TBO.com - Live in the moment

Balancing Home Plans, Nature's Gifts

By LINDSAY PETERSON lpeterson@tampatrib.com

Published: Oct 9, 2005

RIVERVIEW Joanne Bravo and her children pressed their noses into the porch screen to get a good look at the small alligator thrashing in the water, a fish locked in its jaws.

"We were pinned there, just watching," Bravo says. "It was the Discovery Channel, right next to my house."

It's part of what she and her husband needed when they moved last year from Chicago to south Hillsborough County, to the house by the pond on Longcrest Drive.

With two youngsters, 7 and 11, they wanted to be far away from the crowds, the sirens at night and, especially, the cold-to-the-bone winters that kept the family cooped up for months at a stretch.

"We wanted a quieter, sort of country life. We were so fed up with being indoors," Bravo says.

But the land around their wild corner in Riverview is changing hands and changing shape. People who grazed cattle, and who grew oranges and tomatoes for decades, have sold their properties to people who build houses, not just a few dozen here and there, but hundreds at a time.

Tampa's big back yard is changing fast. Concrete is starting to crowd the natural terrain that makes south Hillsborough unique, threatening the creatures that need connecting pathways to thrive and undercutting plans to put nature at the center of the area's life and economy.

"You talk about sense of place. We've got it," says Michael Peterson, a land-use lawyer from Apollo Beach, an advocate for developers who also argues for preservation.

Growth will obliterate that sense of place, many fear, if the county and other agencies don't set aside more land while they can, while it's still possible to expand wildlife havens and offer people an escape from the daily rush.

"This is a critical time for south Hillsborough," says Charner Reese, lead planner for the Hillsborough County Parks, Recreation and Conservation Department. "We have a wonderful potential down there that we're not really making plans for."

Meanwhile, more houses pop up every day.

The four-bedroom house on Longcrest was built on the eve of a slump. Big plans hatched during the development hype of the 1980s collapsed when growth fell flat in the early '90s.

South Hillsborough's leaders responded with a new business coalition and a plan to highlight what made the area special. One of those things, they concluded, was its natural beauty.

The group envisioned a new identity including businesses serving hikers, kayakers and people seeking a quiet weekend in the woods. The other strengths named were agribusiness, the retirement industry, and light manufacturing and distribution.

That year, 1993, the owner of the house on Longcrest sold it for $95,000, barely $1,500 over what he had paid two years earlier.

By 1999, the price had crept up 2.1 percent a year, to $107,000.

But something had happened by the time the Bravos found the house. In January 2004, they paid $139,900 -- 31 percent over the 1999 price, a rise of 6 percent per year. It was the find of a lifetime for the Chicago family.

"We snatched it up," Bravo says.

It was only a 15-minute drive from the credit union where her husband, Humberto, was hired as a manager. The ponds near their house were simple flood-control creations, but to Joanne and their children, they harbored a wealth of frogs, gators and birds, both long and short-legged.

The subdivision, Summerfield Crossings, edged a stretch of open land, and at night the Bravos would sit outside and hear strange animal cries, sounds that gave them chills. They didn't have the many parks and recreation centers they had in Chicago, but they felt surrounded by nature.

In their quest for peace and space, the Bravos helped push the population south of the Alafia River to about 128,000 in 2004 -- a rise of more than 30 percent in just four years.

About the time the Bravos began looking to Florida, 3 1/2 years ago, Peterson began to get the calls.

Members of old farm families needed advice. Home builders were calling. Not the middlemen or the speculators, but companies such as Centex, Pulte, Lennar. The ones with fleets of bulldozers.

Falling mortgage rates had people like the Bravos rushing at their chance to buy a home of their own in the sun. Here was south Hillsborough, with all that open land.

At the same time, the farmers were seeking a way out. For 10 years, they had been feeling the pinch of trade pacts that lifted tariffs and helped foreign competitors cut their prices.

So with Peterson's help, the families began selling. They're still selling, turning away from land they have tended for 50 or 100 years.

When Peterson came to south Hillsborough 20 years ago to work for a developer in Apollo Beach, he was eager to help create a community from nearly nothing.

He waited, and waited, getting a law degree along the way and working for developers elsewhere. He worked with local planning groups to try to ensure that when growth did spread south, the area was ready with residential zoning and road and trail corridors.

A practiced negotiator, ever businesslike, he can't suppress his impatience with people who rail against today's growth:

"I'm still surprised at the shock and awe that befall people when they learn the land around them has already been planned for development."

Still, he doesn't want to see south Hillsborough covered with homes. He may earn his living representing developers, but this is his back yard. He envisions an area like Brandon, but better, where interconnected streets keep traffic from tangling and where waterways, parks and trails create an atmosphere unlike any other across the state.

"We have the chance to become something special," he says. "Someplace we might even be proud of."

About 15 miles southwest of Peterson's realty office, kayakers maneuver a steep bank toward a narrow stream on a recent Sunday morning. Cicadas buzz in a riot of sound that soars, then drops to a din. Bushes enclose the curling band of water that pulls Mariella Smith's kayak into its rushing flow.

"Woo-hoo! It's really going fast, you guys," yells the kayaker just ahead.

Within minutes, a string of vessels is negotiating the coils of the Upper Little Manatee River. The waterway twists and turns west as it slowly widens to eventually join with Tampa Bay, where clusters of mangroves create dozens of wildlife shelters -- and where developers salivate over the possibilities.

"The Little Manatee River is the Everglades of Hillsborough County," Smith says, in her oft-given sermon of environmental advocacy. "I know that sounds dramatic, but it's our wild, pristine river."

It's why she and her husband came to Ruskin.

Seven years ago, they found a little house in a riverfront neighborhood, and practically gutted and rebuilt it to create space for Smith's graphic design business.

Other Ruskin residents have similar stories of finally finding a place where they could live quietly, run a small business, settle down for good.

So in 2003, when Hillsborough County began the latest round of community planning in Ruskin, a process involving residents across the county in setting new growth rules, Smith and many others showed up.

Their plea: Preserve our quiet, rural, waterfront community.

Not possible, rejoined Peterson, one of many lawyers and developers at the meetings. The rural life was fading fast. The future was suburbia. Only one question mattered: What kind of suburbia?

Much haggling focused on one project, an M/I Homes plan to replace 185 acres of orange trees between U.S. 41 and Tampa Bay with about 900 homes, including 300 town houses.

The Ruskin residents had been working on their community plan for eight months. They had watched the Hillsborough County Commission approve other developments nearby, including one that would put 900 homes on land bordering the Little Manatee River.

When the M/I proposal came before a zoning judge in June 2004, residents pleaded for a reprieve.

Stop and look, said one speaker, Andrew Keith. Houses are rising fast. But "there's an opportunity right now to create a gem in Ruskin ... to create something that is ecofriendly," he said.

Some lauded M/I's project. Most speakers opposed it -- not the entire development, but its size and density, and its location in a hazardous flood zone.

The next month, the commission approved the project, which M/I had reduced to 800 homes. It also agreed to increase some lot sizes, maintain the traditional grid street design and build a public bicycle trail. Still it's "too much, too soon," said one resident, Ron Wolfe, at hearing in July 2004.

The developer tried to appease residents, says Mark Spada, M/I's head of land acquisition in Tampa. But the final truth was this: Previous zonings gave it the right to build even more than it had planned, and it required the town houses to make the profit it sought.

"I have a minimum number of lots I have to deliver for the project to make sense," he says.

Many residents came away feeling nothing they could do would make a difference for Ruskin.

Then came a greater challenge.

Late last year, a Fort Myers developer proposed rezoning about 170 acres on the Little Manatee River for hundreds of homes and town houses.

It's a sensitive piece of property, with "environmental, as well as recreation, potential," county environmental lands manager Kurt Gremle said then. But years earlier, it had been zoned for development, and the county couldn't take that away.

Residents were so upset that one Sunday in January, dozens of them lined the road near the parcel in protest.

Three weeks later, the developer withdrew his plans.

From a county office overlooking downtown Tampa, Reese surveys a map of Hillsborough County showing land in preservation and land the county needs to connect the pieces.

She points to a square just south of the Alafia River, on the edge of Riverview, north of Ruskin. That's gone, she says, already approved for development.

"Developers are moving in. ... The pressure is increasing," Hillsborough parks planner Joel Jackson says.

Fifteen years ago, south Hillsborough leaders envisioned trails, waterways and parks across their communities. Today, the same dream anchors the community plans of both Ruskin and Riverview.

"We could be a hub for ecotourism," Peterson says. "Not just day hiking or canoeing. We could link significant parcels and create stops for campers. ... We could set up weeklong trips. Attract people from across the country.

"We have the land."

Over the years, south Hillsborough land owners have given or sold thousands of acres to the county for protection. South Hillsborough, in fact, has more preservation land than any other part of the county. It's a rough patchwork, much of it separated by housing developments, little of it beyond the Little Manatee River State Park managed for public use.

Ten years ago, the county created an extensive greenways system of protected natural areas and over time completed trails in north Hillsborough County.

But south of the Alafia River, the system is merely lines on a map and disconnected pieces of land preserved under various government programs. Little else has been done to create any kind of recreation corridor in south Hillsborough, says a parks department report from July that was requested by the county commission.

The department outlined what it would take to get started, including figuring out how to link the patchwork pieces and turn the entire area into something people can use.

So far, the commission has been silent on the report, even after receiving a plea from a south Hillsborough business coalition, the SouthShore Roundtable.

"Our group cannot help but notice the lack of identifiable [recreation] projects south of Brandon/FishHawk," it said, referring to last month's commission decision on how to spend $350 million in Community Investment Tax money. Only two significant recreation projects, Summerfield Sports Complex at $900,000 and FishHawk Sports Complex at $4 million, were on the list of improvements. Countywide, $5 million was approved for trails, which likely will benefit south Hillsborough.

"Only a few hundred thousand called for in the [parks department] report would establish a SouthShore greenways plan," said the letter, written by Peterson. "Another decade of nothing in SouthShore would be unconscionable."

Peterson thinks developers are the key to creating a recreation corridor. Many realize that having a park or trail on their property can boost the values of their homes. A few have donated land for small parks. But he agrees nothing major can happen until the county comes up with a solid plan.

No matter what, Smith, a member of the Sierra Club, sees trouble for Ruskin.

Last month, she saw yellow rezoning signs pop up near the Little Manatee River on the land whose rezoning she had protested in January. The developer was back, this time with a plan to give part of the land to the county in exchange for permission to build on the rest.

Smith is preparing for another fight.

Across the county, "development is not only eroding habitat at the edges. It's taking big bites out of the middle," she says. "This piece along the river is a crucial doorway" for animals trying to get from the open land south to preserves north of the river.

"I see bobcats, otters, foxes out there, diamondback terrapins. Are we going to cut them off, chop up their habitat, like we did with the panthers and the bears?

"If we don't do something different, all we're going to end up with are a few little parks with squirrels and rats. I have nothing against rats, but we need more than that."

There's one thing the Bravos miss. Their parks. Chicago has an extensive parks and recreation system that practically defines the city's neighborhoods.

"That's where everyone always met," Humberto Bravo says.

Near their neighborhood here, the Bravos have Vance Vogel Park, a collection of sports fields, recently upgraded but often crowded.

"Everything seems to be getting more and more crowded," Bravo says.

Bumper-to-bumper traffic on Summerfield Boulevard has lengthened his 15-minute morning commute to 30 minutes.

He shrugs, standing outside his front door on a quiet weekday evening as frogs swirl the waters in the pond. It's still his dream house, but he wonders what's ahead.

One thing he knows.

In 2004, builders applied for a record 11,455 single-family house permits countywide, nearly 13 percent in one census tract alone, the one that includes Bravo's community.

"I don't want to say it's overpopulated. But it's getting more urban," he says.

His wife dreads the construction. She worries mostly about the children and the traffic. But she wonders, too, about the family of ducks she and her family watched grow up in the pond across the street.

And the turtles her children help across the road.

"I'm still surprised at the shock and awe that befall people when they learn the land around them has already been planned for development.""

MICHAEL PETERSON Land-use lawyer