Ag Reserve is a land of broken county promises
You had to admire the moxie of a GL Homes representative who on Saturday walked into the lion’s den of the Sierra Club Loxahatchee Group, and listened quietly through two hours of criticism of GL’s Ag Reserve plans.
Palm Beach County commissioners will sit down next week for a workshop on whether the developer can build 1,000 luxury homes and 277 affordable townhouses on protected rural land. They too will hear what last weekend’s session explored: soil conservation minutiae accompanied by details of filtrating waterborne contaminants.
But if the science seems murky, the cracked and broken promises are clear enough.
After contributing to the housing crisis for years by knee-capping its own program, the county seems poised to address that problem by creating another and approving residential building on acreage set aside decades ago to counter residential building.
It has been 24 years since voters approved spending millions to buy 2,400 acres in a rural region west of Boca Raton, Boynton Beach and Delray Beach.
The idea was to keep rural land rural. Even before county purchases made less land available for building, it had adopted stringent building guidelines. Landowners could build, but only if they set aside more land in the Ag Reserve for preservation.
Despite the vote, and the rule, the Reserve is in danger of being nibbled to death, as the county has repeatedly greenlighted homes, retail and industrial buildings.
In 2006, commissioners made another pledge. Faced with an affordable housing squeeze, they determined that developers would have to sell or rent at least 20 percent of any new housing at affordable rates.
The county broke that promise. During the same 16 years the county greenlighted 35,000 homes and apartments, only 1,100 affordable units were built, a Palm Beach Post investigation found. Look at the result: Runaway rents and madhouse home valuations now have working parents living in cars. People making what should be a living wage are keeping a roof over their heads by couch surfing.
Enter GL Homes. The developer is willing to build desperately needed workforce housing along with its luxury homes.
It wants permission to build in the Ag Reserve. But it doesn’t want to set aside extra land for preservation inside the Ag Reserve.
This is not an apples-to-apples swap. The 60 / 40 split was not designed to keep county land from overdevelopment. It was designed to keep the Ag Reserve from overdevelopment.
Commissioners may be persuaded that it is good policy to allow GL Homes to build on Ag Reserve land by throwing the county bits and pieces of land elsewhere. But no one should pretend the county is not breaking the implicit promise made decades ago to those voters who cast ballots for preservation.
GL Homes has countered with helpful science. The hundreds of acres it proposes to give to the county in exchange for building would be preserved as a kind of natural reservoir, storing water during the rainy season and filtering contaminants.
But it’s not at all certain that GL Homes can deliver on the promise of both retaining water and cleansing it. Cornell University-trained soil scientist and Lake Worth Beach Vice Mayor Chris McVoy told the Sierra Club gathering he believes that GL has, at least in its original plans, overpromised. The land being offered might provide water storage or possibly effective filtration, but not both.
The public interest argument for building in the Ag Reserve is not the seven-figure homes GL plans. It’s affordable housing.
But why would workforce housing be a good idea in the far-west Ag Reserve when the majority of jobs are much farther east? Many working people have to travel to work. Unlike their neighbors living in high-end homes, a working person’s wages make them especially vulnerable to gas price fluctuations.
Palm Beach County can’t throw two fractured promises at each other and call it a fix.