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Miami's Botched Foreign Trade Zone Development

Posted by: Mike Lydon

15 October 2007 - 12:00pm

What could have been an economic development homerun for Miami's Wynwood neighborhood has turned out to be a miserable failure. Nonetheless, hope remains that new ownership can restore the site's promising potential.

"Behind wide-open gates, the big warehouse and office building -- the product of millions of dollars in public investment -- stands empty and trashed, windows busted out, covered in graffiti, stripped by vandals of anything of value.

This is all that remains of the Wynwood Foreign Trade Zone, a commercial project whose sponsors once pledged 3,000 jobs for a struggling community. It never got off the ground, done in by 17 years of infighting and a skein of lawsuits steeped in claims of ethnic discrimination.

Now the bankrupt nonprofit group behind the trade zone stands to receive a multimillion-dollar windfall from a project that by any measure has been a rotund failure."

Full Story: Failed Wynwood site attracts bids
Source: The Miami Herald, October 15, 2007
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All of that only scratches the surface of what's wrong with this study. The idea that complex urban development patterns and human behavior can be meaningfully studied according to one primary criteria — density — is wrong from the start.
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