The Next Two Years Decide Who Is Still Here in Ten

By Aida Nesimi, LEED AP ND

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Nobody describes their apartment when you ask why they love where they live. They describe the walk to the water, the banyan they park under in August, the guy at the counter who starts the order when he sees the car.

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We are building almost none of that. What is going up instead is sterile — streets with nothing on them worth stopping for, no shade between the front door and the corner, nowhere a person ends up by accident next to someone they didn't plan to see. That is not a matter of taste. Sterile places make people lonely, and lonely places lose people. A city that stops giving anyone a reason to be outside stops being a city and becomes an expensive place to sleep.

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I am a sustainability consultant. I run DAWN RE Enterprises Corp. here, I have spent two years working inside four South Florida city governments, and I hold LEED accreditation in neighborhood development — the standard that grades a place rather than a building: whether streets connect, whether a kid can walk to school, whether rain has somewhere to go. I trained at Harvard's Graduate School of Design and taught high school science before any of this.

I wrote this city a plan covering every neighborhood on my own time and my own money and gave it to staff and the Commission, because I chose this place and intend to raise my family in it. I also sit on the City's Sustainability Advisory Board, so I am in that building most weeks.

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Here is the sequence I keep watching. First it costs too much to live here. Forty-nine of every hundred households in Broward County already earn less than it takes to get by — the line cooks, the teachers, the nurses, the dispatcher who answers when you dial 911. Then the jobs thin out, because a company stays where it can hire people who can afford to live nearby. Then the young leave, because they have the least holding them in place. I have been to those goodbye dinners. One lease at a time, quietly, people who wanted a reason to stay and never found one.

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A city that loses those people loses its workforce, its customers, and its tax base at the same time. And the tax base is exactly what pays for everything we say we want. This August the City projected losing about $17 million in 2028 and roughly $27 million the year after — close to what ten thousand homes pay this city in taxes. The two options on the screen were cut services or raise rates and fees. Nothing else.

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Which things get protected is being settled now, in this year's meetings. Tree planting and park upkeep go first every time, usually in the neighborhoods with the least shade already. We save a few hundred thousand dollars and buy ourselves a hotter summer, a street nobody walks down, and a drainage bill. On April 12, 2023, two feet of rain closed this city in a day and put water in living rooms that had never flooded. Protecting us from the next one is a $1.6 billion program, plus more than a billion to rebuild the water plant, which arrives on your water bill. Much of that was avoidable. Soil and tree roots move water for free until we pave over them and buy a weaker replacement made of pipe.

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What makes this maddening is that almost nobody wants the outcome we are getting. Residents ask for the same handful of things year after year. Builders spend hundreds of thousands on drainage and traffic studies before breaking ground. But approvals here take years and promise nothing, so the safe forgettable project is the only rational one to file — and residents end up in the back row watching their own street get decided without them. Two groups who want nearly the same thing spend a decade losing to each other.

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There is a way out that costs no one more. Publish the standards before an application arrives — how streets connect, where the shade goes, where the water goes, what belongs on the ground floor — and put the projects that meet them at the front of the line. The state took away our power to say no. It never took away our power to say yes faster. Certainty is the one thing a city can still hand out for free, and it is worth more to a builder than anything we no longer have the authority to demand.

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The distance between here and there is smaller than people assume. The neighborhoods I have studied are not short of buildings. They are short of a park within a half-mile walk, a tree every fifty feet, a grocery you can reach without a car, and a corner worth standing on. A block of shade trees costs less than a block of drainage pipe and does part of the same job.

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Protecting this place and paying for it were never opposites. Neighborhoods people stay in, jobs that last, and a tax base strong enough to survive the next storm are the same project. Fort Lauderdale gets built either way. The only question is whether we build the version people move toward or the version they move through — and that is being answered right now, in ordinary meetings, on ordinary streets, by the people who live on them. My generation intends to stay here. We would like something worth staying for.

Aida Nesimi, LEED AP ND, is a sustainability consultant and Principal of DAWN RE Enterprises Corp. in Fort Lauderdale, and a member of the City of Fort Lauderdale's Sustainability Advisory Board. A trained science teacher turned real estate professional specializing in sustainable development, she lives in Fort Lauderdale with her Cavapoo, Joy.

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