Comments by "coreycox2345" (@coreycox2345) on "How Miami's Real Estate Market Could be Hit by Sea Level Rise" video.

  1. After 30 years of being a planner, that isn't the half of it, Kollin011. Engineers typically have minimum safety standards specified and accepted by their professional organizations. The more site specific, the greater the potential liability, so this will often create an acceptance for not doing the stupid thing. The bigger the planning and/or the longer the time horizon, the fuzzier what people are willing to accept when the truth is not convenient to them. I spent years fighting against doing everything to codify not doing the right thing for the future, because it could have theoretically impacted their bottom line by a small percentage years into the future. These were issues that would have huge social environmental or economic impacts, but for other people in a different time. It was always a difficult batttle because most people do not have a good concept of these issues or their importance. Once the Homebuilders Associatin launched a massive ad homenem campaign where they faxed negative information about me to every local government planning agency in Arizona. Fortunately, the recipients were planners and I was known to them so it was probably a wash....it did damage, but it also caused many people to support me. I once had a woman fake being shoved by a planning comittee member and a scathing letter calling for my resignation appeared at the top of the editorial page the next day because I failed to protect her. It was a stunt. I have seen hundreds of stunts. I have met "environmental activists" who are actually doing it to extort some favour completely unrelated to the environment. (Also many wonderful environmental activists.) I have some crazy stories. I have always believed that, if people understood these things better, the short sighted tricks would not be so easily done. The complexity is what makes it difficult to get people to understand because there many trade offs between social, environmental and economic values. It is seldom a simple binary question. If the system was not corupted by economic greed, it would be less challenging to encourage more people to demand a sustainable balance.
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  2. Pathologically insane is a good way to put it, reflections observer. People continually choose to ignore unpleasant realities. They live on the fault line, in the hurricane belt, houses slide off cliffs, and buildings flood because it is inconvenient to think about these things if there is some competing goal. I see it more as a lack of public education and political will. There are many examples of exceptional planning that involves all kinds of stakeholders, and then the political decision goes a different way because it was all wired behind the scenes from the outset. This doesn't usually get a headline. It can discourage people from thinking that they can change public policy. I have also seen brilliant innovation from surprise activists cause change nobody expected. It is exciting to see something like that pickup allies and take off, as this is not the usual scenario. Pulling off such a thing takes a lot of planning to work. This has always been my favourite kind of planning.
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