In my previous blog I was very excited for those who may be in serious jeopardy of losing their homes, but then I read an interesting letter to the editor in the Miami Herald, February 21, from Professor Donal Jones, law professor at the University of Miami.

Apparently, from what Professor Jones says, my enthusiasm was baseless.  He says, "If it [the house] is not sold the bank is often able to maintain the repossessed house on its books without showing a loss. The bank can list the value of its asset based on what it would be at ''maturity.'' The now-empty house may have been vandalized and have rotted drywall. But on paper the repossessed house is as valuable as it was before the bubble burst. The bank has no skin in the game."

Moreover, since so many of these homeowners at risk of foreclosure are underwater with their mortgages, without a considerable amount of debt forgiveness, homeowners who continue to pay their mortgages will continue to pay mortgages in which they will have no equity for a long, long time, unless the real estate market miraculously recovers soon.  

Professor Jones tells us that the Federal government has started a Foreclosure Alternative Program, where they pay incentives to mortgage companies to allow homeowners to sell their homes through short sales or to allow homeowners to turn over their homes in lieu of foreclosures.

Apparently, Mediation is not the panacea that I thought.  It looks that the Federal government will have to lend a hand to homeowners after all. 

We Floridians have been watching the foreclosure crash for a year now while our Federal government bailed out major banks across the country.  While Main Street sat in ruins, Wall Street continued to reward their executives with millions of dollars in bonuses and pay back only a portion of the losses caused by the banking and insurance industries. 

Almost all of us have heard of somebody who lost his house to foreclosure after losing his job.   And although this presents excellent opportunities for those who have cash to buy foreclosures, remodel them, thereby adding value and then selling them at a profit, it must be a gut wrenching experience for those who put their hard earned money into their homes, only to lose them to foreclosure.

Good news in on the way for homeowners in Florida who are in jeopardy of losing their homes. The Supreme Court of Florida on Monday, according to the Miami Herald editorial on Saturday, "issued an administrative order requiring a statewide managed mediation program to handle all the foreclosures inundating state courts."  The courts are forcing banks which are reluctant to offer homeowners alternative to foreclosure to sit down, talk, and "to negotiate rather than automatically foreclose."

I think this is welcome news for desperate homeowners, overworked courts, and the majority of us who think this will be a benefit to the middle class in Miami-Dade County by stabilizing neighborhoods and allowing otherwise responsible citizens some time to work out their financial problems without losing their largest asset.

Views of Barcelona - El Ensanche

Yesterday was a great day for the City of Miami.  The new Miami 21 Zoning Code was approved by the City of Miami commissioners.

Miami 21 is the most comprehensive zoning code change I have seen in any part of Miami-Dade County in my over 25 years of practicing architecture.  It took 4 years of meetings and discussions to complete.

The very talented town planning firm of Duany Plater-Zyberk and Company, hired as the lead consultant to produce this code, held hundreds of meetings throughout the city and took testimony from many residents.  It was a controversial process. 

Architects took sides.  There was the Duany Plater-Zyberk and their University of Miami colleagues and then there was the Bernard Zyscovich side.  The AIA had meetings about it.  Generally, there were many fights about density and height restrictions - and design, of course!

While most codes are based on the multiplication of a number times the size of the lot to obtain such things as maximum lot coverage, maximum buildable area, floor area ratio, green area, etc., this new code emphasizes physical results.  It is a form-based code.  It does not care so much about the size of the lot, as what the building will look like.  Will it have porches, covered walkways, and other items which make it pedestrian friendly?  Will people want to walk down the street in this new designed city?  Yes, that's the idea!

What makes a city walkable or what makes it anti-pedestrian?  Liz Plater-Zyberk has lectured often on this issue, and at one of the many meetings, she explained their planning theories and their system of Transets T1 to T6. 

Among the many issues they discussed, one of the most important, is the issue of car parking.  Large parking lots, whether surface parking or garage parking, will deaden any street.  No live human will want to walk in front of a parking garage or parking lot.  So in their code visible surface parking on a major street is prohibited  

In traditional zoning, if the lot is large, then the building (as a multiplication of the size of the lot) gets to be a tall large building.  In this zoning, the zoning tells the owner how many stories to build.  Everyone on the same street gets to build the same number of stories.  So one lot won't have a huge, tall building with the lot next door allowed only a much shorter building.

Many parts of the city will have mixed-zoning with the street level dedicated to commercial space with residential units above that. 

The opposition's position is the new code would limit "design flexibility". 

As I attended meetings, listened to, or read about the discussions, I was reminded of the many cities I have walked - Barcelona, Paris, Munich, Madrid, South Beach, etc.  And then I think of the ones I would never walk - Miami, Atlanta, Houston, etc.

Many things limit design flexibility - our present City of Miami Zoning Code.  It has setbacks, it has height restrictions, and it has all kind of details that hamper design flexibility.  Our current code does not produce any cohesive cityscape.  It produces a bunch of independent buildings which have no cohesion as a group, a neighborhood, or a city. 

I spent a summer in Barcelona, while I was in college, working for an architectural firm on a student exchange program.  I think this is why I am such a fan of Duany Plater-Zyberk and Company.  That summer in Barcelona I walked and walked and walked.  I took rolls of photographs and discovered the contemporaries of Antonio Gaudi.  See, Gaudi did not work in a vacuum.  I am sure he influenced his contemporaries and his contemporaries influenced him.  His buildings are in context.  They are a part of the city.  That is what Miami needs - buildings in context, not floating, independent self-involved structures who fail to integrate with their environment.

In physical codes (and I am sure that Barcelona must have one) things change but they stay the same.  Here I have several photos of Barcelona streetscapes and you can see for yourself.  The number of stories must be regulated.  The location of the building on the lot must be regulated.  See for yourself, balconies change, but there is a consistency which makes the buildings flow from one balcony to the next.  Some details change while some stay the same.  There are no shocking changes - radical height changes, radical recessions from the street, etc.  The ground floor is all commercial.  The parking lots are sheltered from the main street.

In my opinion what we will see eventually is that there are a many design possibilities within the constraints of this code.  And by implementing this code we will see the new cohesiveness that will develop within city buildings.  Where there is always a tension between independence in building design and a unified urban plan, the pendulum had swung in the direction of independent building design.  Now it will swing once again in the other direction.  I, for one, I think that yesterday was a great day, the start of a movement toward an organized pedestrian city we can all enjoy! 

For every person who buys a property at foreclosure, there is a terrible story of someone who lost a valuable asset.  It is the story of someone who saved and saved until he was able to provide a downpayment for a new house and then paid for that mortgage one year or 20 years.  We don't know.  What we do know is that the loss of the house was probably due to this horrible economic downturn which all of us in the construction business are suffering.

So what can be done now to turn this terrible crisis around?  Well, I don't know if I can tell you what to do, but I can certainly tell you what not to do.