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Archive for the 'Florida' Category

What would offshore oil drilling mean to Pinellas County beaches?

There’s supposed to be crude oil reserves out in the Gulf of Mexico, not too many miles west of the Pinellas County beaches. Most of us agree that a higher degree of energy independence would be a good thing.  So, drill baby drill. Right?

People are pretty split on this issue. Those in favor of drilling say we need the oil, and we need to depend less on foriegn sources. Those against say the Gulf reserves would only produce oil for a decade or so, and an oil spill in the Gulf would foul the beaches and be devastating to Florida’s major industry, tourism. 

Polling seems to indicate that Floridians are fairly split on the issue, with the edge going to the pro-drillers.

Yesterday (that would be Feb. 14, 2010), hundreds of people turned out on the Pinellas County beaches to protest the possibility of oil drilling along the coast. Hundreds more turned out at beaches around Florida. Most of them wore black, to represent the color of crude oil.

St. Pete Beach near the Don Cesar

Anti-drillers say we need to invest in alternative sources of energy — solar, wind, even nuclear. Pro-drillers say we still need to drill in places like the Gulf to get the energy we need while those alternative sources are developed.

How do you think Pinellas County would be changed by drilling in the Gulf?

Oil drilling would create some high-pay jobs (although not a whole lot of them), and the oil that gets produced (some of it, anyway) could be refined into jet fuel which could power the planes that bring tourists to the county.

On the other hand, one good spill could foul Pinellas beaches for years to come, driving away tourists and ruining the natural habitat for many sea creatures and plants.

And what would all this mean to real estate values? (This is a real estate blog, after all).

Not a simple issue.

Tags: beaches, oil drilling, pinellas county, real estate, values

In Pinellas County we import our pumpkins

First, the bad news: pumpkins don’t grow very well in Florida.

 Heat, sandy soil, rainy summer seasons, fungal and insect problems make it tough to grow pumpkins and other gourds.

But here’s the good news: Big trucks bring pumpkins to Florida from other places!

And if you go to a place that sells pumpkins, it looks for all the world like a farm stand that just brought a bunch of pumpkins in from the fields.

I wanted to buy a pumpkin this weekend amd I saw in the newspaper that the East Lake United Methodist Church was going to be selling pumpkins once again this year, just as they have done in past Octobers. So I drove over there around mid-day.

Sure enough, it looked like a real farmer’s pumpkin patch.

I bought a nice medium-sized pumpkin, and I’m thinking about going back in a few days and buying a few gourds to use in decorating the house.

Tags: holidays

North Pinellas Historical Museum displays Palm Harbor’s past

Hartley home, which houses the North Pinellas Historical Museum

Alright, I know what you’re thinking: “Where the heck have you been?”

It’s a fair question. First, we took a vacation and took the grandchildren up to Campbello Island in New Brunswick, Canada (more on this later). Then we came back to a bunch of moving chores and other demands that couldn’t be put off.  So here we are.

So, without further excuses, here’s a quick report on what we did today — a visit to the North Pinellas Historical Museum in Palm Harbor.

The museum is one of those places you can’t miss, being on the busy corner of Belcher and Curlew roads. But I’ve driven past it a million times and never stopped in before.  Today I resolved to do something different.

Cracker house behind the North Pinellas Historical Museum

The excuse was a yard sale on the grounds of the museum. There were a number of displays of all kinds of used stuff and we did a tour of the grounds before we went inside.  There were scores of people outside, either selling or buying stuff, but surprisingly there was no one inside the museum building excpet a couple of staffers. So we took our time moseying around inside.

The house itself was originally owned and built by the Hartley family, one of the early pioneer families of North Pinellas County.  A very nice museum volunteer told us how the house sat on the dirt road that was the main thoroughfare between Tampa and the Gulf many years ago, and she explained how people traveling over to the coast from Tampa would stop, water their horses, and perhaps use the Hartley’s outhouse.

The house ’s exterior is made up of concrete blocks which had been cast on the site.  The original block casts, she said, had been purchased from Sears & Roebuck. The house was built between 1915 and 1919.

The museum's parlor

Out back is a classic small Florida Cracker house, a simple living structure that was popular a hundred years ago.  Our guide explained to us how the cracker housercame to be in the back yard: A few years ago, the house had to be moved from its original North Pinellas location.  It was decided to move the house south to Largo, where the Pinellas County Heritage Village is located.

Once on the road, however, word came that the 21-acre Heritage Village facility had no room for the cracker house.  So… hurried negotiations resulted in the house being diverted to the North Pinellas Historical Museum site.

There are many things to see at the museum and lots to learn about Palm Harbor’s early days. Drop by sometime — admission is free, although they won’t turn down a voluntary donation.

Don: One of 23,952 vets at Pinellas County’s Bay Pines National Cemetery

This is my husband Bill’s story, so I’ll turn it over to him.
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By BILL FREDERICK

On Memorial Day, I visited my old friend, Don.

I had searched for Don on the Internet a number of times, but I never could find him. The last I heard, he was working as a reporter for the Bradenton Herald, but that was back in the 1970s – so long ago that no one at the newspaper had any memory of him. It was like he had sort of evaporated.

Then one day I tried something different on Google. Instead of searching for “Donald McSheffrey,” I tried a search for “McSheffrey, Donald.” And there he was – buried in Plot 55 45-10 at Bay Pines National Cemetery, right here in Pinellas County.
* * *

On Jan. 6, 1968, I started my first newspaper reporting job at the Holyoke (Mass.) Transcript-Telegram. After getting the tour of the building and meeting the other staff members, I was handed over to Don; he was the Transcript’s police reporter, and I was going to be handling his beat on his days off.

Soon we were walking through the cold January air to the Holyoke police station, where Don introduced me around. He showed me the booking sheet, introduced me to the right people, and explained how to get information from the cops without getting in their way.

I was 21; I never really knew how old Don was. His perennially red eyes and the broken blood vessels in his cheeks made it hard to tell. To me, he was a veteran newsman who knew his way around. To him, I was young and teachable. In spite of the difference in our ages, we became buddies.

We drank too much and had a hell of a time.

One day, sparks from a passing freight train set off a grass fire in town, and Don and I went to cover it. The fire had spread up a steep embankment and we couldn’t see whether it was endangering the houses that lined the road above us. We decided to climb the embankment and have a look.

The climb nearly killed us. By the time we got to the top we were so out of breath we couldn’t even speak, so we collapsed in the tall grass, gasping for air. Almost immediately, water started pouring on us, and I picked my head up to see where it was coming from. A woman had come out of her back door and was soaking the tall grass – and us — with a garden hose, and we were too breathless to yell at her to stop. So we just lay in the grass, wet, gasping and laughing our butts off

*  *  *

As well as I got to know Don, he wouldn’t tell me much about himself. I knew that he had two little girls, and I knew that his wife was dead. Other than that, he said little – he wouldn’t even tell me where he lived.

It wasn’t long before I heard the story from some of our co-workers, but I knew Don for several months before he told me about it himself. We were sitting in a bar one night, half-drunk, when he said, “It’s time I told you about it.”

Don and his wife had befriended a man who worked as a writer for a national news magazine. Don said he looked up to the guy, who was very successful and talented. Don and this man drank a lot of beer together. I knew from my own experience that if you knew Don, you were going to be drinking a lot of beer.

One day the man stopped by the McSheffrey apartment when Don wasn’t home. Don’s wife invited him inside and offered him a glass of iced tea. They went into the kitchen, and Mrs. McSheffrey turned toward the refrigerator. When she did, the man grabbed a knife from the kitchen counter and stabbed her repeatedly. She fell to the floor and died.

Don came home that night and found her. The two babies were still in their cribs, unhurt. The police found the man sitting on a doorstep a block away, where he had been sitting since the murder. He told them that he had always wanted to stab a woman to death, but that he had always managed to fend off the urge and figured it would never actually happen.

*  *  *

About a year after I joined the Transcript, Don decided to quit and move to Florida. He got a job at the Bradenton Herald, and he said he was pleased that there was a bar just a few steps from the newspaper’s front door. He had already met the owner/bartender, who he said was a nice guy.

We promised to stay in touch, but we didn’t.

*  *  *

Don is one of 23,952 veterans buried at Bay Pines National Cemetery in mid-Pinellas County

There isn’t much to learn from Don’s gravestone at Bay Pines. He was born in 1934, which solved a small mystery – he was 34 when I met him. He died in 1990, which would have made him 56 years old.  I wonder if the alcohol got him, but I guess I’ll never know. I wonder if his daughters live close enough to visit his grave.

The gravestone also noted that he served in the Air Force, and was an Airman 2nd Class. I remember that he talked about that a little. I think he served in Korea as an airplane mechanic, and I seem to remember that he said he liked the military.

Standing by Don’s grave on Memorial Day, small American flags flutter next to each grave stone for as far as you can see. Besides Don’s, there are 23,952 of them at Bay Pines.

Each one of those stones represents a person who lived and breathed and served in the U.S. military. And there is a story to tell about each one of them.

Tags: Bay Pines, Memorial Day, pinellas county

Buy that Pinellas home with down payment dollars from the state

Florida's old state house

A few posts ago I discussed how some states were finding ways to provide that $8,000 federal home purchase tax credit BEFORE the sale of the home, so buyers could use the tax credit money as a down payment. I said that about 10 states had come up with programs to make that happen, most of them variations on bridge loans.

One state, Missouri, put several million dollars ina pot, and then advanced funds to homebuyers who qualified for the federal tax credit. The buyers could use the state’s money for the down payment, then pay it back when the tax credit check came in the mail. Other state programs were variations on that same theme.

At the end of the post, I asked if you thought the state of Florida should come up with a similar program and, if you did, that you might want to get in touch with your state legislator and say so.

Well, no sooner did I write that post but the Florida Legislature approved its own program.

The Legislature adjourned yesterday (Friday), but before it did it passed a bill providing $30.1 million that can be used for down payments by homeowners. The program goes into effect July 1, and the money will be distributed to qualifying homebuyers (that is, homebuyers who qualify for the federal $8,000 tax credit) by county housing housing administrators.

Details are still being worked out, and I’ll keep you up to speed as that process moves forward. But don’t let the lack of down payment money stand between you and the purchase of a Pinellas County home.

Tags: Add new tag, down payment, Florida, pinellas, tax credit

Tax credit money UP FRONT for your Pinellas County home?

  If you read my earlier post on the $8,000 first time homeowner tax credit, you know how you can turn the purchase of a new home into some much-needed cash.
     “But,” you wail, “I’ll have to wait until sometime next year to get the cash, and I really need it NOW — in fact, it would sure come in handy as down payment money on the new house.”
     If you live in Florida, you’re right — you do have a bit of a dilemma. You can get an $8,000 tax credit if you buy a new house, but you can’t get the house without a down payment, and you aren’t really expecting any extra cash until, well, next year, when the tax credit money comes in.
     However, if you live in a number of other states — 10, to be exact — your governor and legislature has already considered your problem, and come up with a fix.
      Let’s say you live in, oh, Missouri. In that state, you can get something called a “tax credit advance.” The state will advance you up to 6 percent of the home’s selling price, and you don’t have to pay it back until next August (That’s August of 2010.)
     If you fail to pay the money back once you get your tax credit, it is still not a mortal sin — the state of Missouri will simply roll that advance into a second mortgage with a 10-year payback.  The interest rate on that second mortgage is half a percentage point higher than the first mortgage’s interest rate.
Colorado, New Mexico, Delaware, Tennessee, New Jersey, Washington State, Ohio, Idaho and Pennsylvania now have similar versions of this bridge loan idea. Not every plan is exactly the same, but they all share the idea of providing that tax credit money sooner rather than later.
     Do you like the idea? Do you think we should have something similar here in Florida? Write or call your state representative and say so.
     “But,” you cry again, “I don’t know who my State Rep is!”
     No problemo. Go to the Florida House of Representatives web site and punch in your ZIP code — the site will tell you who you should write or call. Here’s the link: http://www.myfloridahouse.gov/sections/Representatives/myrepresentative.aspx

Tags: pinellas county, tax credit

Believe it or not, home construction applications are UP

With real estate sales and values way down from their historic highs of about three years ago, you’d think that developers would be thinking about just about anything except building more new houses.
But you would be wrong.
Developers have been submitting large numbers of proposals for new homes and new commercial developments to state approval agencies. How many? Applications have been filed for more than a half-million new homes as well as about 500 million square feet of commercial space.
What are they thinking?
State officials say it is owners or large land tracts that are behind the push for more development approvals. Whether new homes and communities are being built or not, the people who own those large tracts of land want the permits to build. It increases the land’s value, and it puts the land in a good position to host new developments if and when the market conditions improve.
Much of the land in question is now zoned agricultural, or is envirtonmentally sensitive. But if that land becomes approved for residential or commercial development, it suddenly becomes worth a lot more money.
With real estate in a full stall, you wouldn’t think that new development applications would be taken seriously. But with government and business hoping for an economic jump start, just about anything is possible.

Tags: building permits, new construction, pinellas, real estate

Chinese drywall causing problems in North Pinellas County and elsewhere

I had a disturbing call today from a good client who I sold a new town home to a couple of years ago. She told me that the home (which is in Tarpon Springs, in North Pinellas County) is one that was constructed with Chinese drywall.

Chinese sheetrock causing problems

If you don’t know about this Chinese drywall issue, here are a few facts:

Back in the height of the construction boom, around 2005 and 2006, there was so much new construction going on that American drywall manufacturers could not keep up with all the demand.  So builders began looking around for new sources.
They found it in China.

A LOT of Chinese drywall was imported into the U.S. around that time — maybe 10 million square feet of it. A good portion of it ended up in new homes being built in Florida.

Quite a few of those homes were built by Lennar Homes, including the town home purchased by my client.

What’s the problem?

All or most of that Chinese drywall appears to contain high amounts of sulphur and other materials that should not be there. When the drywall is exposed to dampness in the air, it begins to break down and emit a “rotten egg” smell.  The smell is not the only problem; it also corrodes electrical wiring, plumbing and air conditioning equipment.
And it also can cause some respiratory issues.

To their credit, Lennar Homes appears to be standing behind the homes they sold. In some cases, they are moving people out of the homes while they replace the sheetrock as well as the wiring and plumbing.

The problem is that we don’t know at this point what the scope of the problem is.  I saw a news story the other day that said about 300 homes in Florida had been identified as containing the Chinese sheetrock. With 10 million square feet of it having been sold in the US, the problem might be a good deal bigger than that.

I’ll be following the Chinese sheetrock issue and posting news about it here on the blog. Meanwhile, if you’ve had any experiences with the sheetrock, please tell us about it here in the “comments” section.

Tags: China, drywall, Lennar

What’s driving the market in North Pinellas County?

The real estate market is still slow here, just as it is everywhere, and there’s plenty of uncertainty about buying and selling to go around.  Still, things have been quite a lot better since around the first of the year, and I’ve been pretty busy with a steady stream of buyers.

What’s the common denominator? It’s probably that many of them are first-time home buyers.

This is not a very good time for the move-up buyer, who wants to trade up to a larger or nicer home.  Those people already own a home, and the chances are good they may owe more than the house is worth, or have a large enough mortgage that there just isn’t much equity left to finance a move to a nicer, more expensive home.

But for first-time homeowners, this is a great time.  Home prices are lower than they have been in a decade, interest rates are low, inventories and selection are great, and sellers are willing to negotiate in earnest. And don’t forget that big $8,000 tax credit that’s available to first time homebuyers (or to people who haven’t bought a home in the past three years or longer.)

I’ve sold a number of houses so far this year to first-time home buyers, and some of the deals have been REALLY favorable.

Do you have a good first-time home buyer story that you’d like to share? Use the “comment” area at the top of this post  – I’d like to hear from you.

Tags: First time homebuyers, North Pinellas County, real estate

New Pinellas County park is on the way

Who would have ever thought that you would have to actually travel to a park to see an orange grove in Pinellas County?

It wasn’t too many years ago that North Pinellas County was almost one big orange grove. As recently as the 1980s, orange groves still dotted the area. The subdivision where I live was an orange grove until it was subdivided in the mid-1980s. We still have a couple of orange trees in the backyard that are left over from those days.

Now, Pinellas County is about to open a new county park in Largo that will be devoted in part to preserving a bit of  Pinellas County’s orange-growing history.

The county bought 157 acres in Largo (at Belleair and Keene roads) from the Taylor family back in 1998 (for $13 million), and later they bought a few additional acres. This coming December, the county hopes to open the land as Eagle Lake Park. Some of the Taylor family’s orange groves will be preserved so people can see what orange grove farming was like in Pinellas County.

Pinellas County has some great parks, and Eagle Lake Park will just be the newest one. You can learn more at www.pinellascounty.org/park/

Tags: north pinellas, orange grove, parks