A story in Friday's Miami Herald noted the failure of a highly touted development project called Biscayne Landing. The story noted that the condo project was "once regarded as the centerpiece for a major redevelopment of North Miami" and that the city had handed the developer a 200-year lease on the property.

This wasn't just another high-profile Florida development hitting the skids, though. As we document in "Paving Paradise", this site has been cursed ever since the first attempt to develop it in the 1950s. It's a living example of all that can go wrong in trying to pave over wetlands.

First proposed for this mangrove-covered spot where the Oleta River flows into Biscayne Bay was Interama. It was supposed to have "a 1,000-foot Tower of the Sun topped with restaurants and an observation platform. Interama promised a whole lot more, too: a marine amphitheater with a floating
stage and seating for 12,000, a symphony hall, an opera, a ballet, an art gallery, an international bazaar full of working artisans. It was all supposed to be ready to open by 1965. Or maybe 1968. Or maybe in time for the nation’s bicentennial in 1976. The deadline kept changing, yet
the money kept flowing."

Yet all Interama ever built were huge mounds of garbage. That's right -- they used garbage to fill in the wetlands.

When Interama died, North Miami turned to a new savior, called Munisport Inc. As we report, Munisport "said it would build a major recreational facility on the site, complete with tennis courts, an 18-hole golf course, and a clubhouse with a view of Biscayne Bay...But Munisport turned out to be in the same business as Interama, offering pie-in-the-sky promises and creating nothing but big heaps of trash... By now the piles of garbage were 40 feet high." Some of the garbage dumped there included medical waste.

When Munisport wanted to expand, it sought a permit from the Corps of Engineers to fill in more wetlands with garbage. The Corps said yes, but the Environmental Protection Agencey objected. EPA officials feared the project would set a national precedent, allowing wetlands across the U.S. to be filled with garbage.

The Corps wouldn't back down, though. So in January 1981, Munisport became the first Clean Water Act Section 404 permit ever vetoed by the EPA.

Instead of being a big boon to North Miami, said former mayor Howard Neu, Munisport turned into catastrophic mess. “It ended up costing the taxpayers a lot of money,” Neu told us. “Property
taxes went up.”

In 1983, the EPA put Munisport on its Superfund list of toxic waste sites in need of cleanup. However, "in 1997, despite complaints from environmental groups and mobile home park residents, the EPA dropped the Munisport dump off its Superfund list, declaring it no longer a hazard to human health. In 2002, North Miami cut a deal with a developer to build condominiums there. Despite the site’s checkered past, the developer said he didn’t see it as much of a challenge to build something marketable."

The development "was envisioned as a community within a community that would include 6,000 condos and townhomes, 120,000 square feet of shops and restaurants, 80,000 square feet of offices, a waterfront town center and possibly a hotel," reports the Herald. North Miami officials hoped that it would boost their tax base enough to help them rehab older areas of the city as well as provide affordable housing.

But Biscayne Landings LLC "undertook the vast redevelopment project just as the condominium market hit the skids." Now Wells Fargo Bank has filed suit in Miami-Dade Circuit Court to foreclose on the vacant land. Court papers say the borrowers owe a total of $196.3 million. Meanwhile North Miami faces a $5 million budget deficit, so its redevelopment and affordable housing plans will have to be postponed.

So to sum up: North Miami, in a story you could tell about nearly anywhere else in Florida, repeatedly looked to developers to improve this waterfront spot, and instead repeatedly wound up with more woes. Makes you wonder if they should have just left the mangroves alone.