"Market Based" Zoning Changes

After having worked in my profession for over 13 years (can't believe its been that long), and suffering just about every indignity known to the working class: layoffs, poor pay and benefits, etc, etc, I started thinking about how cities are "planned" and the real reason why zoning changes happen. First of all, a primer on land use planning.
Zoning is supposed to follow the Comprehensive Plan, in particular, the Future Land Use (FLU) Map which is an integral part of the Comprehensive Plan. The FLU map is not set in stone, and an application to change it can be made by anybody who owns a piece of property. You all may remember the home and condo explosion we had a few years ago. Even apartments were being changed into condos. Houses and new condos were being built as fast as the building materials could be manufactured. Every piece of land in the city was fair game for residential development. Even parts of the city that had no business being used as residential.
So how do you use a property for residential when the zoning and the FLU is industrial? Easy, change the FLU and the zoning from industrial to residential. Your attorney will argue that the decision should be market based and its obvious that there is a market for more homes in the city since, by golly, homes are being built as fast as the materials are being manufactured! And herein lies the problem. Should these major decisions, with tremendous consequences for the future of the city, be market based or public policy based? Even being a public policy person, I don't really have a problem with market based decisions. But these market based decisions are NOT market based. Just because everybody else is doing it, does not mean that everybody is going to keep doing it; or as they like to say on those investment brochures "past performance is not a guarantee of future results." You cant publish a market study that says "everybody is doing it - DUH." Look what happened to housing.
Fishkind Associates, a local economics guru, predicted that the housing bubble would blow up by 2007. He was pretty much spot-on. He didn't even mention the banking crisis, that just made things worse. In Jacksonville, industrial land throughout the city was changed to residential. One infamous change was proposed immediately adjacent to the Smurfit paper mill. I was informed that my denial report was an embarrassment to the city's Planning Department. After the long knives changed the staff report, the FLU change was approved by city council and later vetoed by the mayor (for reasons we'll never know). But many more of these changes made it through. And now years later we have.....ta da....land use conflicts! And.....ta da......vacant residential land, foreclosed homes, and bankrupted residential developers. Now, this will really make you laugh.....
Developers from all over NE Florida are clamouring to have their residential FLU land changed to....ta da.....INDUSTRIAL! Because of the expansion of JaxPort, everybody and their brother thinks that they are going to be the next industrial site for inter-modal transport. There are THOUSANDS of acres of FLU applications in Baker, Duval, and Nassau Counties. And yes, the only market study that seems to be in place is that "everybody is doing it."