Late last month, the ten-member board of the Kendall Federation of Homeowner Associations unanimously voted on a resolution asking the Miami-Dade County Commission to place a moratorium on all development west of Florida’s Turnpike.
“Anyone who’s driven on our roads knows it is totally insane,” says the Federation’s president, Michael Rosenberg, who is the president and cofounder of Pets’ Trust. “I’m surprised people don’t commit mass suicide out there.”
The resolution cited “unbearable” traffic congestion that causes “increased travel times such as 30 to 40 minutes to access Florida’s Turnpike and the Palmetto Expressway” — when it should take less than ten. It also said the problem is becoming worse.
Rosenberg, who has been the group’s president for four years, says he has watched Kendall grow rapidly to a population of some 400,000, with
“Someone who’s 400 pounds and eats one ice-cream sundae won’t be impacted too much,” he says. “But if you keep eating ice cream sundaes, it’s gonna create a problem.”
Rosenberg says he doubts the Miami-Dade County Commission will adopt the resolution. “But that’s our policy and belief,” he says. “I don’t know a single normal person who experiences this traffic who says we should keep building.”
In an interview with the Kendall Gazette, Miami-Dade's chief spokesperson, Michael Hernandez, said that a moratorium on building may not be a "silver bullet" but that the county needs to take a “global approach to improving mass transit and mobility."
And Truly Burton, the executive vice president of the Builders Association of South Florida, said ceasing development would not be smart while the region continues to pull itself out of “the worst recession since the Great Depression.”
But Rosenberg disagrees. “Those of us in traffic are already depressed,” he says, "of a totally different kind."
