After a horrific winter, Northeast and Midwest boomers are coming in waves to seek warm weather in America’s Southeast. Homes in the cold Northeast and Midwest are being sold and, with cash in hand for many boomers, the search is on for a warm retirement location for their golden years.
Most guides to retirement rank places by cost-of-living, climate, cultural offerings or personal interests. Few offer any information on the environment. So before you decide where to invest, it is important to see how prospective communities have handled everything from massive, Chinese-owned pig farms in North Carolina, decaying H-Bomb plants in South Carolina and Tennessee, or antiquated coal fired power plants in Florida. Realtors and developers do not warn boomers about environmental threats lurking near their dream houses in the sunshine. They are either unaware or simply choose not to discuss these issues with their buyers.
Buyers’ Beware
After driving the thousands of miles from Virginia to Florida, it becomes clear that humans have unlimited capabilities to adulterate the environment. Because homebuyers fall in love with a community or specific house, a lurking local environmental threat might not even make it into the decision making matrix. That is a huge financial mistake that could have unexpected economic consequences.
In most states, there are requirements to disclose the toxic dump under the seller’s beautiful golf course home. But the South is a regulation-adverse region where unsuspecting new residents may end up paying a very hefty price for the lack of environmental enforcement and protection.
The Chem-Nuclear Site, Barnwell County, SC.
Maybe it is the culture, but many Southerners put verbal bandages on the god-awful to make it sound better. In South Carolina, for example, the state’s U.S. senators actually got cold war nuclear waste redefined into a less dangerous category to make it easier to become a nuclear waste dump.
Just to be clear – the South is not California. It may be warm, but it is also an environmental minefield, and most of the politicians in charge want to keep it that way. Every Southern State has serious environmental problems that relate to some of the dirtiest industries – like coal. Looking the other way has provided jobs and enormous wealth to a relative few. Industries and utilities along with a political willingness that goes back decades to welcome dangerous government facilities – like the Savannah River Site in South Carolina or the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, not to mention numerous military bases and scores of smaller sites – have left a legacy that has taken a huge environmental and health toll on the region.
In a big way, the patriotic South took an environmental hit for all of the United States. It was a mindset that these facilities would be good for the country and bring high-paying jobs to the region.
Air and water pollution from giant farms, coal waste storage, and the defacto home for nuclear waste are just a few of the constant threats to property values. The South is not alone in this economy vs. the environment trade-off. Giant factory farms are all over America’s heartland. But regulation in the South is less stringent.
Virginia
Virginia is a beautiful state sustained by government jobs and largely run by greedy corporations that manage to find ways to get greedy politicians to do their bidding. Front Royal, Virginia, is located at the north entrance to the picturesque Skyline Drive. It was once home to one of the most polluted sites in the state.
The now shuddered Avtex Fibers plant had been one of the biggest single polluters in American history and had once during World War II poisoned the Shenandoah River all the way to West Virginia – some 34 miles. After a five-year struggle and a visit from Ted Koppel’s Nightline, the plant became one of the last major Superfund Sites in the United States.
FRONT ROYAL, Va. — Norfolk District, Army Corps of Engineers implodes the Avtex Fibers Boiler House previously located in Front Royal, Va. (Army Corps of Engineers photos)
But that does not mean the politicians are any smarter.
Just a few years ago the town fathers allowed a huge natural gas plant to be built that literally casts a cloud over the Blue Ridge Mountains and sometimes obscures the amazing views from the nearby Shenandoah National Park. The town did not even get gas hook-ups for its residents out of the deal.
Why start in the mountains? Because the coastal regions are often impacted by environmental decisions made many miles away. The Shenandoah River is part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The bay is contending with numerous environmental issues after centuries of neglect. In a truly historic effort, despite billions of dollars spent and the efforts of environmentalists and all levels of government, the Chesapeake Bay is still struggling to overcome choking pollution.
Naval Station Norfolk, photo from Wikipedia
The tidewater area of Virginia is already heavily impacted by climate change. The Norfolk region with its huge naval and special operations presence finds its neighborhoods flooding on a regular basis. The Navy is planning a major shift of the Atlantic Fleet to less vulnerable bases. The same threat of rising seas and new storm patterns threatens other sacred American playgrounds.
North Carolina
The Outer Banks of North Carolina have developed into the preferred vacation spot for not only North Carolina natives, but also affluent lobbyists and lawyers from the Washington, D.C. area. These barrier Islands are dramatic and beautiful. Even the countless rows of million dollar plus homes blocking the beaches have not diminished the attractiveness of the place. But there is a catch. Human infrastructure is just a very temporary impediment to Mother Nature.
The bridge that connects the beautiful island homes to the mainland is not like bridges in normal environments that might have to be replaced every fifty years. On the Outer Banks, it is more a season by season, storm by storm requirement. While the real estate crash made the Outer Banks much more affordable, expensive public works projects that try to continuously reclaim the land do not make it an ideal place for seniors on a limited retirement budget. So far, U.S. and North Carolina taxpayers pay to replace the bridges and roads. But those subsidies may not last forever.
Beautiful Lake Norman and the college town of Davidson seem like a good retirement spot for many seeking a small town, college lifestyle near Charlotte. But the lake that Duke Energy built is used to cool the company’s nuclear plant and is home to its largest, four-unit, coal-fired generating plant. The facility generates lung-clogging effluent that look like snowflakes until they turn to soot on your skin.
Duke Energy Coal Ash mess
Realtors never mention the environmental hazards when showing the lakefront properties or nearby developments. There is never any mention of Duke Energy’s dismal environmental records. In fact, a division of Duke Energy is a very big and powerful real estate company in its own right. It is creating towns and developing lots, but the development is far away from Lake Norman.
On the coast below the Outer Banks sits Camp Lejeune, a huge, sprawling Marine Corps Base where men, women and children were unwitting victims. From 1957 to 1987, the story of Camp Lejeune and the people who were sickened there has been told in pieces. Veterans lost children to rare diseases and up to a million people were potentially affected over the years. The Marine Corps continually put people in harm’s way without warning. In April 2009, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), announced that the Marine Corps had for years systematically misrepresented the nature and scope of historical water contamination at the site. The military has long denied that water saturated with trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE), degreasing and dry cleaning solvents now known to have permeated the base’s drinking and bathing water systems for decades, was responsible for the multitude of cancers and other rare health problems experienced by former base residents and civilians living near the fence line.
Google Earth Camp Lejeune Water Contamination
Although the problem was identified as far back as 1980 by military engineers testing water treatment systems, the last contaminated well was left running until 1987. By then, according to information from a 2007 U.S. House of Representatives hearing on the issue, up to one million people could have been affected by the tainted water. The decades-long water contamination disaster is still claiming lives.
This Marine base is one reason why it is vital to search the history closely if your perspective new home is near a military facility. The U.S. military has a long history of concealing exposures to toxic chemicals and contaminants, and the contamination lasts much longer than the government admits.
Lauch Faircloth
North Carolina also has a long history of tolerance of giant factory sized hog farms. They were so popular in the 1980s that North Carolina citizens elected hog farmer Duncan McLauchlin “Lauch” Faircloth to the U.S. Senate. After years of pig feces fouling the environment on a grand scale, there is finally real push back. What has changed in the Tar Heal state? The Chinese started buying the pig farms.
Now that many of the giant factory farms are foreign owned, lawyers for the Chinese companies defending against lawsuits do not want the foreign ownership of the farms mentioned. They are also lobbying the conservative legislature to prohibit newcomers from filing new lawsuits – something that should be a real wake up call for future retirees unless they take the time to see if that golf course home they love is downwind from one of these giant lakes of pig feces before they buy.
The environmental minefields are hidden throughout the state. You may avoid buying down stream from a factory farm, but find yourself buying in the proximity of one of Duke’s Power’s giant coal ash ponds.
South Carolina
Savannah River Site Waste Storage Tanks
From the horse farms of Aiken to the beauty of the Low Country there are more than a few hidden surprises in South Carolina. Aiken is the most perplexing of places. It is truly a beautiful and charming place that is completely dominated by the politics of the huge Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site (SRS). This cold war relic has become the defacto high-level nuclear waste storage site for the world. It is both a terrorist target and environmental time bomb. It is also a political plumb that has produced billions of dollars for contractors and has given the local community high paying jobs for decades.
In the 1950s, the federal government picked the “bomb plant’s” location because it had available land and a nearby river to cool the five reactors that created the plutonium for H-bombs. The politics of South Carolina politicians and local citizens have turned a blind eye ever since to the potential health consequences. Caner research and registries are not a priority.
Aiken is the Sophie’s Choice for boomers contemplating a gentile Southern retirement. Its golf course communities are stunning, the town quaint and full of beautifully preserved old winter homes of the leading families of the Industrial Age. But eighteen miles down the road are tanks filled with the most dangerous substances on earth that are leaking into the aquifer. The entire facility is built upon the Charleston earthquake fault – the worst in America’s East. Stored in an old nuclear reactor is enough weapons grade plutonium to set off a deadly nuclear flash that can send a plume as far as Washington, D.C.
Hilton Head Plantation Golf Course
The good news for Aiken is more than a billion dollars was poured into the SRS site by the Obama administration. Recently, when the money dried up, the real estate market went bust. So if you are brave enough, you can snap up a great buy. After all, radiation is cumulative. If you are up in years, you might take the bet that you will die of something else first. But in case you lose, they have good cancer treatment facilities at the medical college in nearby Augusta, Georgia. Medical care in Aiken is not very good.
Real Estate values could go up. Chances are very good the Savannah River Site will get billions more dollars. The Energy Department has already spent billions of dollars on a fuel plant that converts warheads into fuel rods. Like so many other Energy Department projects, the plant does not work. Obama is now trying to cut the funding, but other politicians press to keep the money flowing. And the nuclear mess will have to be tended for tens of thousands of years. That is right. It will take 10,000 years for the radiation to decay. That means there will always be highly paid nuclear “sanitation workers” in the area.Thinking of buying in a gated community to feel safer? Many use the same guard force as the one guarding SRS. Unfortunately, it is the same foreign-owned company that was protecting the airports on 9/11.
Down river from Aiken and SRS is the gorgeous Low Country of South Carolina. (SRS sends directions to their Citizen Advisory Board meeting from this area.) From historic Georgetown, where the legendary Swamp Fox, Francis Marion, and his men conducted Revolutionary War raids, to Charleston and the nearby resorts like Hilton Head and Kiawah Islands, many of the environmental issues are hidden away, except tasteless billboards assaulting your field of vision.
Dunbarton Oaks, Aiken, South Carolina. Photo Frank DiBona, Flickr
Dunbarton Oaks, Aiken, South CarolinaThe Low Country is beautiful – maybe too beautiful for its own good. After the real estate bust, this area is coming back with a paved over vengeance. Gated golf course communities clog the highway leading to Hilton Head. The island has simply run out of undeveloped land. The new communities are in an area that is named after the small community of Bluffton, S.C. But a Bluffton address usually means some kind of giant development in proximity to Bluffton. They are building so many homes in this area one might think there are jobs to go with them. They are not. These homes are for boomers looking for the perfect spot to retire. To say that traffic is an issue would not be an exaggeration. New roads are being built, but traffic in the last Atlantic storm clogged the evacuation area. You will not be alone on these roads.
Environmentally, the communities are changing. Golf, once the glue for these communities, proved to be a bad bet during the post-2008 real estate bust. Many buyers do not want to commit to the thousands of dollars in annual fees to support a dying game, not the mention the sheer number of chemicals needed to keep a large golf course green. These chemicals can contribute to a long list of illnesses, including cancer. In one community, Hampton Lake, the developer scrapped plans for yet another golf community and bulldozed the fairways into a series of lakes so he could sell waterfront homes.
The biggest surprise in South Carolina was that North Carolina’s world-class polluter, Duke Energy, has a real estate development company called Crescent Resources developing two communities not far from Hilton Head. The irony is Duke Energy, a company infamous for polluting rivers and lakes with coal ash, has traveled south to recast itself as an ecological company.
In Oaktie, South Carolina, Oldfield is an equestrian and golf community set among huge old oak trees along Wiggs Bluff on the beautiful Oaktie River. It features metal roofed Low Country custom homes that are at the high end of the very poor county where the development is located.
Palmetto Bluffs Inn
Oldfield is a nice upper class community but it does not compare to what is being attempted a few miles away at a place called Palmetto Bluffs. It is a five-mile drive from the entrance until a visitor gets to the first of two planned communities. Like John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s invention of Williamsburg, Virginia, these communities are what the developer portrays as real Low Country living, if you can afford million dollar homes. A realtor will play a slickly produced DVD on the drive in that talks about that the community with its two river front villages and world-class inn.
The small village built on the river is beautiful. It is so successful a second village is planned and the inn is being doubled in size. A good part of the hefty fees to own at Palmetto Bluffs goes to an environmental foundation and are tax deductible for owners. The point is to preserve the wilderness and original waterways on the 20,000-acre property. What is hard to determine is how much of the 20,000 acres will actually end up being developed. There are no coal ash ponds on the property. It seems Duke’s wealthier clientele can find an environmental sanctuary by moving to South Carolina.
Georgia
South Carolina and Georgia are the only states where new nuclear power reactors are being built. Not far from Aiken is the Savannah River, which divides South Carolina and Georgia. Across the river from the SRS plutonium storage building, the Southern Company is adding nuclear reactors to the existing ones at Plant Vogtle in an area of Georgia the locals call Cancer Alley. The Savannah River Keeper does a great job of keeping track of the numerous environmental challenges the river faces.
Plant Vogtle located in Burke County, near Waynesboro, Georgia. Photo from Wikipedia
The number of chemical-spewing plants along the river is enormous.
Up stream from the “Golden Isles of Georgia,” including the exclusive Sea Island, are toxic legacies that are not advertised in real estate brochures. Before buying a beautiful property along the Savannah River or the Georgia coast, you might want to see what companies have operated upstream. Radiation, mercury and lead are not exactly the dream cocktail for watching a Southern sunset.
In addition, East Coast ports are expanding to accommodate the huge ships expected from the widening of the Panama Canal. The resulting pollution will not be met with the same political sensitivities as the ports on the West Coast.
Tennessee
The southeastern states have the misfortune of increasing incidents of extreme weather. Climate change has had a profound effect on Tennessee where ice storms and flooding have plagued the state in recent years.
The Volunteer State has significant environmental problems related to climate change, coal, nuclear and a lax attitude toward environmentally damaging industries.
Oak Ridge Y-12 Plant
The nuclear waste legacy grows by the day thanks to the Department of Energy’s huge weapons facility at Oak Ridge, not far from Knoxville. Here massive amounts of nuclear waste are imported and sometimes incinerated. But like South Carolina, huge amounts of high level waste stay inside the state. Recently 1,000 tons of very high level waste was brought in from Germany. Safety and security problems have plagued the Oak Ridge facilities for years.
Retirees are being told that places like Nashville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga are worth considering. In 1969 Chattanooga was the most polluted city in America. The river town has come a long way since then but Chattanooga still has the 15th worst air pollution in the country.
While growth has brought an influx of new residents to places like Nashville, the influx has also brought huge traffic headaches and threatens the character of the city.
Alabama
Unbridled industry, terrible pollution and epic toxic waste dumps are not mentioned to retirees looking to live out their years along the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail.
The views of the green forests along Alabama’s highways makes the state look like a nature preserve. It is not. Industrial abuse and the worst kind of political cronyism have combined to make Alabama a place where a clean environment is traded away for money. Parts of Alabama are the dumping ground for the nastiest waste of which the rest of the county want to rid itself.
If you have had asbestos removed from your house or some other toxic substance, there is a very good chance it ended up in Emelle, Alabama. The Emelle dump reflects the dark political history of corruption and payoffs and typifies how this state operates.
Most of this very red state’s citizens do not support regulation and they are paying for it in degraded public health and the environment. The State’s Mobile Bay is polluted and its biggest cities have very serious air and water pollution problems. Birmingham, the state’s largest city, is the seventh most polluted city in the United States. Walter Coke Industries is considered by many to be a major contributor to Alabama’s environmental problems. But, like the Marine Corps’ Camp Lejeune, the U.S. Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville also has contributed its share to this sad toxic legacy.
Redstone Test Center’s Test Area 5 on Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala.
Like South Carolina, Alabama is a state where race and the environment still play major roles. Throughout the South the most deadly factories, military sites and dumps were located in rural areas that are some of the poorest in the nation.
Public health statistics in Alabama shore up the point that this location is not the best place to retire if you hope for a long life.
Florida
First, the most important lesson you need to know before you drive in Florida is that traffic rules are considered by many residents to be mere suggestions.
Be forewarned. For all of its natural beauty, there are big environmental problems in Florida. As of 2011, Florida had 44 federal Superfund sites, 101 brownfields, 13,527 petroleum cleanups and more than 3,000 other sites with dangerous hazardous waste.
Driving the coasts of Florida – from the Panhandle Gulf Coast to the Georgia state line – provides many unique and several similar experiences. (Please note that Southern Living magazine is not a great retirement reference.)
Destin is a small, pleasant place, good for a couple of hours of wandering. The surrounding area is a series of disconnected developments – the housing version of strip malls. Some are old time beach communities and some are high end, but there is no real cohesion. The amazing beaches of the Gulf Coast prove that man can add very little to what Mother Nature gave Florida. Like the BP Gulf oil spill, man seems to only take away. Traveling east to Panama City, the full horror that is Florida unfolds. Towering cheap, oceanfront hotels and condominiums connected by parking structures across the street, block out the light and the views.
Bars with names like Coyote Ugly, drive through liquor stores, discount condom shops and strip joints offering 15% off for seniors offer clues about why Panama City Beach has increasingly violent crime problems. (Google Panama City Beach crime news.) Perhaps that is why there are so many billboards selling lawyers. Visual pollution is the cancer of Florida. The electronic billboards are a constant assault on the senses.
From Panama City Beach to the military town of Panama City, poorly regulated military and industrial sites have taken their toll on the area. Dumping in the Gulf has polluted the water and, way too often, those beautiful white sand beaches.
Some of the major retirement destinations in Florida begin in Tampa and extend across Tampa Bay to St. Petersburg and south along the Gulf. Unfortunately Tampa Bay itself is heavily polluted. Chemical, military and fertilizer facilities have played havoc with the environment. Of particular concern is Cargill ‘s phosphorus operation in Tampa. Another issue, like in many other areas, is Pentagon pollution. The military has 21 facilities in Florida and with them comes a certain degree of environmental degradation.
Route 41, the coastal drive down the Gulf coast, is a window on the latest in cheap commercial construction. Mile after mile of strip malls give way to waterfront communities with either high end, beautiful waterfront homes and condominiums or desecrated beach towns with aging infrastructure. What the communities all seem to have in common is the absence of any real planning or zoning. Punta Gorda, Sarasota and a handful of others at least try to keep some harmony with Mother Nature. Most others are developers’ heaven.
By the time you reach the Bonita Springs area, you will have the impression that developers have plundered the entire southwest of the state. Beach communities have been overbuilt for the existing infrastructure. The resulting traffic is oppressive. Town planning courses should include Fort Myers and Fort Myers Beach on what not to do.
Literally across the street, everything changes. Naples, like Hilton Head Island, seems to recognize the idea that visual pollution is pollution and property values actually rise with a little zoning. Collier County requires most of the signs and billboards to be set back farther from the highways or hidden from view.
It is not an environmental paradise. Naples is home to older rich people who want to be isolated even from other rich people. Most homes and condominiums are in gated communities where activities are centered on membership in clubs that require passing through a security guard.
While there are serious environmentalists in Florida, the state legislature and governor are all controlled by industry-supported climate change deniers. Republican Governor Rick Scott and the majority in the state senate discourage the use of terms like climate change or global warming. But global warming is impacting no other state as much as Florida. Years ago an open cut on a swimmer or fisherman would be annoying. Now, it could be mean death. Thanks to the spread of flesh-eating bacteria like vibrio because of warmer water, a person can die from an infection in just hours. While there may be a political class of climate deniers in charge in Florida, the reality in the water and on the ground will eventually convince even the most stalwart climate skeptic that something is not quite right.
American Bald Eagles The Isles near Naples
As it comes back from the 2008 real estate collapse, one developer in Naples recognizes the environmental theme sells houses. A new development, built on man-made canals, is being sold as an ecological haven. The Isles at Collier Preserve is a high-end community that says that new homeowners can explore nature’s beauty and enjoy luxury housing at the same time. But solar energy for the new homes is not allowed. In fact, what the builder holds out to be “environmentally friendly” is not the same as what environmentalists would spec. Two small bald eagles were resting on the bridge. They are a vision of what can be found in some of the nature preserve around the new 2,400-acre development.
The Everglades separate southern Florida’s east and west coasts. An ecological treasure, the Everglades give visitors a sense of what so many for so long have tried to preserve. The battle to keep developers, invasive plants, snakes, and other animals out of Florida is epic.
The vast farmlands and swamps that Florida once enjoyed have been vastly reduced by development. Residential, industrial, military and agricultural run off all contribute to pollution in the wetlands, rivers and bays. The East Coast communities have spread very far west toward what had been watershed, swamp and farmland.
In the last twenty years, the cruise ship industry has tortured the Florida environment. Huge ships dump enormous amounts of raw or poorly treated sewage while the engines burn highly toxic bunker fuel.
Huge terminals handle giant ships carrying thousands of passengers and crew. The problem is these ships burn terribly polluting fuel called bunker fuel and they produce enormous amounts of sewage and other wastes. These ships are so big they often dwarf the landscape of the ports they visit. The Port of Palm Beach is proud of its cruise ship terminal. Visitors can watch the majestic, huge cruise ships move through the narrow channel fully loaded with passengers, crew and bunker fuel. In communities where these ships are ports of calls, the number with lung diseases grows dramatically because of the pollution from the ships engines.
Downtown Stuart, FL
Politician from both parties were so eager to enlarge the ports of Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale and Miami for the larger ships that will pass through the Panama Canal, that coral reefs that the environmentalists were assured would be protected are now disappearing.One of Florida’s biggest problems is reliance on polluting and dangerous forms of energy. Coal plays a huge role in Florida power production as does nuclear power. Along the East Coast of Florida at Port Saint Lucie in the Stuart area, is one of the most beautiful stretches of coast, bays and beaches in the State. Looming over one end of Hutchinson Island is a massive sea-cooled nuclear plant that has suffered flooding problems as well as very dangerous premature corrosion to its cooling tubes. A similar power reactor at San Onfre, California, was shuttered when similar problems were discovered. After the earthquake in 2010 destroyed the nuclear plants in Japan, the Florida facility increased the potential evacuation zone around the Port Saint Lucie complex because population growth around the plant has far outpaced predictions.
Florida Power and Light nuclear power plant
Coal fired plants that emit mercury and other very dangerous pollutants are part of the pollution legacy with which Florida residents still must deal. Even more dangerous are the coal ash pits that dot the state.
Duke Energy Florida is a subsidy of the same firm that has polluted much of the South with coal waste. (Another of its subsidiaries is building the environmental preservation development near Hilton Head.) Recently its parent company quietly agreed to settle a federal investigation into the company’s pollution along the North Carolina-Virginia border. The firm enjoys strong political support in the very conservative Florida legislature and the governor’s office.
Duke Energy Florida benefited when now presidential candidate Jeb Bush was Florida’s governor. Duke and Progress Energy signed a partnership agreement to refurbish and repair the Crystal River Nuclear plant. In a 2006 energy bill, SB 888, both companies were allowed to charge Florida’s 1.7 million Duke Energy customers what the bill called an “advance fee” to pay for the refurbishment of the Crystal River reactors before any work had actually begun. By 2013, in the post Fukushima environment, Duke decided to close the Crystal River facility rather than complete the repairs needed to operate it. That left a $1.7 billion bill. (Duke had spent $1.5 billion on the project.) Much to the surprise of Florida customers, the Florida Public Service Commission in an October 2013 agreement stuck Duke ratepayers with $3.2 billion in expenses, while project insurance companies would pay $835 million and Duke shareholders would absorb the remainder. There was a huge outcry from Florida environmentalists and angry consumers. The Florida Public Service Commission eventually ordered Duke Energy Florida to credit $54 million back to its customers.
The end of the NASA Space Shuttle program and the 2008 financial collapse has decimated the space coast of Florida. Towns like Titusville look like Florida’s version of Detroit. Miles of abandoned stores, car lots and no reliable tax base make money for safeguarding the environment very tight.
Abandoned stores in Titusville, FL
Daytona Beach is more prosperous but what both Daytona and the Space Coast have in common is a bad case of developers being allowed to put up almost anything. Daytona is not quite as bad as Panama City but getting closer.
Jacksonville is the largest city in the United States in area. It, too, is plagued by a history of poor town planning and huge economic differences among residents. The sprawling city is divided by the St. John’s River and faces enormous environmental challenges.
The real lifeblood of Jacksonville is the river. Long a favorite of sportsman for great fishing, it faces a number of threats. Water is being pumped out at an alarming rate, runoff from farms and lawns is ruining the river’s ecological balance and cesspool and sewage is actually endangering public health.
Many of Jacksonville’s problems stem from decades of being run like an old time southern industrial city. Jacksonville seems to be coming out on the other side. Urban blight is being addressed in the city’s oldest sections like Springfield where gentrification is underway. Downtown Jacksonville, which actually had totally abandoned office towers, is coming back to life. The racial divide that is so obvious in St. Petersburg seems far less tense here. The local government seems determined to improve the large parks system (already among the best in the nation). The big worry is that developers more than the residents will determine what Jacksonville will become.
Unfortunately, Jacksonville faces the same economic forces that plague communities around the country with industrial and military pollution. It is expanding its huge port and is powered by coke and coal fired plants. Their plants are among the most polluting in the United States. Anyone with any pulmonary issues should not consider Jacksonville. The St. John’s coal fired plants are often misidentified as nuclear because of the large cooling towers. But make no mistake, Jacksonville’s local utility is dominated by coke and coal fired old generating stations.
Any hope of escaping the coal-fired world of Northern Florida on Atlantic coast islands like Amelia is unfounded. An ugly coal plant, the Jefferson Smurfit Fernandina Beach Power Plant, powers Amelia Island.
The South is an environmental minefield. If you think the grandchildren are coming for a long visit, the stakes are even higher. Real environmental and eco friendly communities seem at the moment to be unknown to local realtors and not really important. Yes you can go online and locate coal and nuclear plants, but there really is very little help for the boomer looking to relocate.
The missing bridge among environmental foundations and organizations is that real estate and the economics of property investment have not been linked for the average investor to the surrounding environment. If boomers are about to lay down their life savings for a home where they will spend the rest of their lives, the environmental component is as important as the warm weather, good beaches and culture. Maybe it is time to start focusing on how people really live by making access to this information simpler.
The baby boomers were the heart of the environmental and nuclear freeze movements of the 1970s and early 80s. Perhaps their sense of social consciousness will reawaken as they look for new communities in which to live. Making the environment a top priority – working to make a change – is an opportunity to leave something substantial to their grandchildren.
