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Archive for the 'Palm Harbor' Category

Tampa Bay ranks last when it comes to public transit

Tampa Bay scores again; Forbes Magazine took a look at the 60 major metro areas in the country and then rated their rapid transit systems. Tampa Bay made the list — in last place.

That should come as only a mild surprise to anyone who has had to drive to work on either side of Tampa Bay. Traffic here is a nightmare, and there are few alternatives to driving your own car to work. We do have a bus system, but there is no rapid transit system, no subway, no passenger rail.

A great light rail system opened a few months ago in Phoenix. So far, it's been very popular with local residents.

Many of our major roadways started life as sleepy two-lanes.  US19N, the major north-south road that runs the length of Pinellas County, was once a rural two-lane road that passed through miles of orange groves, at least in the northern part of the county where I live. Someone recently told me that he remembered when there was just a flashing light at the intersection of 19 and Tampa Road, a busy major intersection today that serves six lanes of US19 and four of Tampa Road. 

If you want to cross the bay between Pinellas (Where St. Petersburg is located) and Hillsborough (Tampa), you have four choices: The Gandy bridge; the Howard Franklin Bridge; the Courtney Campbell Causeway; and Hillsborough Avenue, the only land route, located at the northern tip of Tampa Bay. If you attempt this crossing in rush hour, be prepared to sit.

If you’ve read this blog before, you know I am a fan of light rail, and we might — just might — have such a system in our sights.

A month or two ago, President Obama came to town and announced that the federal government would fund the majority share of a high-speed rail line between Tampa Bay and Orlando. That’s nice, because it would eliminate the drive on I-4, a really difficult bit of Interstate between those two cities.

But the real value of such a line would be the possibility of a light rail system at this end of it. The high-speed line could connect to a light-rail system that would circumnavigate Hillsborough and Pinellas Counties and provide an alternative to the automobile.

We have something called the Tampa Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority (TBARTA), which would like to build that system. Clearwater Mayor Frank Hibbard, who serves on the TBARTA board, spoke at St. Petersburg College recently about rapid transit in Tampa Bay, and said such a system is necessary both for current residents and to respond to companies that may consider locating facilities in Tampa Bay. 

All that said, I do have a bone or two to pick with Forbes about this ranking.  We used to live in Washington, DC,  and it would be hard to imagine a worse commuting city than that. before we lived in Florida we lived in Maine, and that meant the occasional drive to the biggest metro center in that neck of the woods, Boston. If you’ve never driven in Boston at rush hour, it is a breathtaking experience. Still, both those cities have good subway systems and buses that run frequently.

I think it is fair to say that Palm Harbor real estate, Dunedin real estate, or Pinellas County real estate in general would be more attractive if it was served by an efficient light rail system

Savannah: Worlds away from Palm Harbor

Why a post about Savannah, Ga., when this is a blog about Pinellas County real estate? 

Excellent question.

The thing is, every once in a while it feels good to get away from Palm Harbor real estate and take a look at real estate in some other locale — hopefully one that has a great selection of restaurants.

So last weekend we decided to take a few days off and head for Savannah. We drove up on New Year’s Day and came back three days later. We took the Paula Deen tour, ate dinner in her restaurant, took a long walk through the historic district, had some heavenly ice cream at Leopold’s (an ice cream shop founded almost 100 years ago) and just generally had a wonderful time in spite of overnight temperatures in the 20s.

Once nice thing about living in Pinellas County is that we are a day’s ride or less from some great getaway spots — Miami and the Keys to the south, Orlando and St. Augustine to the east, Atlanta and the Georgia mountains to the north, to name a few.

We don’t take advantage of all that near enough. Maybe this year we will.

Tags: Palm Harbor, pinellas county, real estate, Savannah

Real estate and Palm Harbor: Is this the best market for buyers ever?

If I were to ask you to describe your income, would you use words like “reliable,” “dependable,” or “steady?”  Do you think there’s a very good chance that your job (or your business) will be around in a year, or two, or five?

If you took out some sort of loan tomorrow, would you worry about your ability to pay it back because of future income issues? Or would you be confident that your job would remain in place over the long term?

Some people have jobs that pay really well, but which probably won’t be around for long periods.  I’ll give you an example: I have a relative who is working right now as an electrical contractor in Iraq. He’s making REALLY good money, but he doesn’t expect (or want) the job to last forever. After a year or so, he’s going to want to shake the sand out of his jeans, come back to the States, and resume a more normal life.

My relative’s big but short-term income puts him in a great position to pay off debt and accumulate cash. However, it does NOT make him a great candidate for a 30-year mortgage or a five-year car loan.

But YOU, on the other hand, might be sitting on a bigger asset than you realize, if you have a steady and dependable job or other source of income.

Why? Because this may be the best time in the past, oh, 75 years or so, to buy a house.

Which brings me to my second question:

Do you know what the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices is? Okay, I’ll tell you – it is a monthly report that measures the residential housing market. It tracks home values in 20 metro markets in the U.S.

And the Case-Shiller report for October, released just this week, shows a couple of things: 1. Home values in October were flat, and 2. in spite of that, home values during 2009 have generally been in slow but steady recovery mode.

Case-Shiller reports that home values have fallen a full 30% since their peak in 2005. That drop has been stunning – nothing like it has been seen since the Depression, and perhaps even earlier than that. For people who need or want a new home, it is an opportunity of stunning proportions.

And there is even more good news; interest rates have dropped, too, If you wanted a 30-year fixed rate mortgage three years ago, it would have likely cost you around 6.4 percent. Apply for that same mortgage today, and you’ll pay more like 5 percent.

What that means is that median home prices are now about where they were in the mid-1990s, a time when just about every agrees was a really great time to buy. What makes the current conditions even more attractive than then, however, is the difference in mortgage rates – something like 5 percent now, more like 9 percent back then.   

The Wall Street JOURNAL recently did some numbers-crunching, and came up with this conclusion: Buy an average home now, finance it with a 5 percent 30-year mortgage, and the cost comes out to be around 19 times today’s average weekly earnings. Conditions haven’t been that favorable for homebuyers since the 1970s, according to the JOURNAL.

Still not good enough for you? Okay, fine – then throw in the $8,000 first time home buyer tax credit, which is scheduled to run through the spring season.

Which brings us back to my original question: How would you characterize your income? Would you describe it as “reliable,” “dependable,” or “steady?”

If it is, and you can feel pretty good about relying on your income over the long term, this is probably the best time to buy a home that has come along during your entire lifetime, and probably your parents’ lifetime, and maybe even your grandparents’ lifetime as well.

The real question is the reliability of your income. These are uncertain economic times, and no one needs additional uncertainty in times like these. Unstable or unreliable income down the road could result in a foreclosure, no matter how attractive the selling price of the home is now.

But if income unreliability is not a major concern, unprecedented real estate opportunities await you.

Tags: pinellas, real estate and clearwater, real estate and palm harbor

Two-Day Palm Harbor Arts & Crafts Festival draws crowds

The holiday season  really brings out the local arts & crafts shows, and this year has been no exception.  If you scroll back you’ll see that we visited a small arts show up in Tarpon Springs a week or two ago.

But the mother of all local arts shows is the Palm Harbor Arts & Crafts Festival, a show that has been a fixcture in Palm Harbor for the past 35 years.  Most of these shows have been held in the Olde Palm Harbior area right off Alt. 19, and that’s where the show was held again this year after a hiatus of several years during which the show was moved up to the St. petersburg College Tarpon Springs campus.

A couple of art-loving Newfoundlands

This year was fun as always, athough it seemed to me that both the crowds and the number of vendors were down a bit from the average. that should be no big surprise, I guess, what with the slow economy and the general lack of disposable income rattling around in peoples’ pockets.  Several of the vendors told us that business was way down this year, and some mentioned that the past two or three years have been something less than great.

Bad weather on Saturday, rain and cold, really put a damper on things on the first day of the two-day show, although things seemed to have picked up a bit on Sunday.

One nice thing this year is that Sunday was Pet Day, a special featured done in cconjunction with the Humane Society of Pinellas. There was a pet parade on Sunday afternoon, and a special Santa was on hand so that proud pet owners could get their pets’ poctures taken with

Dogs love Santa, too...

Santa. There were also adoptable pets on hand, along with a whole street of pet-related vendors selling everything from pet food to leashes, collars and other pet accessories.

Aside from all the official pet stuff, one nice feature was that there quite a few pets simply being walked around by their owners. Not everyone loves animals, but we do, so we really enjoyed the different pets that were on hand.

We also ran into John Mascoll, a very talented wood worker who lives in Safety Harbor. John won the best of Showe award last year, and because of that we didn’t think it was likely that he would place thisyear, but he did — a big blue ribbon was hanging in his display.

The Palm Harbor arts how is a juried show, which is nice because ot attracts vendors who might not otherwise come. Even if an artist doesn’t sell a whole lot, he or she might win a prized worth bragging about.

This was the 35the annual Palm Harbor show. It started out pretty small, but it has become a major Palm Harbor event that local people really wait for.

Farmers’ Market in Palm Harbor

Fruit and veggie vendor's stand at the Palm Harbor Farmers' market

If you are a fan of local farmers’ markets, you should know that Palm Harbor hosts a very nice little farmers’ market on the grounds of the  North Pinellas Historical Museum at the corner of Belcher and Curlew Road.

This area has a number of good farmers’ markets that are fun to attend.  The one in Dunedin is a good-sized market, and Clearwater has a somewhat smaller one.  I haven’t been to the farmers’ market in St. Petersburg, but it’s supposed to be terrific.

But anyway, back to the Palm Harbor market; it happens every Sunday at the museum, and vendors are on hand from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. This past Sunday there was a fruit and vegetable stand, a fellow selling very good-looking fresh fish, a woman selling handmade hats, a could of sandwich vendors and several others.  I mostly just nosed around, but I did buy some bananas and some really nice-looking red grapes.

I’ve written about the Dunedin and Clearwater farmers’ markets in the past — you may want to scroll back a few pages and look those over.  It’s nice to have one in Palm Harbor, and you can combine your visit with a tour of the North Pinellas Historical Museum.

Tags: farmer's market, Palm Harbor

Got your eye on a new Palm Harbor home? Don’t drag your feet.

I just sold a house to a couple who had been working with me since last November.  That’s right, it took them a full year to find the house they wanted to buy.

Were these people unusually picky, or were their requirements so specific that the right house simply wasn’t available for a really long time?  I would say “no” to both counts; I think they just wanted to be very careful in what they considered a very volatile market.  They wanted to make sure they didn’t pay too much in case the real estate market continued to free-fall, and they wanted to be sure they didn’t end up with a house that was going to cost a lot to upgrade.

This couple looked very actively during the past year, and they actually made offers on several houses. But if the negotiations on those houses began to bog down, or if the sellers didn’t act like they wanted to significantly drop their prices (and do so quickly), these people would back away.

I think their attitude was exactly the opposite of buyer attitudes two or three years ago, when buyers thought they had to act very swiftly in order to get the home they wanted. Now, caution rules the day for buyers, along with low-ball offers. I don’t think the low offers come so much from a desire to play hardball as from a fear of paying too much in a market where prices may have a way to go before hitting bottom.

The point of all this is the new first-time homebuyer tax credit, which the Congress just recently passed. This new tax credit offers an $8,000 tax credit to first-time homebuyers, and a credit of $6,500 to repeat buyers. That credit for repeat buyers MIGHT entice some move-up buyers to come back into the market, which has mostly been dominated by first-time buyers.

The original tax credit, which was launched last spring and which was to run only through the end of November, made home ownership possible for many first-time buyers. This new version continues to offer that, while also offering a tidy tax credit to people who are NOT first-timers.

But here’s the bad part (and the reason why I started out by talking about those buyers who took a full year to find a home they wanted to buy); this new tax credit is authorized only through April – buyers have to have a binding contract in place by April 30, 2010.

If you think your home search may take a number of months, you’d better get started now. April will be here before you know it.

Tags: first time home buyer, Palm Harbor, real estate, tax credit

22nd Annual Veterans Day observances at Curlew Memory Gardens in Palm Harbor

For the 22nd straight year, Curlew Hills Memory Gardens in Palm Harbor hosted a Veterans Day service .

The program began at around 9:30 a.m. A piper played the bagpipes, a choir from St. Alfred’s Episcopal Church sang to the accompaniment of a keyboard player, and an honor guard presented the colors. There was a threat of rain during the early morning hours, but the sun came out just in time for the service.

Remarks were delivered by Gunnery Sergeant Nathaniel Garcia, a Marine stationed at U.S. Central Command in Tampa.  The ceremony was concluded with taps played by Ron Ashley of the Marine Corps League’s Morris F. Dixon Chapter #54.

A contigent from the Palm Harbor Fire department was also on hand for the ceremonies.

The event was open to the public.

A number of other ceremonies and remembrances were held throughout the Tampa Bay area, as well.  perhaps the largest was at Bay Pines, the Veterans Administration facility in mid-county. A year ago, my husband wrote about the Memorial Day ceremonies at Bay Pines and about finding the grave of an old friend. You can find that post elsewhere on this blog.

Tags: Palm Harbor, real estate, veterans day

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.

Real estate sales up nationally for fourth straight month

The National Association of Realtors says that national sales of existing homes rose in July, marking the fourth consecutive month of home sale increases.

That’s the good news, and it really is good news in a market as bad as this one has been.

 But here’s the not-so-good news; most of that increase can be traced to distressed properties – foreclosures and short sales.

Even so, any increase in home sales is a good thing, and this national trend noted by NAR seems to mirror what we have been seeing here in Tampa Bay – increasing numbers of home sales even as prices have continued a downward trend. Those lower prices have contributed to the uptick in sales, as have continuing good mortgage rates and the lure of that $8,000 federal tax credit for first-time homebuyers.

That tax credit will come to and end at the end of November, and many observers are predicting a bit of a scramble as first-time buyers try to purchase homes before the deadline.

So the real estate market really looks like this: It’s a great time to buy if you qualify as a first-time homebuyer – prices are extremely attractive, mortgage rates are low, and there is a really attractive tax credit out there for the taking. It’s not so great for people who want to move up to a better home, or who have a home they need to sell.

There really is little activity in the middle- or upper ranges of the market except for those relatively rare cash buyers.

Chamberlins were part of Palm Harbor history

Grave of Franklin and Ella Chamberlin

Back in March I wrote about the cemetery at Curlew Methodist Church in Palm Harbor, one of the oldest cemeteries in Pinellas County. You can read that earlier post here.

Not long afterwards, I got a nice note from Michael Chamberlin of California, who said he had enjoyed the article because his great-grandparents, James F. and Ella Chamberlin, were buried in that cemetery. I filed that information away, thinking I would go back up to the cemetery and see if I could find James’ and Ella’s headstones.

It took a little while, but over the Fourth of July weekend we stopped by the cemetery and walked around a bit.

We thought we would be there for a while — there are quite a few graves in that old cemetery. As luck would have it, the very first headstone we saw — the closest one to the church buildings to the left of the main driveway — said “Chamberlin.”

We were pretty sure we had found the right stone, although some of the information was a bit different from that provided by Michael Chamberlin. He had identified his great-grandfather as “James F.”, but the stone identified him as “Franklin.” Michael said his great-grandmother died in 1926, but the stone had the year of death as 1929.

I took a picture of the gravestone and sent it, along with a note, to Michael Chamberlin. he confirmed that his great-grandfather’s middle name was Franklin, and he confirmed the 1926 year of death for Ella Chamberlin.

In his earlier note, Michael said that his great-grandparents were originally from Beloit, Wis., and that they had moved to Florida and bought a 20-acre citrus grove on Curlew Road in 1910. He said their son, George L. Chamberlin, followed his parents to Pinellas County. He became very active in Republican politics here, and during the Calvin Coolidge administration was named postmaster of Palm Harbor.

It’s interesting how one story leads to another. I believe the old Palm Harbor post office was located in the Sutherland Building in old Downtown Palm Harbor, a building which now houses Peggy O’Neill’s restaurant, which I’ve written about previously.  The post office boxes are still in the restaurant, I’m pretty sure. Maybe I’ll try to dig up a story about the Post Office, and maybe a bit more about George Chamberlin.

It’s fun writing about the history of this part of Florida. If you have any interesting old stories about Pinellas County that you’d like to share, I’d love to hear them.

Special thanks to Michael Chamberlin for providing the information about his family members.