Cheap Housing

A funny thing happened last week in the Lower Keys. The county planning commission, the people who advise the county commission the lawmakers that is, voted down a proposal to build affordable housing. You'd think it was a bad thing. Actually no, it  was in aggregate a good vote much to my surprise.

The plan was to put 160 units of housing on Summerland Key on apiece of land they call the Shrimp Farm just off Highway One. It's not a terrible spot you'd think,vacant and cleared of the old business, but for some reason the owner who also owns hotels in Key West decided he wanted to go all out and build 160 units of "affordable" living.

Of course no one really knows what "affordable" means to a multi millionaire developer...and wages aren't that great in the hospitality trade in Key West as a general rule, so the idea of creating houses for sale at prices workers could pay seems unlikely at best, maybe naive or maybe a confidence trick at worst. The planning commission wasn't buying. 

The neighbors were none too excited though that's to be expected as the general rule of thumb now is Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything (BANANA) an acronym that supersedes NIMBY (Not In MY Back Yard). In this case I think they had a point as  an extra 160 families ona small handkerchief of land on a small island is going to create traffic and congestion issues worse than they already are. On top of that there is no clarity as to price and true affordability. So all the neighbors can see is more transient housing, more second homes mixed in with rentals and no affordability.

I was surprised by the negative vote but these developers don't give up and I'm sure there will be a less dense proposal soon with a clearer mixture of amrket rate (second homes) with a sop to affordability and eventually it will be approved in some form. Developers start out asking for the stars and the moon and whne you say no they then ask for the moon, you figure it's a huge victory you can exploit at the next election and tons more houses go up.

Unfortunately in these small islands we are running out of room and I don't mean that metaphorically. Now that Spring Break is over and the winter residents are gone we can all notice we have breathing room at the supermarket, lines on the highway are down. But the lines to get into Key West on the highway were extraordinary, and evertyone noticed and everyone grumbled.   It's true there is a lot more commuting going up and down between Big PIne and Key West as fewer workers can afford to live in Key West. But the additonal traffic from visitors and winter residents doesn't help. And the fact that lines have eased up now they are gone proves the point.

The hotels have been mumbling informally that visitor numbers are down. Online booking services say Trump's America is unappealing to Europeans at the moment. Perhaps Key West will get a respite from the hordes this year, perhaps not. Perhaps if the city does there could some rethinking about the lack of a plan or a vision for the future of this remarkable city set amongst these remarkable islands.

The Amphitheater

Earlier this week the city commission in Key West voted to carry on with the construction of a four million dollar outdoor concert venue at Truman Waterfront. They had a public meeting at which half the audience supported the plan, the other half didn't and the remainder wasn't sure. That adds up to more than 100 percent of those in attendance and I think it's fair to say this latest storm in a Key West teacup has left a lot of residents unsure. The whole of the waterfront is now pretty much a construction zone and something like this should emerge by the Fall:

At the meeting city staff told the elected leaders that were they to shut down the project plans and closure would cost the city half a million dollars which seemed to decide the outcome. The paper had previously checked around the state and the Citizen found that similar venues elsewhere generate almost no income for their municpialities, a suggestion Mayor Cates found annoying, musing out loud about the perception that a park should pay for itself. That notion was put about by the Spottswoods the premier family that wanted to develop a profitable concern at Truman Waterfront and whose plans were scotched nit by the city but by the Navy who said a firm "No" to the idea of a marina generating money as part of the waterfront park. Ever since then this notion of a park-for-profit has hung in the air, an emanation left over from thedeseprate Spottswood development plan.

Which is not to say the park will be a wild and interesting open space as I might like. It will offer facilites and paths and order and control. That at least is the impression they give. Meanwhile we drive through corridors of construction fencing, like travelers passing through Checkpoint Charley in a divided Berlin. Rusty is always ready to inspect anything, such is his curiosity.

Either the amphitheater will be successful beyond anyone's wildest dreams in which case traffic and noise will flood the quality of life in Bahama Village,. Or it will sit idle  most of the time and become a four million dollar monument to the Triumph of Hope.

Southernmost Cabanas

A life in Key West's modest little cottages can sometimes spill out untidily as the homes though pretty are small and not always designed with the practical in mind. 

A lot of visitors like the slightly down-at-heel appearance of this town which still lays claim to a slightly off kilter reputation, a place where vice flourishes and those on the run come to seek cover. It's mot really like that but the story is good and who wants to spoil it?

Well it turns out there are people who think homes built "in the Key West Style" are a good compromise between the gritty reality of life in a  Conch Cottage and the modern desire fo convenience and cleanliness and order.

So outside the fence trash cans and dust and messy street signs litter the way. Inside the fence will rise a fabricated community, a kind of community, of neat clean and well appointed homes of a certain style.

Outside the fence where working Key West struggles to make ends meet.

Inside the fence where intruders bring color until they crow at four in the morning and wrench the visitors from their slumbers.

I found the sign slightly ironic wondering who exactly it is that is trespassing...The land used to be owned by the Catholic Diocease which sold it to pay legal bills incurred by people make claims against the church in the sex scandals of note of years past.LINK

So trailers for the working class are gone and homes for people who need a second home in Key West are here. 

The trend is unstoppable it seems. Rusty and I keep walking.

Housing: Affordable And Not

Clearly I am getting to feel better as I have started to take a fresh interest in the pages of the daily paper, and I am well enough nowadays to stagger downstairs to pick up the neatly folded newsprint tossed in my driveway. Oh dear what do we find? More stories about the abominable state of housing in the Southernmost City. And judging by a couple of stories on the front page tonight's city commission meeting could make things, at best, no better, and  at worst, no worse. 

The first chunk of housing involves a development on Caroline Street with expensive town homes under construction (see above from the front page of yesterday's paper). The question there is whether or not the homes should be permitted to rent for less than 28 days at a time. The city limits short term rentals, the idea being to preserve residential neighborhoods rather than turning them all into party central for a week at a  time...However in neither case are these multi million dollar homes going to be rented as workforce housing, it seems to me. The question is more one of helping to encourage sales to people who one day might like to live in Key West  but want to buy these town homes to use as rentals in the meantime which does the housing market no particular good. This issue highlights the difficulty of home ownership in Key West that is often masked by ridiculous prices combined with lack of amenity. You buy a home and end up with your neighbors being vacationers up till all hours splashing in the pool, playing music and being rowdy after a night's drinking on Duval Yay! That's what Key West is all about! When you've paid through the nose for your home this sort of behavior can render you pretty testy

The other housing development planned for the city is a collection of ten manufactured homes to be built on stilts on Flagler Avenue at 11th Street on a piece of land essentially cleared by Hurricane Wilma in 2005. Apparently one city commissioner of glorious but short memory wanted a city park but developers have been arguing over the parcel and now it seems these manufactured homes will sell for $800,000 apiece with a chunk of the land remaining undeveloped and "preserved." These three bedroom wonders don't exactly qualify as worker housing either at those prices. The best part is the city gets a whole $15,000 tribute for affordable housing funding from each home. As you might imagine around here  $150,000 won't go far to assuage the need for affordable homes. The best part about this development for me is the security wall and electronic fence that is planned to keep the ravening hordes of homeless at bay. The Catholic Soup Kitchen is next door...The Enclave will be a secure fortress, safe from the poor.

If there were any doubts about Key West's commitment to affordable housing, let them be dispelled at once. Even in my feverish state this appears just to be more lopsided fuzzy thinking from a leadership class that has not one spark of thoughtful creativity.

Construction Zone South

When people talk about "South Beach" in South Florida they usually mean a glamorous Art Deco neighborhood in Miami, but at the end of the road, south beach is the bottom end of Duval Street, more or less. Perhaps its the top end of Duval, because in upside-down-land, Upper Duval is the part of Duval furthest from the action. Lower Duval is where the action is, where the cruise ship passengers land, where people get drunk and look at naked women in city Commissioner Rossi's Red Garter strip club. At the Atlantic end of Duval then, lies south beach. The Duval Beach Club and the Southernmost Everything crowd the ends of Duval and Simonton Streets. Nowadays there are lots of holes. And the construction is promising a better future, bigger hotels, nicer facilities means more expensive and so it goes. But the old Key West, not the ancient run down Key West, the middling Old Key West, the one that came as part of the first wave of gay oriented re-development, is getting knocked down. At the southern end of the city that piece of history is long gone. Atlantic Shores was a place that offered rooms in motel-like rows heavily vegetated and really quite pretty. There was a diner for post-orgy breakfasts and Thursdays was al fresco movie nights where we took over the parking lot and lounged with free popcorn and cans of Heineken and my Labrador snored in my lap while I sank into the magic of the silver screen under the silver star-studded night sky. All gone. Even the pool where clothes were optional and men and women sun bathed, if they so chose. I doubt the new Southernmost extension will offer any of that. And who will miss Atlantic Shores?

The back end of the old Atlantic Shores was a place my wife and I still talk about. City Commissioner Rossi owned The Sands beach club, a place that offered decent food and outdoor casual seating on an actual sand beach. It really was a cool spot, and we enjoyed it. Our peripatetic yellow Lab Emma used to be able to sit alongside us in the sand and that was a bonus. The Sands is gone and a white construction fence is there instead. Across the street the old Reach Resort has been rebuilt and looks just as massive and solid as it did before Wilma trashed it in October 2005. The Santa Maria resort, a cute 1950's art deco motel has been transformed into minuscule condos selling for over a million bucks for each 400 square feet. I don't suppose the new occupants of the rabbit hutches will miss the ability to fling off their clothes around a public pool. They get tiny balconies to watch traffic whizzing by on South Street though.

I can't really say what I think about all this. Lots of people spend a great deal of time bitching about change and threaten to leave the Keys for a better, more expansive life Up North. What they don't investigate is that Up North is convulsing with change also, and for the price of a small residential condo in a converted Key West Victorian they can buy a tract house, twice as large with garage and a clean, bum-less street outside. But what makes the keys worth living in and struggling in isn't on offer in suburbia, at any price. Change is inevitable and it isn't usually a real improvement, but at least in Key West it is still a subject of debate and we all try to hang on and remember what's gone on ahead.

The 1990's was a decade of great wealth everywhere, in the Conch Republic as much as Up North and development was set in motion, but there was lots of good stuff that cheered people up in that decade. Much of it is gone or going as money dries up and people spend less. PT's a second rate restaurant where people liked to hang out is an actual parking lot. Dennis Pharmacy a cheesy but cheerful diner whose success was predicated on nostalgia is now a bland bank and so forth.

I wonder if one day we will wax nostalgic about the good old Santa Maria. Personally I never stayed at the old one and I sure as hell won't at the new one. As for my role in the poolside shenanigans at the Atlantic Shores? Why on earth would I miss them...?

Paving Paradise

Key West continues, inexorably to change. The changes aren't sudden and God knows they are planned far enough in advance, but the paving of paradise continues apace, like it or not. Its Old Town that takes the brunt of the cement attacks, focused on two stretches of waterfront. The old Atlantic Shores resort at the southern tip of Simonton Street is a large hole in the ground at the moment. It used to be a pretty cool place, straight friendly, dog friendly offering open air movies every Thursday night with free popcorn. Next door the old Sands beach resort is also gone, paving the way for some new monstrosity. That's the bad news on South Beach, and more on that later.

The focus of controversy I rode by earlier this week is around Waterfront Market an overpriced food store offering key West's widest selection of organics (Publix is in close second place). The owner of the Waterfront wants to quit but locals want the institution to remain so there is a move afoot to sell shares and keep the place going as a coop. Buco Pantelis was notorious for low low wages and its hard to imagine a coop will be able to pay the sort of money that will keep experienced staff.

Just next door to the Waterfront Market is an older Key West institution that may also survive as a public entity. Historic Tours of America abruptly fired the crew and put the schooner Western Union up for sale last summer. With hurricane season over (notwithstanding Caribbean islands getting a drenching from Hurricane Olga this week), some civic minded citizens popped up and decided to try to sell shares for the Western Onion and raise 1.5 million to keep it on the Key West waterfront. So far so good. But I did think it odd when organisers showed Deep Water as a fundraiser to save the boat. The film is about the suicidal Donald Crowhurst and his doomed attempt to sail around the world in the 1968 Golden Globe race. But I went to the Tropic Cinema anyway and yielded my $25 to watch one boat flounder to save the other.

These public minded attempts at preservation are bookended by two major housing developments that bode little good for the mostly city owned waterfront. To the north is the old Steam Plant, the electrical generating station that spewed its effluent into the harbor at the "toxic triangle" off Trumbo Road. That thing sat unused for decades, a brooding castle of Transylvanian proportions, that has now been reborn as 3 million dollar exclusive apartments (one left!) with a dozen affordable units built in its shadow (none left!).

Once Ed Swift, owner of Historic Tours of America, is done with the Steam Plant we will shortly thereafter witness the birth of another set of condos popping up on top of the old Jabors RV park which sat across the street from the Waterfront Market. This development is being created by another development company that is convinced this is the best way to make Key West a hot tourist destination. Despite the glut of condos in south Florida these ultra expensive units, also on offer at around $3 million, are selling briskly. Everyone wants a slice of "Old Key West" even if they kill it in the process of buying it. The Watermark took a lot of effort to permit as the developers wanted to violate just about every zoning regulation but steady citizen opposition got it within city zoning requirements and now construction has begun.
Watermark, a name discredited by the zoning fiasco is known as Harbor Condominiums in its latest incarnation, and will soon tower over the little bar that likes to call itself "the last little piece of old Key West," Schooner Wharf Bar. Bar aficionados are sounding the death knell of the funky, musically off beat and always loud joint, even though current plans call for the Schooner Wharf to be treated as a charming attraction, for the multi gazillionaires who plan to live next door. I doubt that will last. All new residents bitch when they start to reside here, about the funky charm that attracted them here in the first place.

And this has been going on for decades in the Keys. Errare humanum est, perseverare diabolicum, and we just can't find any decent local leaders to elect who will change our headlong course into middle class mediocrity.

Smoke and Mirrors

The good part about living in the Keys is the bit where you wake up each day remembering you live in small town America. This is the place where you enjoy the benefits of life as rhapsodised in places like North Dakota, places where front doors are never locked, here that attitude is allied with the best possible weather and warm ocean water and a certain savoir faire that is hard to describe but easy to enjoy. For instance I have no idea what my neighborhood crime watch is or does, but there are signs in my suburb proving that it exists:It occurs to me to think about the possibility of worrying about the reasons for the existence of the sign, but then I relax, I live in the keys after all! What you might call a place that offers savoir faire combined with lassitude, that translates into a quality that outsiders call laid-back, a concept that belongers make fun of as they trudge daily through three jobs that between them barely pay for rent and beer. In Kansas one lives in a small town and doesn't lock one's front door, true, but one frowns and suffers anxiety if a person of strange demeanor enters the city limits. In Key West one possibly locks the door to keep chickens and drunks at arms length, but one hardly notices men dressed as women, people speaking foreign languages on the street or coming to the office in shorts and floral shirts. We,as far as I know, have no children on our street, despite the signs of awful warning. Just another of life's little paradoxes in paradise.

Undoubtedly it helps not to have children in paradise, unless you are a millionaire, in which case you have all the help you need. It also helps to be connected. There is, it has to be said, an unusually healthy portion of the inexplicable in Paradise; inexplicable that is, were it not for the fact that there is always a money trail. Take sewers for example. The State government has oversight over Monroe County and has been asking the Keys for the past twenty years to please put a sewer system into the islands and replace all those leaky sewage pits. Well, the good leaders of Monroe County have been temporising for twenty years and the State has now decided that if all the islands aren't sewered by 2010 heads will roll and people will be fined. So now we face the prospect of getting sewers, and I might add saving the coral reef. A recent study showed conclusively that human sewage leaking into the nearshore waters is poisoning the coral. 'Nuff sed.

The city of Key West got done with their tertiary (three stage) sewage system a while ago, and very painful it was too tearing up city streets apparently at random. But now all that waste gets made clean enough to drink before it is ejected back to the ocean. I live with a septic tank, underneath a lid like the one shown above, and the county is mulling over how to put me on a central sewer system, at a cost to me of somewhere around $7,000.

Residents of Stock Island have been through the process and the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) voted to give the job to a private company called Key West Resort Utilities. This despite the fact that the publicly owned and run Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority (FKAA) did an excellent job of sewering the city with no cost overruns. Key West Resort Utilities is run by a man who is close friends with a long time member of the BOCC, and that's why they got the contract, despite building a system that did not meet specifications, that cost more than bid and that repeatedly backed up raw sewerage into people's homes. I'm not kidding- you'd come home from work to find a brown lake in your bathroom.


So, if you were the BOCC you would rather crucify yourself than risk giving another contract to Key West Resort Utilities, right? Especially with people on Rockland and Big Coppitt and Geiger Keys screaming "No!" Right? You or I would ask FKAA to do the central sewer system. Not the BOCC, they are thinking about awarding the contract to their buddies at Key West Resort Utilities.


And thats the flip side of living in Paradise, daily, public corruption masked as incompetence! You'd think the voters would be over it by now! Instead we open the paper and read another disturbing headline. The county is preparing next year's budget at a difficult time, especially as the state has mandated budget cuts in all 68 Florida counties. So this is the time the County Administrator, a public clown, decides to fire the Budget Director. On the face of it the Budget Director has been rude and unprofessional to co-workers, including the County Engineer (think sewers) but the BOCC, the Administrator's bosses have split down predictable lines. The majority of three, known as the Gang of Three for their Maoist devotion to cronyism, support the County Clown and the minority of Two, the sensible Republicans (another paradox in paradise!) wonder why the Budget Director is under threat by the Administrator, the jester of the Gang of Three. Which leads me to wonder what is really going on. Is the Budget Director an abrasive yet competent public official, duly worried by the Administrator's ability to run up a huge public deficit- currently $8 million and counting. Or is the Budget Director just another incompetent bubba wallowing in his job, and now facing getting fired because he has fallen out of favor with the rest of the gang?

So much for living in Paradise, this place sometimes is just ankle deep in shit- literally.