council, which represents Charlotte, Collier and Lee counties,

is to provide responsible leadership for the use of land.

Offering several types of memberships to business

professionals, public sector employees and others interested, the district

council is led by a chairman—appointed by the national Urban Land Institute’s

international chairman to a one-year term that’s renewable for three years—who

appoints an advisory executive committee of local members. Backed by research

from the national group, the local organization has become influential, holding

seminars on smart growth and other land-use trends, highlighted by this month’s

fifth annual Winter Institute.

Wayne Falbey, president of The Falbey Group and chairman of

the district council since 1999, and executive committee members David Graham,

vice president of planning and development for The Bonita Bay Group, and Mike

Timmerman, president of Feasinomics Inc., recently discussed their group and

its role in growth management.

Fueled with members and financial sponsors, what’s your

major effort right now?

Falbey: We’re putting together a certification program in

land use and development technology with the Florida Gulf Coast University

College of Business. We are attempting to bring in more public sector members.

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We also are putting together technical assistance panels. A

county or municipality agency would ask us to supply a group of experts in a

given area, maybe transportation or a zoning issue. A panel of five or six

members ranging across a number of disciplines in land use would study the

problem and present a report. We’re identifying who the members would be and

simply getting the word out to the different agencies that we’re available. The

idea is to bring local experts together on local problems.

How is the district council funded?

Falbey: Most of our funding is from local businesses and

individuals who agree to sponsor us in one of two ways, either as a sustaining

sponsor, in which they make a commitment to provide $1,500 a year for three

years, or as a sponsor of one of our programs. We haven’t lost money on

programs yet—sometimes it’s close. We get a negligible amount of funds from the

national ULI. We’re a non-profit organization, essentially budgeting to cover

expenses.

Your work is voluntary; why do you feel it is important to

support a local Urban Land Institute organization?

Falbey: There is more to the responsible use of land than

what is coming out of the environmental camp. Not all environmentalists are

eco-Nazis; not all developers want to pave the Everglades. You get so much

misinformation that somebody needs to provide to the public unbiased hard data

concerning the responsible use of land for this reason: People are not going to

stop having kids. The population base is going to continue to expand. So we are

going to need houses, roads, schools, hospitals, places to work and parks. If

somebody doesn’t lead the battle to show how that can be done responsibly, you

either have the no-growthers prevailing, which is a disaster, or we’ll grow out

of control, which is equally a disaster.

Graham: We need to bring expertise [provided by the ULI’s

research] to the local area. One of the main tenets today of good planning or

smart growth, whatever the latest buzzword is, is to integrate land uses. In

other words, to integrate the place where we live with the place where we work

with the place where we recreate at with the place where we go to school with

our cultural facilities. Whether you do it in a rural setting or an urban

setting, integrating those uses is the goal. And we need to increase density so

that transit systems work and not do things like we did in the past, which was

to spread ourselves out, have the homes all in one place, have the retail and

work in another place. That message has to get to local officials.

Instead of reducing the density in certain places, we should

be increasing the density along transportation corridors. We should be moving

the businesses closer to where people live, not separating them. These methods

have been found to work around the country, and that information needs to be

brought to the local area.

Falbey: One thing that troubles us is that you have the

two-edged sword at work in Southwest Florida, where there’s pressure for lower

densities [which results in making it too expensive to build] and urban

boundaries. You can’t go out and you can’t stay in. All that tends to do is to

drive up the cost of existing housing and make affordable housing totally out

of reach for a whole segment of the population. And when you look at Interstate

75 any morning, you see the southbound lanes literally clogged with the working

people who have to come down from Lee and other counties because they can’t

live in Collier.

Graham: What we have found nationally is that the infill

[building more homes in already developed areas] can only handle maybe 15 or 20

percent of your growth. Now, what do you do with the rest? As a responsible

leader in the use of land, which is our goal, you need to be able to provide

for it. The fact of the matter is what’s happening in Latin America, South

America, Argentina–we know the economy–these people are going to come to

America. As we know, if they land on our shores, we don’t get rid of them, they

stay here. So we need to provide for these people.

How are the ULI’s views accepted locally?

Graham: They are accepted by the professional community, but

they’re very hard to get across to the public. The public still wants lower

heights on buildings, lower density and that’s more of a selfish perspective

than it is a community perspective.

Timmerman: My joining the ULI was because of the phenomenal

research that’s available and because of its mission statement. As stewards of

the land, how do we best prepare and provide for growth? And in order for us to

educate the consumer, if we can show them that it makes economic sense to do

this, it’ll be a much easier sell. We’re providing the information so they

understand what’s actually happening in the marketplace. Most people know the

numbers don’t lie.

Falbey: What you have in Southwest Florida and particularly

in Collier County is a very small but very well-funded and vocal anti-growth

movement. On the other hand, if the development community steps up and says,

“Wait a minute, there’s another side of this,” it’s easy for the public to say,

“You’re a special interest group.” Somewhere in the middle has to be a

non-profit research and education organization that says, “No, these are the

facts, unblemished by either side of the argument.” That’s what we do.

Have people besides those in the business community attended

local ULI seminars?

Falbey: Members of conservation agencies and environmental

groups have attended and joined ULI. They’re beginning to realize that we’re

not a developer’s mouthpiece or representing the local legal community or

construction interests.

What’s an example of how Southwest Florida has handled

growth correctly?

Graham: Look at downtown Naples and the turnaround that has

happened on Fifth Avenue. What happened to turn that area around? Basically, a

mixing or integration of uses. That’s why people now want to go there. That’s

what’s caused the economic vitality. It’s in-creased the rents, the quality of

users of those facilities, the economic base of the area. We need to do that

kind of thing in other infill areas and rural villages.