Southwest Florida subdivisions are poised to clog the Florida Wildlife Corridor

When the wildlife corridor was envisioned, subdivisions with 10,000 houses and hundreds of thousands of feet of office space were not planned.

The Town of Big Cypress with its three villages, and another large subdivision named Kingston, when built in the Western Everglades will add thousands of homes to ease the housing shortage in Florida and create thousands of jobs to stoke the regional economy.

That's what their developers say.

Environmentalists have a different take.

They say that the residential developments will also ruin crucial wetland ecosystems, create miles of new roads, and add thousands of car trips in the region increasing the number of highly endangered Florida panthers hit and killed by cars.

Big Cypress and Kingston are planned for land within the ever-expanding Florida Wildlife Corridor, which is nearly 18 million acres of patchworked ecosystems, including state parks, national forests, and wildlife management areas from the Everglades on the south to the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia to the north.

Wildlife there are supposed to have it easy.

The wildlife corridor was initially designed so species of all types would have a pathway through the pavement where car strikes and run-ins with people were supposed to be minimal.

Coming out of the quiet wilderness to encounter subdivisions containing thousands of homes — and even more people living and working among the hundreds of thousands of feet of office space , parks, and schools — is not what corridor supporters envisioned for the Florida panther — or any other creature.