Homestead Miami Speedway is noisy, holds events at night and draws traffic. Its operators are worried that if homes are built nearby, new residents will complain so much that the track could be shut down. So they have petitioned the court to stop a housing development that the Homestead City Commission recently approved. The Speedway, which sits less than a mile from the planned subdivision and hosts a number of auto races, including a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race, appealed the council’s vote by filing a petition this month with the appellate division of the circuit court. ‘We are very similar to an airport. If residents move too close to us, they’ll start complaining about noise and traffic, and that will have an adverse effect on our business,’ said the Speedway’s vice president, Al Garcia. The area doesn’t have any homes right now. Its tenants include the Speedway, Homestead Air Reserve Base and a beer warehouse, ringed by the Park of Commerce and commercial, mixed-use and other zoning that provide a buffer between the speedway and homes. The issue is a development that the City Council approved in May. Developer Wayne Rosen proposed building single family homes in and next to the industrially zoned Park of Commerce. He also asked the city to change the definition of mixed-use so that he wouldn’t have to build a combination of commercial, multi-family and single-family homes, but instead could build any of those categories without building all of them.(Miami Herald)(6-30-2016)
