A few thoughts after visiting Miami

No more sea, climate migrants, warm-weather architecture, walkability

Last week we took a daddy-daughter vacation to Miami, Florida. Seems like a lot of pro-freedom people moved there during COVID… actually, an inordinate number of the people I read or listen to seem to have made their way to Florida or Texas over the last few years. (You ever get the sense that you’re living on the wrong side of a wall that’s about to go up?) So I thought I’d check the place out, for the culture, and also for the wildlife because… tropics, everglades, come on. Here was the city on our way home, seen from the oldest A320 still operating in Delta’s fleet!

And here are a few thoughts.

And there shall be no more sea

Ya, we saw the ocean.

But the thought did come to me - perhaps we have all heard a hundred times now that, to the ancient Israelites, the sea represented unpredictability and danger. They were not water people. It is suggested that this should guide our interpretation of texts like Revelation 21:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea.

The point (it is thought) is not that there will be nowhere to swim after God remakes the Earth, but rather that (in this book of metaphors) danger will be gone. The sea represents danger.

It was easy for me to understand that, walking along the ocean. I have never lived near a large body of water, so I am not “used to them”. And yes, they do feel a little, well, ominous, be a good word. The ocean is big and mysterious and unpredictable. Me being me, I also have thoughts like "you know, the right sort of earthquake in the Caribbean would send a tsunami in our direction, and here we are, on foot, on a low lying island, what would we even do?" It’s cool, too (we saw stingrays and nurse sharks swimming right by the shore), but we cannot control the sea. So I understand the Israelite mindset there.

Where are my climate migrants at?

Here in Michigan, we are subject to semi-regular chatter that soon, “climate migrants” will be heading our way to escape the cooking planet. So don’t worry about the fact that our state is 40th in population growth (a slight population decline actually) since 2020, soon we’ll be inundated with people, or something.

I’ll believe it when I see it. The boat tour mentioned above was actually a “celebrity homes tour”… OK, I knew almost none of these people and mainly just wanted to get out on the water, but OK. The tour went around the “Venetian Islands”, artificial islands that constitute some of the most expensive neighborhoods in the United States. Put another way, people with plenty of money, including a fair number who preach that climate change is going to kill us all, are spending tens of millions of dollars to purchase for themselves a single home on low-lying islands in south Florida.

Hmm. Hmm. Shouldn’t they be building in Michigan or Maine or something? You know, it doesn’t prove anything, but actions do speak louder than words. If the people telling you climate change is an existential crisis aren’t living their own lives as if they believe that, you ought to at least notice.

And indeed, by appearances all of Miami was booming, there were cranes everywhere. OK, I didn’t take many good photos of them, but they were everywhere. The city, right now, ranks #3 in the US for number of buildings over 490 feet tall after New York and Chicago.

On a related note, something that surprised me actually was the lack of solar panels. Not many people seemed to have them, and we rode a lot of light rail, we were high enough to see any roof-top panels on homes. We saw, actually, almost none, I feel like they are trendier in our neighborhood in Michigan where they are also surely magnificently less effective. I don’t know what the explanation is there. Elevated danger from hail damage? Higher property values generally (much higher) somehow makes the addition of panels less desirable? Worse tax benefits? I dunno.

Always-warm architecture

Of course I had to compare Miami a bit to our week in India, and there were plenty of similarities. In fact, apparently a fair number of plants and animals native to India now live wild in Miami. Have some peafowl and a banyan tree, for example.

But I was especially charmed by the sort of architecture that you build when you know it’s never going to be cold outside - openings and “windows” with no glass pane, just open to the natural air, all the time. This was the upper floor of the Frost Science Museum - shielded from the rain, but not the air. (Note also the giant cruise ship in background.)

No photos, but we also saw several schools where the “hallways” were just covered outdoor passages, each classroom a sort of motel room. I just thought that was neat. (Why, friends, do we live in places where the air hurts our face, as they say.)

Walkability

We had no car there, we got around via walking, light rail, and Lyft. That made me think a bit about city design. You almost hate to give our city (East Lansing, Michigan) too much credit on account of how our elected leaders are mostly crazy people, but the city has actually done a good job in urban design, preserving to a significant degree neighborhood elementary schools and parks to which children can walk, good sidewalks, bike paths and lanes all over the place, and a growing downtown. And for its size, the Lansing area actually has good (exclusively buses) public transit. Our home according to WalkScore gives you some idea:

Miami I actually found less friendly on these points. You’d think denser development would bring amenities closer together and hence make them easier to walk to but… I found the city less friendly. It does have light rail, which we used, that is preferable to buses. But for one, there was just a whole lot of automobile traffic, which doesn’t help when you’re on foot. (We did also see a fair number of people who owned their own electric scooters, the kind you stand up on.) We walked through the Coconut Grove neighborhood and had to deal with sidewalks appearing and disappearing, vehicles parked across them, plus a lot of homes had fences right up the sidewalk so there was no way to divert into a lawn if you found your way blocked.

(OK, that particular stretch doesn’t look half bad - but you do see the “stay off my property and don’t look at me” fences.) Anyway. Made me wonder if moderate-sized cities (and having a university surely doesn’t hurt) might be the sweet spot for urban design.