My County's Award-Winning Smart Growth Plan is a Disaster. Here's Why.

Sarasota County, Florida, where I live, belongs on a short list of poster children for America's Growth Ponzi Scheme. A popular retirement destination on the Gulf of Mexico, we have an economy that is powered by real estate development. And for decades, we've kept the bulldozers running.

As the county's population has gone from about 75,000 in 1960 to 434,000 today, we've supersized roads, extended pipes, and built budget-busting freeway interchanges with little attention to long-term replacement costs. And those costs, especially for water and sewer infrastructure, are beginning to rear their heads. Our prevailing development pattern is insolvent: A 2008 study by Joe Minicozzi of Urban3 demonstrated that a typical residential townhouse development in Sarasota County would take 42 years to generate enough taxes to cover the cost of its associated infrastructure.

It might, therefore, surprise you to learn that Sarasota County is viewed as a trailblazer in the prevention of unchecked suburbanization. (Think of the way you'd be surprised if you learned Wisconsin was running an acclaimed public health campaign against the dangers of excessive cheese consumption.) This undeserved reputation can be traced to an award-winning, innovative growth management plan that the County government adopted in 2002, titled Sarasota 2050.

Unfortunately, the Sarasota 2050 plan has not remotely changed our growth trajectory or resulted in a better pattern of development. It’s a dismal failure.

The reason for this failure is simple but important to grasp. It’s that the best plan in the world can’t solve something that’s not a planning problem. What we have here is a problem of power: who has it, and who doesn’t.

Anatomy of an Award-Winning Plan

By the 1980s, fast-growing Florida was home to some of the most ill-conceived development schemes in American history, and discontent with haphazard growth had led to a powerful, populist backlash. Advocates pushed, often successfully, for growth controls and long-range planning. (I describe this history at greater length in a 2021 piece on a development controversy in Collier County, two hours south of Sarasota.)

It was in this context, in the 1990s, that Sarasota County initiated a massive effort to achieve a Grand Bargain among rural preservationists, environmentalists, developers, and existing land owners. It would be a master plan that would accommodate population growth, while breaking with Florida's history of indiscriminately carving up the countryside.

The resulting Sarasota 2050 plan allows new development in the eastern, predominantly rural portion of Sarasota County as long as it clusters into compact communities, called "villages" and "hamlets," in exchange for leaving nearby land permanently undeveloped. This is accomplished through a planning mechanism called a Transfer of Development Rights, or TDR. Think of it as a cap-and-trade scheme like carbon credits, but for development density.

Official county documents describe these requirements as promoting New Urbanism, a planning movement that aims to create walkable, compact communities where you can meet your needs locally, inspired by the traditional development pattern of pre-automobile cities and small towns. Villages, per the plan, were to be complete, self-sufficient communities. Each would be compact and walkable, have a village center with neighborhood-serving businesses, and a mix of housing types and price points. The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) praised Sarasota 2050, awarding it one of its 2003 Charter Awards. And for some time thereafter, the plan received accolades in the planning profession as an example of "smart growth."

The Gulf Between Theory and Practice

Unfortunately, calling something a “village” does not make it so. None of the development that Sarasota 2050 has produced is either New Urbanist or village-like in any ordinary sense of that word.

The northernmost of the designated 2050 "villages" is Waterside, itself a portion of gargantuan Lakewood Ranch, the second-fastest-growing master-planned community in the United States. (Ironically, it’s second to a mega-retirement community named, ahem, The Villages, also in Florida.) I've written about Lakewood Ranch and Waterside before (here, here, and here). The whole place is a turbo-charged version of everything we at Strong Towns critique about suburbia.

The prevailing thing you experience when you drive through Lakewood Ranch is distance. Incredible, alienating distance, with long stretches of nothing at all flanking the major roads in between entrances to gated communities and business parks. It’s a landscape of supersized roads, supersized parking, giant medians, noise walls, and retention ponds. It's impossible to even imagine walking anywhere as a means of transportation in Lakewood Ranch. The distances are so great that the idea is ludicrous.

Our local newspaper, picking up on the language associated with the 2050 plan itself, described Waterside upon its legal approval as "a New Urbanist-style community of 12 interconnected, walkable neighborhoods." It isn’t. This is what Waterside looks like on the ground:

And this is the eventual plan for Waterside:

What Waterside passes off as its village center—to meet the 2050 Plan’s requirements—is a strictly drive-to-retail and dining district where parking lots occupy twice as much space as buildings, more like a Hollywood set of a town center than the real deal.

These places are a far cry from "villages" in any sense of economic function. When you think of a real village, you think of a place where life is intensely local. People walk around. They work, shop, and socialize locally. They are embedded in a community.

The truth is that there is no shortcut to a village, absent the incremental development process that produced every real village on earth. You need to start with a core that has some intrinsic reason to exist, some source of economic gravity, and then build outward from there.

Everyone who buys a new home in eastern Sarasota County is buying it on the outer edge of a car-dependent region in which most of the jobs and amenities are not especially near that home. Such a place cannot help but be a bedroom community, even if it’s called a “village” or even looks like one superficially.

Who Has the Power?

The most brilliant “village” design concept was never going to overcome that regional context. Thus, the thing that has most shaped Sarasota 2050’s results is not its land-use vision—a set of impossible promises—but its political economy. That is, who has the power, and who has the money?

Whom does this plan empower? One observation is that the Sarasota 2050 framework is extremely complicated. And like every complicated bureaucratic system, it favors an insiders’ club.

There is absolutely no way to do a small project within the 2050 framework. It’s only suitable for massive communities built over time frames measured in decades. You will spend several years and a million dollars in attorneys' fees just on planning and approval, and executing your Transfer of Development Rights. The players who can pull this off are, exclusively, about four large development companies with immense political power, and a similarly tiny insider’s club of large landowners—mostly former cattle-ranching or citrus-growing families whose land is now worth far more in speculative suburban development value than it ever would be as working agricultural land.

The insiders' club holds all the cards. They have a profitable business model, and little incentive to deviate from it, at least as long as movers flush with cash keep pouring into Florida from Northern states.

Virtually from day one, the 2050 plan has been bent and amended to accommodate these developers’ preferences. Major changes pushed through in 2014 over significant public protest removed some requirements for housing diversity, allowing more of a monoculture of single-family houses than what was originally envisioned. They made it easier for village "centers" to be strip-mall style retail plazas close to major roadways, rather than true neighborhood centers. And they neutered a pay-as-you-go requirement called fiscal neutrality. In 2018, developer Pat Neal successfully petitioned to allow a village to lack a commercial center altogether. Neal had previously petitioned successfully for a gated community to be allowed.

And in 2022, Lakewood Ranch developer Rex Jensen approached the County to request that it fully dispense with the core of the plan: the compact, walkable village concept. Jensen wants lower density—a very typically exurban two homes per acre over a tract of 4,000 acres (about six square miles). For this proposal, county commissioners lauded him from the dais as a "visionary," and directed planning staff to work directly with Jensen on creating a new set of rules for a "village transition zone" which would lack a town center (residents can drive the several miles to Waterside Place), include gated communities, and have a "suburban as opposed to urban landform."

In other words, twenty years into the Sarasota 2050 experiment, we are abandoning even the pretense that this plan is supposed to produce anything other than paint-by-numbers suburbia, extending deep into rural areas.

You can argue that Sarasota 2050 was co-opted, but it's very hard to imagine a world in which a plan like this isn't co-opted by pre-existing development interests. University of South Florida planning professor Evangeline Linkous makes this point in her research on the "political ecology of exurbia" in Sarasota. Large-scale subdivision developers have a lot of concentrated political power (they are the dominant campaign donors in all local elections here) and have used it effectively against a splintered coalition of opponents who can articulate what they’re against, but rarely what they’re for.

The big developers are clear on what they’re for. The next generation of the insider club’s vision is already planned: 30,000 people on 10,000 acres at Hi Hat Ranch, a giant tract of land that is somehow several miles even farther east (i.e., into rural territory) of what is currently the suburban/rural dividing line. Naturally, this behemoth is a Sarasota 2050 project. Trying to imagine stopping it feels about as hopeful as standing in front of a steamroller.

Planners Won’t Save Us

Some local advocates frame the problem as one of “poor planning” or “insufficient planning” for growth. They’re wrong. We’re up to our ears in meticulous, extremely long-range planning here in Florida. It’s just in service of a bad vision.

What we have is not a planning problem, and it never was. This is a power and money problem. The people with power and money continue to build in ways that enrich them in the short term, while saddling the public with long-term liabilities from a grossly insolvent development pattern.

If you want to stop this, you need to turn off the power, or turn off the money.

We could stop widening roads to facilitate new bedroom suburbs. Stop allowing new sewer and water hookups outside the urbanized area. Incremental development in already built-up areas of this extremely low-density region could meet demand for decades of projected growth without any expansion of the suburban fringe at all.

These are not planning and design problems. These are political and economic problems. The above answers are not popular with today’s power brokers.

Those who were around for the compromises that created Sarasota 2050 sometimes speak reverently of the “Multi-Stakeholder Group” of that era, as though it were King Arthur’s court. What’s less popular to say, but more true, is that any successful effort to actually stop the bulldozers of suburbia won’t come from a plan that represents a nuanced compromise among everybody in the room, but from one that barges into the room and flips the table.