Foundations of trust fall with garbage

Others, however, see it half full. ``Why, you've got waterfront property,'' I told Latasha White.

Latasha was not amused. The waterline created by the unexpected appearance of the great Miramar sinkhole laps within a few feet of her back door.

She was not assuaged even by the sight of tadpoles, though they offered living evidence that the brown turbid soup isn't deadly poison. At least not to frogs.

Maybe, I suggested, Miramar's unsightly sinkhole was only the Everglades reasserting itself, the old river of grass bubbling up over the concrete, Bermuda grass and mini-vans that blanket West Broward. Tadpoles today. Gators tomorrow.

Latasha was not amused. Maybe if the Everglades' big comeback had come in a prosperous place like Weston. Maybe if SilverLakes had been confronted with a not-so-silver impromptu lake. Instead, a smelly sinkhole debuts in working-class Hampshire Homes, smallish houses on smallish lots, worth between $70,000 and $90,000. At least that was the value before their common yard became Broward's newest inland waterway.
Hampshire's beleaguered developer, Lennar Homes, might make amends with the sullen, soggy owners of the 20 homes surrounding the unplanned pond by stocking it with catfish. Lennar's variation on the old proverb: Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Give a man a sinkhole, you feed him for a lifetime.

Latasha was not amused. ``We'll probably have to sue,'' she said.

She and other residents had long suspected something was wrong with the strange, deep, perpetually squishy muck in the common area behind their homes. Especially when odd items began protruding from the earth. Tires. Building materials. Tattered sheets of plastic. Rotting tree trunks. Machine parts. Homeowners doubted the relics dated back to the Seminoles.

Lennar created Hampshire Homes in the late 1980s, building 138 homes on 22 acres of a onetime cow pasture at Palm Avenue and the Dade County line. One might have assumed that the geologists who tested the pasture soil might have been alarmed at core samples revealing steel-belted radials, plywood, insulation and Kenmore dishwashers.
Lennar dutifully began excavating the mystery pit two months ago. It quickly filled with water and mosquito larvae and could pass for any well-polluted rust-belt river. Homeowners, however, wonder whether the dimensions of the hole are rather too convenient, a rectangular depression that neatly coincides with the common property but stops just short of their houses.

Some folks worry that their homes were built on foundations of refuge and bad faith. ``We're afraid our house is going to sink away,'' Latasha said.

Akilah Rance, who lives on the other side of the street, on the dry side of Periwinkle, suggested, smiling, that after the Whites' home drops into the abyss, then her family will have the coveted waterfront view.

Latasha was not amused.

Sinkholes also might seem a glum development to other residents in Broward's vast, hastily developed wetland subdivisions. If county inspectors and town officials and geologists and builders could overlook a Miramar refuge pile 50 yards long, other communities might also be perched on foundations of rubbish.

Other homeowners must worry that their own well-mortgaged terra firma could eventually disappear into the primordial soup of the day.