"Opportunities And Challenges: How to Use South Florida’s Emerging-Region Designation To Build Businesses, Brands and Industries" by v. johns, 7/22/11, 2:07 PM
Even with a bad economy, a slight dip in population and a housing boom gone bust, Southeast Florida is still awfully close to build-out. And even with build-out approaching, though more slowly than it was when things were booming, Southeast Florida is still a region that is rife with opportunity and business potential.
For individuals, companies, institutions and brands looking to start a new venture or expand an existing one, the key to doing so, in a region as diverse as ours, is looking for potential to build product and service strength in areas where we are perceived to be weak or have no representation compared to other more centralized metropolitan regions. What do other places have that we don’t or could use more of? Movie stars? Trains? Buses? Museums? Skyscrapers? Film Schools? Film Studios?
Southeast Florida is slowly, but steadily, evolving into a national and international business and branding hub. To support this, several examples come to mind:
(1) While Hollywood and Silicon Valley are the ancestral home to the animation and movie effects industry, California-based Digital Domain has chosen to blaze its own trails by expanding its brand to South Florida with studios in Port St. Lucie and a forthcoming educational institution in West Palm Beach. With any luck, Southeast Florida could potentially become a large entertainment hub in a state that threatens to rival Hollywood in film production.
(2) Throughout the region, institutions of higher education are either locating, or are being built near, Interstate 95. Nova Southeastern University, for example, recently opened its new campus between Military Trail and I-95, in Palm Beach Gardens.
(3) While many of the world’s most respected biological research and technology institutes are clustered in states well known for their stake in the biotech pie (California, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, etc.), Scripps Florida, Max Phlanck, VGTI and Torrey Pines are forming the foundations of a forthcoming “biotech corridor,” along I-95, that will compliment the previously-mentioned entertainment and education corridors taking shape along the interstate, as well.
South Florida is not only an entertainment capital in its own right, its also heavily populated with stars like Venus and Serena Williams, D-Wade, Alonzo Mourning, Shaq, Rod Stewart, Rush Limbaugh, Tiger Woods, LeBron James, Ann Coulter, Don King, Michael Jordan, Donald Trump and George Hamilton, to name a few. Homegrown stars like the great Burt Reynolds, Gloria Estefan, Vanilla Ice, Larry the Cable Guy, Dan Marino, Pit Bull, Rick Ross, Flo-Rida, Alicia Minshew, Megan Fox and Mickey Rourke show the area’s propensity for producing high-quality, top-level talent. While many of our stars value our unparalleled privacy, others view our status as a top national media market and population center as being crucial to building, marketing and maintaining their brand. Still, others just simply enjoy living here and wouldn’t trade our beachy lifestyle (and nonexistent state tax) for anything in the world. Furthermore, when you’re famous in Florida, you’re famous forever. There’s no such thing as “has-been” here. We remember and appreciate everyone.
South Florida’s propensity to attract celebrities and stars of all kinds shows the power of its unusual mix of combining privacy and security with brand expansion potential. It also shows how in some cases, bigger can indeed be better. In Miami, one of the most successful Super Bowl sites in the nation, each time the event has been held there, in recent years, it has been dubbed: “the South Florida Super Bowl.” Each year, regional-level business participation is not only encouraged but is promoted and even “coached.”
For anyone wanting to invest in Southeast Florida, whether it be as an individual, a business, a brand or an institution, the idea is to get in where you fit in, get comfortable, invest locally, be charitable and grow your brand slowly on a small, but effective scale. Understand that while Miami, Miami Beach or Palm Beach may be the area’s most prolific locales, there’s room for growth and a need for solid industry in other, less glamorous parts of our region (such as Ft. Pierce and the Glades) that could use more jobs and opportunities. For those with existing name recognition coming into our state, there’s potential here to promote your brand even further with pathways into Latin America, Europe and the Caribbean that can only be done within the context of South Florida’s own unique style of international flair.
While Southeast Florida will never be the largest or most populated metropolitan region in the United States, it has major potential to be the most dynamic. Even in its apparent state of incompleteness, it is often hailed as being a very lively and dynamic area. And it is. Opportunities abound, but many challenges beacon as well. Among them, structural challenges that impede commerce on a wider scale. Crime, housing, schools and governance issues continue to linger and persist. Public transportation on a regional scale is still years away. Key in building on our region’s noted dynamism is the idea of thoroughly connecting it’s two sub-regional polar opposites (the Treasure Coast and the Gold Coast) in ways that exemplify the official existence of a large, diverse, well-connected universe of cities, towns and villages with unparalleled opportunity and choice.
There really are two starkly different sides of South Florida. The main difference being the highly-populated Tri-County or Gold Coast counties of Palm Beach, Broward and Dade versus the less urbanized, less built-out (but just as crowded and congested) Treasure Coast counties of Indian River, St. Lucie and Martin. But, as with any other major metropolitan area, culture clash ultimately gives way to economic survival and the need for people to socialize. The level of inter-regional travel across and within South Florida’s seven counties is astounding and at least mildly comparable to New York or Los Angeles, on any given day, with the main difference between these MSAs being: In Southeast Florida, there’s no central city. More akin to a coastal Japanese megalopolis, than an American metropolis, this area is bound to the east by the western edges of the Everglades, Lake O, and other natural areas in our state’s famed wild interior. In our region, it’s all about the counties: Seven in all. Each with their own unique vision of what life in South Florida is all about.
One of the best things anyone new or native to our area can do is to advocate for the one thing that’s going to fuel the region’s future in a way that home and highway-building can’t: pubic mass transit. Public transportation on a massive regional scale that promotes activity and commerce remains to be a “last-mile” type of challenge for this area. If this region is to truly evolve into a more sophisticated center of commerce, the ability to move people to and from, with or without cars, must be sufficiently present in our area. Even with high-speed rail off the table, for the time being, the revival of Jacksonville-to-Miami Amtrak service, as well as the building of a proposed commuter line (from Jupiter to Miami along U.S. 1) could combine with Tri-Rail and local bus-service to grow the U.S. 1 Corridor into marketplace dream. As trains and busses fill up downtowns along the region’s coastline with shoppers, businessmen and travelers that cars and trucks can’t, business will no doubt boom.
The good news is that even with cars currently owning the show, throughout South Florida, there seems to be more and more people out and about, walking and riding bikes along U.S. 1 in big places like Ft. Lauderdale and even small places like Hobe Sound and Tequesta. More choices in mobility, with special attention to walkers and bike-riders, can only improve this trend.
With New York losing seats in Congress and Florida gaining seats, return on investment in Southeast Florida, our state’s economic engine, is not rocket science. Those things that will ensure South Florida’s transition from “accidental region” to cultural center include: (1) education, research and entertainment corridors forming along I-95, (2) a robust coastal marketplace along U.S. 1, and (3) the potential to create a public large mass transit system that’s accessible, self-sustaining and commerce-generating.
While uprooting Hollywood as the film capital of the world, or New York City as the cultural center of the world, are all still a long way off, the main point is that the opportunity does exist. Though incomplete in its construction, it’s the potential to create a new paradigm altogether that makes Southeast Florida among the premiere regions in the world –- yes, the world -- to live, work, study, play, relax and do business.
© 2011 lostparadisefl.us
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