Florida’s Growth Management Experience: From Top-Down Direction to Laissez Faire Land Use

Abstract

Land use and development pose fundamental long-term governance challenges for city regions across the world. This chapter traces the recent history of reforms in Florida’s growth management regime, advancing understanding of the containment tools employed by cities and the strategies that underlie these configurations. Utilizing surveys of local government planners from three time periods (2002, 2007, and 2015), the chapter examines land-use choices before and after the Great Recession and a state-level deregulatory reform of Florida’s once-heralded growth management system in 2011 to examine variation in land-use regulations at the local level. The patterns have implications for future research and practice and suggest that the durability of land-management tools intended to stave off development and preserve open space may need to be carefully examined apart from smart-growth approaches which assume development is inevitable.