Community fights pickleball replacing basketball courts at South Florida beachside park

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FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Basketball players who frequent a South Florida park feel like they’re being run off in favor of wealthy residents of a new luxury development.

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The city of Fort Lauderdale is planning to replace the decades-old, beachside basketball courts with pickleball courts, part of a deal with developers for a massive condo and hotel project.

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Local basketball players have generated a groundswell of support online, but city officials and developers have said the changes are part of larger improvement plan for the park that now includes building new basketball courts several hundred yards away.

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Unpleasant surprise

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Ozzie McRea said most people who use the basketball courts only found out about the changes to Fort Lauderdale Beach Park in April. He helped organize a group called Fort Lauderdale Beach Ballers to preserve the courts, located just a few dozen steps from the Atlantic Ocean.

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“We saw a sign put up that says that there was going to be a conversion from a basketball court to a pickleball court,” McRea said. “And that raised a lot of flags, and it was a very surreal moment, because everybody that’s seen that sign, you see that their heart just dropped like out of nowhere.”

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McRea said the message is clear: developers want to change the demographics of the area, allowing condo residents to use the public park across the street as a private club where working-class and diverse people aren’t welcome.

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“It’s a very multicultural atmosphere out here. We have people from all ages, every ethnicity,” McRea said. “And it’s a beautiful thing because we all come in harmony over here. We all play basketball.”

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Some advocates have linked the old basketball courts to the Civil Rights Movement and the push to desegregate the beaches. Photographs show basketball courts on Fort Lauderdale beach in the 1960s, but local historians believe those courts were in a different location. The current courts were likely installed at least a decade or so later.

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Making a deal

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Fort Lauderdale city commissioners approved a deal with developers in January 2024 for the construction of The St. Regis Resort & Residences Bahia Mar. The $2 billion project includes four residential towers and a hotel tower next to an existing marina on city-owned land under a 100-year lease.

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Developers agreed to pay $1 million for improvements at the park, including replacing what they described as dilapidated and rarely used basketball courts with pickleball courts.

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These types of public-private partnerships are nothing new.

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Maria Ilcheva, a Florida International University professor with a focus in public policy, said partnerships between local governments and private companies have become more common over the past two decades in South Florida and other places around the U.S. with growing populations and rapid development. She said there’s nothing inherently bad about these agreements, and governments can often negotiate improvements to transportation, parks and other infrastructure in exchange for a project’s approval.

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“If these partnerships take into account the local context and ensure that the community benefits from it, they could be a value,” Ilcheva said. “If they don’t take into account community perspectives and don’t take a broader look at how it will impact values and how it could potentially incentivize or push out local residents, they could be detrimental to the community.”