I can understand that. But growing up here, it was never like that, and I just want to be able to stay here, and it makes it tough. Plus, Im talking about looking for a home in the VERY small town that I grew up in and not being able to find something, not Orlando or Miami. Thats a little different from Chicago or northern areas, which are big cities, and where the pay is higher. We are stuck in the high real estate market, but the job salaries haven't caught up yet. I'm been teaching a few years and I"m only making $31,000. (In Chicago they start at 37,000, in New Jersey around $40,000, in ONtario $75,000, in New York $50,000, etc...) This is a major problem here in this area, beacause in the 18 months they found that the needed workers (police officers, firefighteers, teachers, etc) can't afford to live here anymore.
Besides, the real estate thing really isn't my issue. My issue is the people purchasing homes so that they can spend a few weeks out of the snow each year, and letting them sit the rest of the year. Everyone wants to move here, so everywhere you look beaches are becoming more and more lined with condos, they are building highways through our swamplands, FLorida panthers are losing their homes to gated communitites, bulldozers are filling up our estuaries, the list goes on forever and forever. Florida is not the same, it is being destroyed every day.
Everyone so desperately wants to get away from all the hustle and bustle so they come here, and now that what its turnign to down here. So everyone with their higher salaries up north can come down and buy their weekend condos, and investors can buy up our land, and then it all sits. All that destruction of land, and it justs sits. the condo sits until someone up north decides its beginning to get a little chilly, and the empty lot or home sits until the investor in California decides its time to flip. I won't go into how many animals lost their homes so that those places can sit empty.
The proablem is this:
Show me houses in FL - even for $200,000 - and I'll buy three of them. Smart investors know how to make a good return on their dollar, and FL real estate has been hotter than the stock market in recent months.
- Everyone is out to make a buck and that is all that is important to people anymore. Who cares if we destroy the only planet we have?
I guess my problem is that I'm a simple person. i love florida, i'm a 3rd generation native (you'll never meet another one) and it makes me sad that my kids will never do the things that I did growing up. i cna't understnad how money is so important to everyone, and i guess i never will understand that. its just so sad to me - everythign that is happening here. and the worst part is that it will keep happeneing, and it will only get worse. and there is nothing i can do about it. I teach Marine Science at a high school down here, and i try my best everyday to tell those kids how important our environment is, and how our futures will one day depend on it. i can only hope that they are listening.
"A few so called experts say that they aren't surprised that Hurricane Wilma caused such a mess. They say it was inevitable, with six million people crammed onto the tip of a low-lying penninsula in a hurricane zone. I'd like to promise that we will do a better job of coastal management in the future, but who am I kidding? We dont have the stones to say enough is enough. We will let them keep on building subdivisions until every last acre is gone..... Shark attacks, killer pythons, gator maulings, west-nile-oozing mosquitos, flesh-eating bacteria, killer hurricanes every 3 or 4 weeks - none of these threats have significantly dented Florida's insane growth rate." Carl Hiassen