Thoughts on the Urban Environment

So, I was watching HGTV and there is this show called House Hunters. If I’m bored late at night (and not writing provocative quasi-genius rumblings for this blog), you might find me sneaking a peak at this guilt pleasure. The producers of House Hunters usually take a young couple on their first home-buying experience, drag them to three houses, tape them weighing the options and the couple picks one.

The episode last night just happened to be taking place in what I thought looked like the least sustainable community in the United States: Cape Coral, Florida. I jumped on Google and found myself both fascinated and horrified.

The red outline is an area of Cape Coral that is fully supported by road and canal infrastructure, yet – the homes are few and far between. In fact, there are so few homes relative to infrastructure that it boggles my mind on why they just kept on building it out.

The above image is not an anomaly. The majority of the landscape in Cape Coral looks like this. How are 42 houses going to support the infrastructure maintenance of the roads, sewers, electricity, canals, etc.? These are not high-end homes – most are pretty modest and range from about $80k to $200k (from a quick Trulia search). Since I couldn’t believe what I was looking at on Google Maps, I had to double-check with Bing Maps just to see that the Google imagery wasn’t out of date.

Nope. It looks like Bing gives us the same results, which is to say, not good. I’m confused here – why would they keep building roads if no one was building there? Why did they build NW 8th Terrace when they only sold one house on NW 7th Terrace? Or, better yet – why did they build NW 9th Terrace when no homes were sold or built on NW 8th Terrace?

Of course, not all of Cape Coral is empty. Approximately 1/3 is appropriately built up … in the most mind-bogglingly sprawl-ish way. The canal system might have been a good way to sell real estate, but I’m guessing it’s going to become quite the liability. In the age of climate change and rising sea waters, well – I’m curious to see what will be of this former swamp in 50 to 75 years.

And, from the looks of it – you’ll have trouble walking anywhere. At least from what I could see on House Hunters, it looked like there was a lot of free parking though! To abruptly move on, I was reading through a local Cape Coral blog, and ran into a promotional flyer that appears to sum up the community and their aspirations [speaking of which, Cape Coral even makes this suburban-disaster slide show look tolerable].

It is a flyer for a “Family Fun Walk” to celebrate the “Grand Opening” of a road! I can’t imagine anything less fun than walking with children next to a 6+ lane road. I wonder how many people turned up to the event? I did find this chunk of information though: “The total cost for the right-of-way acquisition, design and construction of both the roadway and bridges came to $42 million.” [Source].

Of course, I looked up the weather report and Cape Coral was 40 degrees warmer than Minneapolis today.