By:
Cindy Spence

Source:
John Reynolds (352) 392-1845, ext. 412

GAINESVILLE—Natives grumble about it all the time — the rate at which Florida land, seemingly overnight, is transformed from pasture to pavement, hammock to highway, scrubland to skyscraper.

But how fast is it really happening? And what does the future hold?

University of Florida economist John Reynolds can hazard some pretty good guesses. The food and resource economics researcher specializes in models that provide estimates of the rate of land conversion from rural to urban.

Using population projections and data from aerial photography and satellite imagery, Reynolds estimates that 130,000 acres per year will be converted from rural to urban uses in Florida from 2000 to 2020. For Florida, the issue is critical.

“The conversion of rural land to urban uses is considerably more important to Florida than to most of the rest of the nation,” said Reynolds, a professor in UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. “Only about 2 to 3 percent of the total land area of the United States is accounted for by urban development, and only small fractions of percentages are being converted to urban uses each year.

“By contrast, Florida’s urban land uses account for 10 to 11 percent of land area and that is expanding more rapidly.”

Reynolds has determined that for each additional person who moves to Florida, a half-acre of land is converted to urban uses. Florida’s population broke the 15 million mark in 1998, and roughly 673 people move to Florida every day. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that Florida will pass New York as the third largest state by 2025, with 20.7 million residents.

“We will continue to see the conversion of rural land to urban uses because we will continue to see people move to Florida,” Reynolds said. “There will be a need for places for those people to live, work, play and go to school.”

In Florida, many of the urban counties are still important agriculturally, too.

Eight of the top nine counties in agricultural sales are metropolitan statistical areas or urbanizing areas. These counties — Palm Beach, Dade, Collier, Hillsborough, Manatee, Orange, St. Lucie, Polk — sell more than $200 million in agricultural products annually and, according to 1992 figures, account for 49.3 percent of all agricultural products sold in Florida.

Today, urban and agricultural uses in these areas co-exist quietly, but Reynolds see the potential for conflict in the future. Between 2000 and 2010, population growth in those eight counties will result in the conversion of 340,291 acres, or 531.7 square miles, to urban uses, he said. While all the new urban land would not come out of farmland, the conversion will affect agriculture.

In Dade County, farmers have stayed in business by virtue of their ability to grow winter vegetables during a window when they cannot be grown elsewhere. Tapping into that niche market has kept their farms viable. But as the value of their land creeps up, more farmers will feel the pressure to sell out, especially considering that land within 5 miles of urban areas in Dade County already carries a $28,000-per-acre price tag.

“In Dade, agriculture is really threatened, and it could disappear,” Reynolds said. “The farmable areas are being squeezed between preservation and urbanization. If the Dade population continues to grow as much, there will be severe pressure.”

Numbers tell the story of Florida’s transformation from rural to urban use particularly well. For example, in 1954, the census of agriculture showed 192,517 acres in Dade and 129,872 acres in Broward being used for agricultural production. By 1992, that figure had dropped to 83,681 acres in Dade and to 23,735 acres in Broward. In Pinellas County, the 1954 census showed 56,955 acres in agricultural production and that number had dropped to 4,123 by 1992.

“Most of the coming growth will be concentrated around the current major population areas. In some of these areas there will be competition for water and concern about a number of environmental land issues, along with conflict between urban interests and agricultural interests,” Reynolds said. “There’s going to be fairly intense competition for the rural land.

“In some cases, agricultural production can move to other rural areas,” Reynolds said. “But that’s not always the case, as with Dade County’s vegetable-growing region.”

Florida’s comprehensive planning process has resulted in enough land being designated in all the counties to accommodate population growth in the next 50 years, Reynolds said. But, the designated land is not always where people want to develop.

“We will continue to see intensification of land use planning efforts and restrictions on land use changes in the next 20 years,” Reynolds said.

Traditionally sleepy North Florida counties also are feeling urban pressures. Walton, Wakulla and Gilchrist counties saw 30 percent growth from 1991 to 1997. Gulf County grew 20 to 30 percent.

“These counties won’t be anything like Miami,” Reynolds said. “But they’re not going to be Old Florida, either.”

Reynolds said other trends also will affect which counties grow.

“How much will computers allow us to work and get an education at places that are nontraditional now?” Reynolds asks. “Computers may allow people to live in North Florida more than they have in the past even if their place of work is somewhere else.

“It’s always hard to judge the next century’s change,” Reynolds said. “People now expect more change than they did 50 years ago. But we always adapt to change, and we’ll continue to adapt to change.”

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