St Pete's real estate and hurricane aftermath
I’m in St Pete’s doing my final walkthrough on my top floor condo unit in an 82 Unit boutique highrise in the downtown area. What this process makes me realize - which I already know but it’s validating to see up close - is the process at Catskill Farms is good, centralized, buck-stops-here, no chasing your tail type of process.
That's Fred Hemmer, the man behind the vision of the building.
It’s ‘fun’ being on the other side, so I can see how I react and communicate items of concern, and I can say that I think I did pretty good. Plenty of issues, but definitely not looking for my pound of flesh like we encounter at times.
When I say and compare the process of Catskill Farms with this process, it’s really just the centralized control and command we offer - with my closing, my real estate agent is referring me the punchlist person, who I’ve never met, and she is jousting with the construction team, etc… So for 8 weeks there has been a round robin of non-accountability so I got my white ass down here to straighten it out - something our clients would never need to do, and if they did, it would be directly with us.
But all is good. St Pete’s is a great town. My unit downtown. The hurricane devastated the coastal regions - the trailers, the simple homes, the non-updated, weathered homes. When people think of Florida beach towns they can think of Miami or Palm beach with wealth oozing from the sand grains, but in all honesty, Florida is made up of small homes near the water, that are part of communities that weren't expensive to buy. Those - from Sarasota to Clearwater - are gone. Thousands of homes. Thousands of lives.
The tidal surge pushed a few feet of sand hundreds of yards into mainland, a cleanup that will rival Asheville's mud for expense and tediousness.
That had its heart ripped out by the hurricanes. Even folks not directly impacted were directly impacted by the loss and suffering of others. St Petes is a beach town, with beach bums, day drinkers, and early happy hours, You got your high end real estate, but like a lot of florida, you have a whole nother housing stock of low slung 1 story homes on grade built 80 years ago. Jimmy Buffet style front porch picking shelters that didn’t shelter rich people but average earners, low earners, beach bums of assorted diversity. They got wiped out. That sort of leisure housing was just demolished. Miles of it. Abodes of paradise and simple living gone. Really gone, like won’t be coming back.
Some immature person in the Publix candle aisle!
The water surge just rolled right through these homes - in the front door and out the back. The entire miles of beach front hotels are closed as sand 3’ thick has covered inland hundreds of yards, if not a few miles.
The cleanup is slow. Wheres the Feds, where DeSantis? Helene hit 4+ weeks ago, and the debris is everywhere. It’s a mess. The cleanup is like non-existent.
There are always reminders that just before the storm, life was normal. Then it wasn’t. Then everything changed. And in this case, like Asheville, changed forever.
I’ve dealt with a few floods, and it’s the smell that get you as everyone hauls their life out to the front yard and waits for relief. Waits for electricity.
I met a person or two who stayed the storm, and they said the storm was bad, but after was worse. The city had turned off the water as a precaution, the electric went out, and gas supplies dwindled quickly with delivery roads unpassable, and infrastructure down - and just like they predict will happen, within 24 hrs society became a little unstable, a little Mad Max. Just like that - Just like our bodies operate on a fragile balance of blood and oxygen, society seems to operate on a set of assumptions that once are pierced, anything goes.
What has me annoyingly perplexed is the lack of federal aid - especially during election season. I mean, as an incumbent. lead a convoy of 1000 army reserve troops and spend a few days helping to cleanup and organizing the effort. Coming to people in need. So, a great opportunity to showcase leadership, and nothing. As a leader who continually leads from the front, this makes the candidate nearly unvotable for me, except the alternative. Weird times. I mean, flood the zone with attention and assistance - campaign on action. Instead nothing. Literally nothing.
We got a new house started at the Crest where we have a few more to build on an exciting piece of land. Gonna be a Ranch, and gonna be on like 20 acres. And gonna have a nice view.
