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Archive for the 'Florida' Category

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

Curlew church is one of Pinellas County’s oldest

Curlew Methodist Church in Palm Harbor

I’m from New England, a place where communities often stretch back several hundred years. It’s not like that here in North Pinellas County.

The area where I live, made up of Palm Harbor, Dunedin, Tarpon Springs and even much of Clearwater, was little more than orange groves just 20 or 30 years ago. There are many wonderful assets in this region, but the local history is a bit thin.

But that’s not true of everything. A case in point is Curlew United Methodist Church, located in a little corner of Palm Harbor just north of Curlew Road.

Most churches in this area are not very old, but Curlew United Methodist Church was founded 140 years ago, in 1869. John Sutton, a local resident, decided that this part of North Pinellas County, a near-frontier area back then, needed a place of worship. He called together 22 of his friends and neighbors, and he then provided six acres of land for the church and an adjoining cemetery.

Sutton wasn’t done at that point; he also provided logs from the property, which were rafted down to a saw mill in Clearwater, cut into boards, and then rafted back up the coast.

The church members agreed to help build the church, which Sutton named Curlew after the pink birds that flocked nearby. Actually, Sutton thought the birds were curlew birds, but he was incorrect; they actually were pink spoonbills. No matter; the name “Curlew” stuck, and that’s the name of the church today.

About 12 years later, the church was destroyed by fire. The members held their services under a big oak tree on the property for a couple of years, then built a new building. However, that building wasn’t very well put together, and members tore it down in 1902 and built a new one.

That building was remodeled in 1942, and it still stands on the site and serves the members of the congregation, but not as the main church building; that structure was erected in 1969.

The cemetary that Sutton founded surrounds the church on two sides, and its gravestones provide a fascinating record of life and death in North Pinellas County from the late 1800s until the present day.

Today, the Curlew United Methodist Church still counts descendants of John Sutton among its worshippers. It is the oldest church in Pinellas County to still occupy its original site.

Tags: church, Curlew, history, north pinellas, Palm Harbpr

St. Paddy’s Day in Palm Harbor

One thing you have to say about Downtown Palm Harbor — for a small downtown area, it seems as though there’s always something going on there.

I went there early in the morning on Saturday to just get a few photos to go with the previous post. When I got there, Florida Avenue was roped off. Hmmmm, I thought — what could this be?

Turns out it was sort of a mini-celebration. Peggy O’Neill’s, the Irish pub, was about to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.

St. Patrick's Day vendor

The interesting thing about Downtown Palm Harbor is they are always doing something fun that draws people to the area. This weekend its St. Patrick’s Day. Next weekend there is an arts and crafts display. After Thanksgiving there is a really big art program, and on another weekend there is a big motorcycle event.

There aren’t a lot of merchants in Downtown Palm Harbor, but they go the extra mile to make their neighborhood fun.

Tags: Add new tag, Palm Harbor, St. Patrick's Day

California leads the real estate value decline

All the data appears to be in, and we can now say with authority that the state with the biggest decline in real estate values for 2008 was….

(Drum roll, please….)

CALIFORNIA!

That’s right, California was the big winner (actually, loser) in the real estate downturn sweepstakes, losing 26.9 percent of its real estate value during the year. Next was Nevada, with a 22.8 percent value drop, followed by Arizona (19 percent) and then (ahem) Florida, with an 18.2 percent drop.

Values actually dropped in 35 states during 2008.

That’s the story for 2008, but what about the total drop in values since, say, the peak of real estate value in July 2006? California still leads the way with a 42 percent decline. Nevada protected its second place position with a 39 percent decline. Arizona and Florida are tied for third place at 33 percent.

If you want to look at actual metro markets rather than states, we see nine California markets leading the list, but then Miami-Dade in Florida captures the 10th spot.

Did any market actually gain value during 2008? Actually, several did. If you live in Binghampton, N.Y., you live in a place where real estate actually appreciated by 7.78%. Plattsburgh, N.Y., Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Rocky Mount, N.C., Auburn, N.Y. and Florence-Mussel Shoals, AL also did pretty well.

This data comes from First American CoreLogic, which follows real estate values across the country.

Tags: california, real estate, values