It's wondering about the impact on our in-town neighborhoods when the next 5,000 downtown apartment units go up. It's ambivalence toward the big changes fast coming. It's worry with more than a small touch of hypocrisy. Casual conversations with my neighbors invariably turn to how property values have doubled in less than a decade, one of the subsidiary characteristics of New Vertical City which draws few complaints. We begin eyeing the weary, paint-peeled homes of frail and elderly neighbors wondering, when they go, what the speculators will bid for the houses.
Houses come down.
It's prosperity run amok. Great, financially anyway, for us surviving homeowners. But something's lost. The scale is important. Despite my gripes, I love to forget about my car, walk down Las Olas to a restaurant or a bar or the bakery or the post office or the movie multiplex.