Amendment 4 defeated in Florida
A measure that would have required popular votes to amend local comprehensive plans was defeated Tuesday.
"The people of Florida have given us a second chance to do better planning. Now it's time to deliver. The massive effort and financial resources needed to defeat Amendment 4 are a wake-up call to local governments and developers to end the sprawl that congests our roads, endangers pedestrians, and chokes off transportation alternatives," said Eliza Harris, director of Orlando's regional division of the Congress for the New Urbanism ("CNU").
CNU Orlando's Advisory Committee is urging local governments to revise their comprehensive plans to make walkable development -- instead of sprawl -- the default development pattern. "To avoid future proposals like Amendment 4, local governments need to fundamentally change their required development patterns. Miami and Denver did so this year by replacing their zoning codes with SmartCodes and some local jurisdictions like the City of Orlando have started to create space in their regulations for walkable neighborhoods. Local governments in Central Florida should revise their comprehensive plans to enable form-based codes and mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods."
Over the past several decades, the real estate market has seen a significant shift back to living in our downtowns and compact walkable neighborhoods. The market demanded an alternative to compartmentalized, vehicle-centric suburbs. The real estate industry responded with downtown revitalization and New Urbanist communities. Amendment 4 threatened to stop this progress by freezing Comprehensive Plans that often mandate sprawl development in their current dysfunctional state.
"If voters had approved Amendment 4 twenty years ago, nationally recognized examples of good development like Celebration (comprehensive plan update Dec 13 1993) and Baldwin Park (1997 and 1998 updates), based on principles of New Urbanism, may never have been built.
Amendment 4 would have:
• Discouraged adoption of new standards that promote and support urban, compact, walkable, and transit oriented developments and sustainable economies, which conserve resources and enrich property values over time; and
• Encouraged sprawl by giving an advantage to poorly located and designed development already approved in many comprehensive plans.
• "We are grateful the voters realized that Amendment 4 was not the answer," said Harris. "However, Amendment 4 expressed a very real frustration with growth patterns in Florida, a frustration that New Urbanists share."
