We Live Here! Florida Community Studies Consortium

                                                                Charles Cobb Oral History

                                                                Conducted by Greg Bush

                                                                        29 June 2004

Charles Cobb: [b. 1936] I came [to Coral Gables] in late ’71. The challenge was to be the new CEO of a small company then called Arvida. It had a lot of land in South Florida, but had very little management, very little capability in building communities. I was given the challenge to build a management team and to build some great communities for Arvida and South Florida. I took that challenge and we have loved it ever since.

My two sons are San Franciscans, born in San Francisco, fifth generation Californians. I’m a fourth generation Californian, and they are fifth. They have absolutely no interest in California. It really is interesting. One of them went to Harvard and to Tulane. He’s an architect of the Harvard Business School, so he thinks Miami, New Orleans, and Boston. The other son, who’s an investment banker in New York, went to SMU. He thinks Miami, Dallas, and New York. None of them think West or even California, even though they’re fifth generation Californian. The [importance] of that is our family loves Florida. We’re Floridians, and even though we were fourth generation, my wife and I both are fourth generation Californians, we’re Floridians all the way and we love Coral Gables and have enjoyed our thirty-plus years here.

One of the things that I’ve tried to do in the little bit that I’ve developed in Coral Gables is to enhance. I live in part of Coco Plum that is called Tahiti Beach. Tahiti Beach is the furthest island to the East. It’s a separate island that we developed into thirty home sites with a separate guard gate and separate tennis facilities and beach and other elements. The whole plan for the Arvida part of Coco Plum is [George] Merrick inspired with the turning circles and the other elements and the landscape treatment and stone treatment is all Merrick inspired. We tried to continue that, but also this office building which we built. You can see it’s very Merrick inspired. George Merrick was a great planner. He could have very well been a project manager for Arvida. He was that good; I say that as a joke.

I guess the common dynamic [in planning, development, education, and politics] is this passion of building communities, the passion of making communities better. That’s the lifelong centerpiece. That’s what I’ve done most of my professional life. To build communities, you have to be involved in politics. I would say I’ve been in politics for most of the fifty years of my professional life building communities, both before I arrived here thirty-plus years ago and thirty years since then. I’ve been to maybe 200 or 300 planning or zoning meetings and have made presentations endless times.

The community of Westin was seven years, hundreds and hundreds of meetings. It was most recently ski resorts that Cobb Partners has done since Arvida were five-year approval processes. Politics has been an integral part of building communities. The part of education is also an integral part of building a community. The best communities have the best education. That’s it’s truism. They have also the best parks, the best transportation, but most importantly they have the best education. You don’t successfully build communities without the education component. It is central to building a community.

I’ve been involved in secondary education a great deal. I started the second charter school in Miami-Dade County at Barry University. It has been very successful. I’ve been involved with education at every level.

My parents were upper-middle class. One, my dad, was an accountant and went to Stanford. My mother went to Fresno State and was an English teacher and was a newspaper reporter. She probably was the more aggressive of the two, so if I maybe picked out the most competitive of the two it would be her also. I was very involved with a lot of student activities in high school and I was an athlete, a football player. I was a track athlete. I was one of the best high hurdlers in the nation in high school and I was a pretty good basketball player and other sports. Sports were an important part of my life. I went to Stanford, which was about three hours away in northern California, where I was also involved with a lot of different student activities and athletics.

My reputation--it embarrasses me--is that I won a couple high hurdle races and hit all ten hurdles and broke them and still won the race. I was a powerful football player, a powerful hurdler, a powerful basketball player, probably a powerful businessman. I’m pretty intense, pretty up front. You might ask how that personality and skill, how did it go over in Washington, how did it go over in embassies as the ambassador. I think pretty well. In fact, I was surprised how people in today’s day like you to say it like it is, up front, summarize get to the point quickly, focus. That’s appreciated in a lot of places in Washington and appreciated in diplomatic life.

First, as an undergraduate economics major I really didn’t get much professional training at all. It was after my Naval career that I went back to Stanford Graduate School of Business, so most of [my] professional leadership was through the MBA program at Stanford, not undergraduate.

I was an officer initially on an aircraft carrier. In the middle of that capability, I was allowed to compete in international activities. I competed all over the world as a track athlete. I was invited to Japan, Europe, and other places where I competed. Then in 1960, I was the alternate on the U.S. Olympic Team. I was the fifth best hurdler in the world, but I was only the fourth best in the United States. The United States could only send three athletes, so I did not get to compete in Rome in 1960. There were three better than I was. It was disappointing, not that I didn’t make the team so much as the rule that each country is limited only to three. I thought that was an unfair rule, but that’s how the rules were.

[My degrees were completed in] ’58 undergraduate and ’62 business school. My specialty was corporate finance so I was involved with a professional investment management firm, managing large investment pools, pension funds, that kind of thing in the early 60s. Then the chief financial officer of Kaiser asked me to come and help them with some mergers and acquisition work, and then also to be the chief financial officer of this small real estate subsidiary that they were starting. As that got bigger, it got a more substantive position. Later, I became president of a couple their subsidiaries and built some pretty significant new towns in California and Arizona [in my] late twenties.

[One was Vail Ranch]; it was called Ranch of California. It’s a 95,000 acre new town that we started. Today, it’s a community of over 100,000 people, halfway between Riverside in the eastern part of Los Angeles County and San Diego on Interstate 15. I go back a lot to see it and I’m very proud of what has evolved there. It’s one of the major new towns in the United States.

The unique part was that it focused on that transition between suburban and rural country. It was many homes on five to ten acres with citrus, or five to ten acres with avocados, or five to ten acres with vineyards. We went in and planted wholesale vineyards that were commercially viable, and then we would sell tracts of five to ten acres where people would manage the vineyard for them. They could live in the middle of a beautiful vineyard, or they could live in the middle of beautiful citrus, only on ten acres. The whole thing was managed in 200-acre citrus, or of an avocado orchard of ten acres.

It was an opportunity for people to escape the urbanization of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, but have a commute of about an hour depending on where they worked in Los Angeles, but could live in a unique, rural setting. Also, they could have the avocado orchard or the winery vineyard work economically. It was a unique concept and very successful. It’s been copied by a lot of other people, but that was the main element. A high percentage of those 100,000 people live on large agricultural plots.

At the time, there was a lot of investor packages being put together which we didn’t think made real economic sense to the investor. Here, we could put together a package where you could get a residence and get an investment that made sense. Then there was the pollution of Los Angeles. It was worse then that it is now. People were leaving the Los Angeles basin in large numbers, wealthy people that wanted this kind of a lifestyle or even upper-middle income people who wanted this kind of a lifestyle. It was something that responded to the market, and I think we did a good job aesthetically and architecturally and good planning to develop a good master-planned community.

It’s all the elements of master planning. Team building, marketing, good market research, good aesthetic planning, good financial planning. We set up some very unique improvement districts--water district, a sewer district, conservation districts, unique ways to preserve land, environmentally sensitive land with various kinds of trusts. It was all the elements of a master-planned community. We did it at this 90,000 acre new town.

[Henry Kaiser] was about 90 at the time, but I had a couple meetings with him. It was always a pleasure to be with him. tell you one little cute story. This had nothing to do with real estate, this was my earlier years at Kaiser. I was helping the team finance a new product that would take aluminum foil and it would roll it exactly to how much foil you’d need and have some sort of a process where you tore it off. People had complained about aluminum foil and that it was so awkward to deal with. We were creating this, and it was going to be like a $50-$100 million launch of this product.

They needed to get some financing, and I was helping them do it. I went and met with him. He was asking the market research guys how long is it gonna take, and I forget how many days they said or weeks that it was gonna take to do this, and he just slammed down his book. He said, “Look, I built a ship in two days and it takes you guys weeks to do a funny, little teeny report!” He was a dynamic, focused, hard-charging executive that I really admired. I’ve met a lot of them but not many more focused and demanded and tough-minded than Henry David Kaiser. He built dams and built roads and built everything.

We did another large [planned community] in Scottsdale, Arizona. It’s called the McCormick Ranch. It’s a 4,000-acre community that we built, and right now it’s right in the center of Scottsdale. Scottsdale is all-encompassed around the McCormick Ranch. At the time, we were on the North edge of the city and it was zoned for agriculture. We wouldn’t get an acre in 4,000 acres, so we had to go in and convince the city fathers that a planned community was in the best interest of Scottsdale and that more agriculture was not necessarily in their best interests. We were successful in that and we built a lot of unique things there.

We focused on Arabian horses. Arabian had always been an important part of Scottsdale. Today, it’s a very important part of McCormick Ranch, one of the major show areas for Arabian horses in the world which we built in as part of that community. We put in five or six golf courses and other elements to make it an attractive community in Scottsdale.

Arthur Davis was the founder of Alcoa in addition to the Aluminum Company of Canada. He founded both companies, and they in the 1950s were the two dominant aluminum companies in the world. Kaiser, Reynolds, and others weren’t very big at the time. They were really post-war developments. Alcoa and the Aluminum Company of Canada, Alcan, were the two dominant companies in the world. The Justice Department of the United States told Arthur Davis you’ve got to sell your controlling interests in one or the other. He decided to sell his controlling interests and all of his stock in Alcan. In the mid-1950s, he was as wealthy as Bill Gates is today, all cash by the dollar standards of the day. He was an incredibly wealthy man, a man about five-feet tall.

What he started doing with his money, he had no children and so he retires from Alcoa where he still owned Alcoa stock but he has all the cash from the Alcan sale. He starts buying stuff. He buys ten percent of Dade County. He buys ten percent of Broward County. He buys the Boca Raton Hotel and Club and five percent of Palm Beach County. He buys the Isle of Pines in Cuba, a high percentage of that. He buys the south half of Aleuthra. He buys other large holdings, and then he buys companies that help a lot of their agricultural properties. Then he buys packing plants, ice plants, fruit distribution companies, and he owns all of this stuff. He buys a lot of this on mortgages. He buys some with cash, which he has in abundances, and he buys some of these thirty and forty year mortgages that will go until he’s 120 years old. He has all these mortgages, he has no cash flow, because they’re basically undeveloped properties, so his advisors said he should create a company. He created Arvida.

He then sells to the public forty percent. It becomes a public company, and he owns sixty percent. Well, a few years after that he dies and his estate sells the sixty percent controlling interest in this public company, sells it to the Pennsylvania Railroad. A few years after that, the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central Railroad merge to form the Penn-Central. The merger was in 1968.

In 1970, they have our nation’s greatest bankruptcy. Mismanagement of dramatics, pension funds lose money. It was just a big financial crisis in our country in 1970. Of course, all the management of Penn-Central was fired. This bankruptcy estate is set up to control this process, and one of the assets in this is the sixty percent ownership of controlling interest of this public company Arvida. A board of directors is found and they go on a national search. They call me, and I say, “Do you think I’m crazy? Leave California? Go to a Florida company with a bankrupt parent?” Et cetera. The more I looked at it, the more I saw these wonderful properties in Dade County and Boca Raton properties. I came down about three times. Each time I got more and more enthused.

I’d been here a couple times. I knew the area. I just liked California better. I was a fourth generation. The more I saw, the more I could see this has a lot of potential. Now, I forgot one point of the story. Arvida did not have it’s own management. It hired a consulting firm from Jacksonville to manage it. It had no management, so when this new group starts to manage the assets of the Penn-Central they decided they needed to get a CEO and at least take over management. The more I could see these assets, I was sure I could hire the management team. I was sure I could get the financing, even though our parent company would be in bankruptcy we as a company could be a strong company. In the end, we were able to and we created a superb management team and created good momentum, then came the recession of ’73 and ’74.

The first step was that they handed me a book that a prominent consulting firm has prepared. This prominent consulting firm said the way you make good returns with Florida real estate is you go on the installment land sale business. You go into a business similar to what a general development was doing, and similar to what Bill Tony was doing, and similar to what other installment land sales were doing. You’re familiar with that concept. Some people call that community development; I don’t. You start the elements of a little bit of a community and then you sell on an installment basis thousands and thousands of lots with no improvements.

I just said that this document that you’ve built is worthless. If you want me to be the CEO to do that, then I’m not your man because I don’t think that’s a good business. I don’t think that’s in the best interests of the citizens of Florida. I don’t think it’s in the best interest of the shareholders of Arvida. I said I want to build real communities with real improvements and not be involved in the installment land sale business at all.

Penn-Central went along with that. They didn’t know the business. They were relying on this consulting firm. If you looked at past financial results, that was true. Previously to 1971, the people that had made a good return had been in this business. It was bad business. It wasn’t a good deal for the consumer. It wasn’t a good deal for the company. It wasn’t a good deal for the state. You can fly over Florida today and you can see it’s unfortunate.

Now, a kind of interesting thing happened to me about the same time. I was a Republican then and a Republican now. Ruben Askew had just been elected governor. He’d been elected governor on a very anti-business platform. He had been for a corporate income tax, and he had been for a process of statewide zoning to stop some of these abuses.

The business community was adamantly opposed to Ruben Askew. During the election, I think he got very little of the business vote. The more I thought about this idea of a statewide zoning process or a development of regional impact, I thought that’s what Florida needs. I became the only real estate person in the state, who was a Republican, supporting Ruben Askew. I think I had an influence on him and suggested that it should focus on regions rather than states.

It should focus on and be a south Florida regional planning council. They should issue developments of regional impact, DRIs. We knew that it was going to cost $1 million to $3-4 million to do the planning and go through the year process for each of these DRIs. We knew that was gonna happen, but Arvida was gonna do it anyway. So this was an opportunity for Arvida to force the rest of the industry to meet it’s standards of quality. It was to our advantage to do it, and so in many ways you could argue that it was [to] Arvida’s advantage. In retrospect it was, even though at the time a lot of people were saying it’s not wise for Arvida to take that position. I was convinced it was the right thing for Florida and it was the right thing for our company.

A lot of the home builders who were gonna now have to go through this process and with smaller capitalization and less property [were angry]. So you might argue that it was unfair to the small guys and it was to the advantage of the big guys who could afford the $1-2 million on planning and the wait time to build these master-planned communities.

I thought it made terrific business sense. I thought we were right and that’s what we did. It played out to our advantage, because we had these large parcels. The only thing that maybe didn’t play to our advantage, and to some cases like Westin, I think I told you before that it took like seven years to get approval. It might have taken seven years to get approval without a DRI. It might have taken longer, and in fact we might not have ever gotten it approved without the regional planning council. Westin was clearly in the best interest of the region. It was gonna create more jobs, provide more industrial properties, more commercial properties in addition to residential and resort properties. It was good for the region, and in the end the Broward County Commission saw that but it took a long time to get it approved.

The first [development] was in Boca Raton. The initial focus was Boca West, a community with four golf courses. At the time, it had zoning for over 10,000 homes. We reduced that to about 5,000, and eventually we only built about 3,000 homes. By any standards, although we only built twenty-five percent of our allowed density it is still a very large community around four golf courses. That was very successful. Sports was an important part of that. We had the Pepsi Grand Slam tennis and some other things. People associated Boca West with the best of golf and the best of tennis in America, and it was. It was one of the best golf courses and it was one of the best tennis facilities in America. That was very successful, and then we started the Town Center Mall.

It’s hard for people in South Florida to visualize this, but I remember the original key tenant was Burdines. I-95 would not get to Boca Raton for three years. You can’t imagine that today. We were hoping it was coming, and Burdines was hoping it was coming. They wouldn’t open the store until I-95 was there, because people couldn’t get there. That was a long time ago to think about I-95 wasn’t even there.

Boca Raton was an important focus, but then we also started on Boca Westin as I just talked about. We also started building some communities in Dade County. We started on a small community called Sable Chase, which was right across the street from the Dade Community College South campus. We then built, down the road there, a little community called The Crossings. Then we also started in Long Boat Key, and after a couple years then we started acquisition policy and went into Atlanta with communities and went into North Carolina. We went to southern California.

That’s just called building a company. You have good people and you have good finances and you have a good research team and good marketing team and good finance team and good public relations team. We were bringing on some very good, very capable people. Kind of interestingly, very few with real estate experience on purpose. We were building a new company with the best consumer marketing people we could get and we brought some of the marketing people from Hunt Tomatoes and some from Avis Rent-a-Car and another from Burger King.

We were looking for skills. It’s kind of like a philosophy that Don Shula used to have. You didn’t go looking for left tackles and right tackles and tight ends. You looked for the best athlete you could recruit, and then you figure out how to fit him in. That’s what we were doing. We were looking for the best athlete that had the best skills, and then we figured we’d give them an assignment and see how they could do.

I’ve had a lot of debates with Reg Walters over the years who was I think head of planning most of those years in the 70s and 80s [in Dade County]. For one, I was not a supporter and had been an opponent of an artificial development line two or three miles east of Chrome Avenue--the Urban Development Boundary line. Here we have an unusual situation where there are four-story and five-story buildings at the Urban Development Line, and then cows and incredibly, artificially high prices so people can’t buy a single-family house in South Florida in the Dade County area. They have moved to Broward County where they can buy a single family house at a reasonable price, which has dramatically hurt Dade County’s urban development in my judgment.

I understood the rationale to force more people to use the rapid transit, and to force more in-fill. I understood the theory, but it didn’t work because you can’t force somebody to live in an apartment or you can’t force somebody to go into a part of the community they don’t want to live. They just went to another suburban area of Broward, and so Broward has had dramatic growth and now they take I-75 into their urban workplace and they live in their single-family house in Westin.

You just look at the in-fill population numbers of real people working. I’m not talking about South American investors and speculators and others that are buying a high percentage of these downtown properties. I’m talking about the people that have jobs and have families. They want a piece of ground. I had been a little bit at odds with a lot of the planners and with a lot of our mutual friends who feel that we have allowed too much sprawl in Miami-Dade County. I don’t think we’ve allowed enough sprawl.

[The watershed argument] is just not right. It’s factually wrong. We have John DeGrove and other expert water people who will tell you if we manage our water properly, we have abundant water in south Florida and we are not water constrained. Now some parts of Florida are water constrained, but not South Florida.

I happen to think [moving water around] is a good idea, by the way. That was one of the wise things we did in California while I was there. We did allocate the water resources to all the people with a pretty expensive system of redistribution of water. We have these water management districts which are fiefdoms with almost no statewide supervision and almost no statewide allocation. You cannot allocate X cubic feet of water from this district to that district which is not in the best interest of that state.

I’m saying this as it just relates to water. For planning purposes, I still think it should not be statewide zoning. For water, I think there needs to be a statewide water plan. I have been the chairman of something called the Florida Council of 100, which is a group of 100 of the largest businesses and the most influential business leaders in the state. We worked closely with all the governors, including Governor Bush, and we have made a recommendation that there needs to be more of a statewide perspective on water management. I think that’s the controversy that you’re describing, too.

[In my relationship with Arvida], there were several different steps. The first step was in 1976 after about five years here, Penn-Central came out of bankruptcy, came out as a pretty healthy company. It sold all of it’s remaining rail assets to the government for ConRail, and then it also had some tax benefits and some other things. So Penn-Central became a pretty healthy, successful company.

First [thing] they did was to buy out the forty percent interest that the public owned in Arvida, so Arvida became a wholly-owned subsidiary. At the same time, they started to rationalize some of the businesses. They asked me to be the president of what was called the “living leisure” group of companies at Penn-Central. It was Arvida, it was the Six Flags Amusement Park company, which has Six Flags in several different states. They’re the second largest company to Disney in amusement parks, so I was responsible for that. Then we had some health spas and other real estate companies, and then we had real estate on Park Avenue that Penn-Central owned and some air rights and some other things. It had been a pretty complicated thing that I was in charge of for several years. Then they asked me to be the chief operating officer of Penn-Central in charge of all of it’s businesses.

I had to move to New York. My family stayed here in Coral Gables, and my wife continued to practice law here. I commuted from New York during those years. One of the first things we did was we sold a couple of the companies. We sold Six Flags and a couple other companies, and then the decision was that we were gonna sell Arvida. The way we were gonna sell Arvida was we were gonna go public again, and I was gonna stay with Penn-Central, but I was gonna continue to be the chairman of this publicly-held Arvida.

In the middle of these negotiations, Equitable Life Insurance Company made an offer to buy Arvida. Since I was the director, they had to give me twenty-four hours notice of that board meeting that would have approved the sale of Arvida to Equitable. What I did was I met with the Bass brothers of Texas in Fort Worth that night and convinced them that they should make an offer in partnership with me and my management team.

The next morning I arrived at eight o’clock and the executive committee of the board said no, we’re not gonna do the deal. We think we’d rather sell to Equitable. Furthermore, with the board meeting at five o’clock we don’t think you oughta come because you have a conflict of interest. I said, “No, I’m gonna be there because I want to make sure the company is sold for the highest price. I’m prepared, and my group is prepared to pay the highest price.” Fortunately, I convinced several of the directors to go along with me.

We then made an agreement to buy Arvida with the Bass brothers. There were no more public shareholders. There was a raider whose name was Saul Steinberg, and he bought a lot of Disney stock and he said he was gonna split Disney into three pieces. He was gonna liquidate it. He was gonna turn it into a private company, and a group of his partners were gonna do the real estate and a group of his other partners were gonna do the theme parks. He was gonna sell to Kirk Kerkorian and MGM the Disney studios and the film rights.

The Disney people were all concerned about that. One of the problems they had was they were not developing their real estate enough. The view was if they bought Arvida, plus the strong shareholders like the Bass Brothers, that would be in their interests. Well that’s what they did. We sold Arvida to Disney and then I went on the board of directors of Disney and took over the responsibility of developing the real estate of Walt Disney World property and the Disneyland property, and then purchasing the EuroDisney land in France.

Disney had been looking at that for several years before we joined them, and there was a consensus that Japan had already been developed at that time. There was three at that time. There was a park in Japan, the one in southern California, and the one in Florida. The fourth one in the world that had enough income and had enough critical mass it was felt was Europe. It became obvious to several of us that the best site was near Paris.

What Charles DeGaulle had done is--talking about community planning--he brilliantly in 1958 designated six new town sites around the edge of Paris. He made sure the transportation worked that way and the rails worked that way, and so one of these new towns we, as Disney, bought. Four-thousand acres--it had very attractive prices of agricultural land because [agricultural prices] had been frozen in 1958. It was owned by the government, so it was a very attractive opportunity for us. We were in charge of the hotel development and all the other real estate development activities except the theme parks. There was another division called “Imagineering,” which actually designed the parks.

I guess in terms of actually building communities in the country, I guess I probably have been responsible for more than anybody. I’ve just been at the right place at the right time, with Kaiser and then Arvida and then with Disney and then with Cobb Partners and the things we’ve done. With Cobb Partners, I’ve just had the pleasure to oversee or be the key responsible person for about thirty to thirty five of these large, new town projects. It’s been an honor to do that, but I’ve only been the chairman. I had a lot of really good people doing a lot of good things, a lot of good planners and builders and designers. I was just the overseer and the challenger and the energy, kind of like Henry J. Kaiser was.

I can recall a couple [ethical dilemmas], and I’ll tell you how I dealt with them. I’ll just take two that I can think of in the mid 70s. The first is political contributions. When I arrived, I was advised that most people in the development industry would give money to their employees and have them make political contributions. I said that’s illegal, you can’t do that! Somebody said, look, you’re just an ethical person. A director of my company said, “You are an idealistic Californian. You don’t know how the old South works.” I said, “I don’t know if I’m an idealistic Californian or not, but that’s just wrong.” Then Watergate was six months or a year later, so I went to that one person about me being an idealist.

I’ll tell you another one where I maybe copped out. In Boca Raton, we came up with this great plan with moderate-cost housing and everything that you would want in a great new town. The city of Boca Raton said we don’t want any moderate-cost housing. We don’t want apartments. We want single-family lots throughout. Higher tax base, wealthier people, and we did the back of the envelope penciling. We concluded that would be better for Arvida, and that’s what we did. We made more money by going along with politicians and their political thing. We copped out.

In retrospect, that kind of bugs me that I copped out. I did what was the easiest thing and made the most money for Arvida, so Boca Raton today is a wealthy place. Most of the employees at the Boca Raton Hotel & Club have to commute from Deerfield or somewhere else. Most of the employees at the Arvida Park & Commons have to commute. They can’t get housing and they can’t get apartments, because the selfish city commission in the 70s wouldn’t allow us to do what we wanted to do and we cooperated with them.

We could have fought it! We fought it for a while in the courts and we finally compromised. We fought it in the courts for about a year, but then we just compromised and said, “Look, let’s go along with them! Let’s just build all single-family.” I wasn’t sure we could sell all the single-family houses, but it turned out we could.

Chere has never been a large-scale project that I know of in the history of the United States that wasn’t controversial. There are always people who want no growth, who want that field to stay right the way it is. They are enjoying that field. They don’t want any more houses or any more traffic. Every project is a balancing of what ever the property rights of the individual that owns the property [wants]. What is in the best interests of the community, what kind of housing do we need, what kind of schools do we need, what kind of water and sewer do we need, what kind of parks do we need, and how does this community deal with the needs of the community. It’s always complicated and it always takes a lot of time, it always takes a lot of meetings. There’s never been one that has not been controversial that I know of.

Boca Raton is a pretty complicated place, no more than Coral Gables or no more than Long Boat Key, Florida, or no more than some of the ski resorts that I’ve been involved with in little towns. Every community sees itself as unique, distinctive, and a high percentage of the community doesn’t want it to change one iota. It’s controversial when you have a plan to improve it and make it better.

[I heard of the Graham brother and Miami Lakes] immediately when I came here in the 70s! They had started ahead of me, so I immediately struck up a friendship with Bill Graham and then Representative Bob Graham. He was not yet a senator or not yet a governor. I had a lot of meetings and conversations with them, discussing what they had done and how they had created a very good community feeling. I felt they were one of the leaders in the United States in building communities. I admired them then, and I still admire them very much.

We actually hired their planner from Pittsburgh to be our initial planner on Westin. We [include public space] in every community including the new community I live in on Tahiti Beach, where we have a park on a lot, one little lot which could be sold for $3 million. It is the best lot in all of Tahiti Beach, worth $3 million, which is our community park. That’s just an example of every community, every Arvida community has an abundance of parks and open space.

That’s just good planning. That’s what we did on my Kaiser experience, that’s what we did with all the Arvida communities. Many more things than that in terms of common architectural treatments, common landscape, extensive landscape treatment, of course all-underground utilities, common mailboxes, common signage and walls. You’ve seen it in the various Arvida communities.

I am very proud of [Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany]. They are citizens of Coral Gables, Elizabeth is the dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Miami, where I have been the vice chairman for over twenty years. I’m very proud that they have been the leaders of this new architectural movement. I think it’s an intellectual thought process, it’s an intellectual way for America to think about planning and community and it originated here with them. I just couldn’t be more proud of them.

There’s a lot of issues of good planning that [were] long before new urbanism. I would say it’s one of the movements, maybe not the primary thing of the twentieth century, but it’s one of the movements and it originated here and I’m very proud. Number two, they’re both very talented and so I asked them to be the architects of my house. You haven’t seen my house, but I’m gonna show it to you one of these days and you’ll see what a great job they did. Number three, they are both so brilliant they hired my son who’s an architect and so they have to be really smart. I have nothing but positive things to say about them.

However, to build a community like Westin, which has 30,000 homes and 100,000 people, the elements of new urbanism can work in the urban core, but to say we’re gonna have 100,000 people and no street you can go over twenty miles an hour. To say we’re gonna have 100,000 people and no one is gonna drive, when it takes ten miles to go from this part of the city to this part of Westin and to say everyone has to be a small little curved street and go in by somebody’s back alley, it’s not practical. It’s not practical! I had debates with Elizabeth and Andres on the practicality. They’ve been critical of Westin.

I understand that, but you’re not gonna change. We have a responsibility as a developer to make that commute reasonable, and you can’t send a person through seven miles of twenty mile an hour neighborhoods. You gotta have a main thoroughfare through the middle of your community to get them from here to there. That’s the debate that I’ve had.

[In regard to mixed use], I totally agree with them. That is a problem with many of today’s zoning rules. They want to mix them, and it’s so dumb that you can’t. There’s no grocery store in the middle of the community for milk and bread. In fact, I was just in New York this weekend in Greenwich, Connecticut. I was admiring the fact that Greenwich, which has these $10 million houses and then there was this little teeny house that sells bread and milk and newspapers in the morning. You can walk over there. You can’t do that in Coral Gables. You can’t go across the road. You have to go five miles to the nearest commercial facility to get your bread or your newspaper.

I’m not saying it’s too strict. I’m saying it’s not flexible enough on such areas as mixing commercial. Commercial should be an integral part as new urbanism has it. It’s an integral part of residential, but some zoning codes don’t allow that. Coral Gables happens to be one of them that doesn’t allow that. I think it’s dead wrong.

I think our problem in education is more basic. I think that one of our problems as a society is that we have spent too much time on the broad portfolio of things we want to teach our kids, from social values to community planning values, et cetera, that we’ve forgotten about reading and writing. Our first objective is that every child should read at grade level and do mathematics at grade level and do basic science at grade level. The basics is what’s been the primary thing that’s been neglected. One of the good things about the whole A+ program of Governor Bush, and the FCAT is that I think that there’s a return to the basic reading and writing. We are dramatically improving reading and writing skills.

Until we do that, we should maybe even narrow the curriculum of other social studies. Social issues are important, and I could come up with a list longer than community planning. The basic is what we’re really neglecting. I’ve been involved with several different things, the Anna Berg program and others, that have focused on the basics and I’m glad we’re making progress in the state.

I went on the [University of Miami Board of Trustees] in the mid 70s, so it’s been now almost thirty years that I’ve been a trustee. Almost immediately, I was asked to be chairman of the finance committee, within a year or two. Then I went on the executive committee within two years. I’ve been on the executive committee, where I just resigned. I’ve been trying to resign for about six or seven years. They finally have allowed me to resign from the executive committee. I think it was 1976, so I think I was on for twenty-eight years.

I’ve been very involved in the place. I have continually compared the University of Miami to Stanford, where I was in the 50s, which was not one of the great universities of America. In combination with the fact of it’s location, it became one of America’s great universities. The University of Miami, particularly in basic research at the medical school, has recruited some very, very good professors. They have dramatically increased the student quality. When I arrived, the SATs were below 1000 on average. Now, they’re above 1200 on average, so they have a much better quality student. They have a better quality faculty. We have much higher research, and it is becoming one of America’s best universities. It’s been a good run, and I have enjoyed my partnership with Tad Foote for years. I was very involved with the selection of President Foote and working with him for twenty years.

Then, I was the chairman of the search committee that brought in Donna Shalala. She is doing a great job of shaking the place up even more, and all out of the way Henry Kaiser would have done it--demanding, charging. She’s tough and she’s good.

[Donna Shalala] was an easy decision. She was the best of our candidates. We had some very, very good candidates. I’d almost like to tell you who they are, but I guess I can’t do that. Our top three candidates are now presidents of three of America’s top universities. One of them continues to be at the university where he was, a second which is a lady has now been made the president. They were all interested, and we had multiple meetings with all three of these candidates, so we had really three very good candidates that are now three of higher education’s top leaders.

She was the best candidate. The only concern was would she be effective with a Republican legislature in Washington and a Republican legislature in Tallahassee. After a lot of telephone calls, we concluded she would be effective on both sides of the aisle, which she has been.

[In terms of the future of development], I think that the trends that we’re on are good, which is an emphasis on regional development and an emphasis on large-scale communities. The penalty should not be to build a large-scale community, like it used to be. The penalty should be on to do small tracks and urban sprawl. [We need] to make sure everybody builds their fair share of the schools, make sure everybody builds their fair share of the park needs, make sure everybody pays their fair share of the water and sewer expansions, and make sure in each development of the cost of the impact on the community, which I don’t think we did enough of.

With the concurrency rules and the other rules, we are now fairly allocating the costs and we are encouraging comprehensive planning and we’re encouraging large-scale development, which is good. I think that Ruben Askew’s strategy, which I supported in 1972, has been good. It has improved the quality of life, it has improved the quality of housing, it has improved commercial facilities. What have we done a poor job of? Transportation. We have transportation funding, transportation planning has not followed the rest of the dynamics.

I think it’s a lack of state funding. Maybe it’s a lack of a constituency for better roads and better bridges. Our infrastructure is falling apart, so we’ve done a good job of improving the quality of our communities. We’ve done a pretty good job on water and sewer facilities, so I don’t see a constraint there. In transportation, we’ve got to do a better job. We’re choking needlessly.

I had this debate with somebody the other day. Should we put another bridge over the Coral Gables waterway at Coco Plum Circle? That’s just a little, teeny decision. That will never get approved, but that will probably be the most pro-environment thing you could do. You would encourage the traffic, you would have less pollution of cars waiting all backed up to get over that little bridge. Some of it’s money for transportation funding, but part of it is mindset of the population that we don’t want to change. We want to continue some of the quaint stuff rather than focus on efficiency.

Mass transit is, in theory, great but at this point it’s not cost effective. As President Reagan pointed out, if you did full costing of the Dade County transportation system--the amount that the federal government spends plus the amount that the Dade County taxpayer spends plus the amount that the consumer spends--it comes to something to close to fifty dollars a ride. Fifty dollars a ride! Until we can get more people that want to ride it, it’s a great theory but we’ve got to get people.

We’re subsidizing about as much as we can. The federal government is subsidizing it. We the taxpayers subsidize it, and the consumer only pays a buck for something that costs fifty dollars. So even though he can take the rapid transit for a dollar and his alternate is his car, it’s probably costing him ten or fifteen dollars in his car, full-costing, plus the cost of parking. So it’s costing him thirty dollars to come to work, park, and go home, where he could take the rapid transit for a dollar. They still won’t take it, and it’s been a subsidized dollar.

Water is not one of our biggest challenges. Our biggest challenges for our quality of life in a good community is education, education, education. Transportation, too. Security used to be number one, but we’ve now had a much more secure environment. Even with terrorism and other things, security I think is number three or four, but not one. I think Florida is coming together. The quality is there.

I’m optimistic and we’ve got a lot of good people doing a lot of good things. As it relates to the purpose of this, we want to pay tribute to Mizner, Merrick, Fisher, and the Grahams, and Arvida and others that have made South Florida a nice place.

[END OF INTERVIEW]