Back in the 20th Century, California was “the land of fruits and nuts.” It was where you went if you were too strange to make it anywhere else in the country. It was our nation’s haven for artists, gays, people who followed or started non-mainstream religions, and those who wanted to make experimental films or music. I grew up in that California. Now California is rule-bound and insanely overpriced, so those people move to Florida instead.

Both California and Florida have a pall of impending disaster hanging over them. Realizing your whole life can come crashing down in the next earthquake leads to a “drink and make merry today, for tomorrow we may die,” attitude. In Florida you’re more likely to be blown away by a hurricane than crushed by an earthquake, but the attitude is the same.

In a way, hurricanes are better natural disasters than earthquakes, because you know they’re coming toward you days in advance. This gives you time to talk them over with your neighbors, which fosters camaraderie. And because you don’t know in advance whether a particular hurricane will hit or miss you, there’s always plenty to talk about before a hurricane.

“Will it or won’t it?” is the biggest shared question.

The next-biggest is, “What, if anything, are you doing to prepare for it?”

Some people brag about their sturdy, hurricane-resistant homes, roll-down storm shutters, emergency generators, and large stocks of water, food, fuel, and batteries. Others say, “It’s all God’s will,” or, “This part of Florida hardly even gets hit,” or, “We’ve already had our share of hurricanes here,” and do nothing. Those who live in mobile homes or near the water call all their friends who live inland, asking if they can come stay with them instead of going to a public shelter. (Hint to newcomers: Even if you’re rich enough to buy beach front or near-beach front property at today’s prices, you are well-advised to make friends with people who have strongly-built homes a little inland, even if they aren’t as rich as you are, because no amount of money will save you if storm waves surge over your million-dollar home.)

There is no greater conversation starter than a natural disaster that may or may not directly affect your town. It’s good for TV ratings, too.

And since we may all die in a hurricane next month or next year, why get upset with a neighbor for being gay or a Republican or an alcoholic? When the winds start howling and the palm trees start bending over, differences in religion, politics or sexual orientation suddenly don’t mean much.

Weirdness Everywhere You Look

Imagine going to a local craft store in a strip mall and seeing a local heavy metal band performing in the parking lot. I mean the kind of band where the lead singer has Ozzy Osbourne-level tattoos and the guitars are louder than a 747 taking off. Now imagine the majority of that band’s audience being scrunched-up old people sitting in folding lawn chairs they brought with them. Yes, you can say, almost any free event in Florida will bring out a crowd of old people who bring their own lawn chairs, but heavy metal rock? In this case, it was a band I call “Headbangers for Jesus” because this is better than their real name, and they were sponsored by a local conservative church that wanted to “attract more young people,” as one of the oldsters explained. I love these people!

Novelist Piers Anthony, who doesn’t live terribly far from me, once told me Florida was his inspiration for his famous fantasy domain, Xanth. Humor writers Dave Barry, Carl Hiaasen, and Tim Dorsey all famously use Florida as their stories’ backdrops. And my first impressions of Florida came not from tourist brochures, but from John D. MacDonald novels. Florida is home to many strange and funny writers — and plenty of strange artists, too, even though the majority of “art” sold here is touristy stuff featuring beach sunsets, dolphins, and other obvious subjects.

But don’t just take *my* word that Florida is seriously weird. There are now three Weird Florida books out, and my otherwise bland local paper, The Herald, runs AP’s Weird News section on its Web site.

(It’s too bad that The Herald doesn’t do more local reporting. They’d find plenty of weirdness in Bradenton and the rest of Manatee County with very little effort.)

One Party Ends, Another May Return

The idea of Florida as a cheap place to live has been dying over the last few years. Some areas, like beachfront properties near Miami and Ft. Lauderdale, were always expensive, but now the whole state’s coastline is becoming a No Working People Allowed zone as modest houses, mobile home parks, bait shops, waterfront bars, and marinas get replaced by condominiums only the overmonied can afford.

This same “You ain’t rich, don’t want you here, bitch!” thing has been spreading inland. Tacky little houses in slummy E. Bradenton that sold for $50,000 or $60,000 three years ago are now part of “Historic Downtown” in real estate-ese, and have $120,000 to $250,000 price tags on them. These are “investment properties” for the most part, because “investment property” is current real estate code for “niggers, spics, and other undesirables live here.” And now, those tacky houses are priced so high that the undesirables — you know, folks like cops, teachers, and retail workers who haven’t scammed their way into fortunes — can’t buy their own homes but are forced to rent. And apartment complexes are condomizing like mad, too, so the supply of rental units is decreasing even as the need for them goes up.

Luckily, the real estate speculation party has ended, at least around here. We see more than twice as many houses for sale and fewer than half as many sales as there were a year ago. This is bad news for those who bought “investment property” to resell a year or two later for BIG $$$$. Not that I’m crying for them. Every single house sale on our block since we bought our little place has been to speculators. Not a single new homeowner has moved in. This neighborhood, Bradenton’s Village of the Arts, is supposed to attract artists, but not many artists can afford the current housing prices here.

The Artists’ Guild, the group behind the Village of the Arts, says its mission is “to build a community where artists live and work while enhancing quality of life and creating a harmonious environment.” Lately, I’ve been thinking they should change this to, “build a community where real estate speculators can make big profits.” There are few working artists at Guild meetings now. It’s mostly gallery owners and real estate investors. We’re well on our way to becoming a junior version of Towles Court in nearby Sarasota, where only artists who can afford $500,000 or more for a house — or who can afford to rent in a neighborhood full of $500,000+ houses — are welcome.

So our place is worth at least $100,000 more than we paid for it last year. Whoopie-doo! And the city is putting in new old-fashioned street lights and new sidewalks, and there’s at least one new house being built near us, so I guess we’re sitting on a prime piece of real estate. The only problem is, we want to live here and have nice homeowner neighbors who take care of their property, not to sell out and move someplace cheaper, and that’s the only way we could profit from the Florida real estate runup.

This is why I am happy to see the real estate madness ending. My friend Joe Moraca lives in a modest Sarasota neighborhood that has been similarly besieged by investors who have crowded out homeowners. Maybe with the real estate madness ending he and I will see new homeowner neighbors move in. And maybe — although this is a scant dream at this point — actual artists will be able to afford to buy homes in Bradenton’s Village of the Arts again. That would be sooooo nice…

Baby Boomers Gone Wild

One group that has effectively migrated from California to Florida is aging Harley riders. And one of the factors that’s supposed to be behind the housing price increases (and the fact that hardly any builder will put up unsubsidized new housing for less than $300,000 around here) is that 62 trillion baby boomers are supposedly ready to retire or at least buy second homes (in Florida, of course) in anticipation of retirement.

One flaw in this thinking is that pensions are less secure now than they used to be. Most baby boomers aren’t going to be able to afford to retire at all. But a lot of them are going to get tired of living in suburban houses that were big enough for families but are way too large for a couple or a single person with no kids, and will want to move someplace warm, like Florida. Some will be able to afford these properties or even more expensive ones, but a lot are going to be looking at mobile homes and other low-cost housing alternatives — which despite the condomization of the coast are still relatively abundant inland. (But be warned: if you buy a mobile home in Florida, make sure you own your land or are part of a co-op or you can easily be evicted by condomizers and lose your investment. And don’t even think about renting a mobile home month-to-month!

Whatever their income level, I think a lot of the older baby boom crowd moving to Florida is going to use their move as an excuse to cut loose. Why act straight and normal if all the relatives (and the kids) are 1000 miles away?

If you have some sort of retirement income, why not stay out all night? Why not buy that boat, motorcycle or cool bong you always wanted but didn’t fit in with your old suburban minivan image? And if a little marijuana happens to appear, why not put it in the bong and smoke it? The possibilities are endless!

Second careers are also likely. Lots of them. It takes less money to support a couple or a single person than to support a household that includes kids, so why not follow an old dream and open a craft gallery (in the Village of the Arts, of course), go to massage school or open a kayak rental business?

All the billboards advertising “adult” communities in Florida have a picture of a guy swinging a golf club and a woman swinging a tennis racquet, both grinning like idiots, and shuffleboard courts are a mandatory amenity, but I think this kind of retirement is on its way out. I mean, how many people do you know under the age of 70 who play serious shuffleboard?

Times change. Tastes in recreation change. And so do living patterns and reading habits, which are trending rapidly away from paper and toward the Internet. An example of this trend was our recent attempt to find the owner of a small dog we found, then to give him away when we decided we were better off with just our regular dog, Terri. A (free) classified in The Herald brought no meaningful responses. A listing on the local Freecycle list drew dozens, and — hold your breath here — most of them weren’t from young people but from women over 50, including 73-year-old Mary Sue, who took the little thing home and pampers him so much that he sleeps on her bed with her.

If I was marketing an “adult” community in Florida these days, I’d boast about high-speed Internet and my online community bulletin board, not about shuffleboard. The Internet is not only for young people, you know. Famous retirement center Sun City has had its own computer club since 1983, and it gets bigger every year.

Florida’s Future

This state is an odd political mix, outwardly conservative but with a strange liberal bent to it. This isn’t exactly “The South” except for parts of the Panhandle, which might as well be Southeast Alabama. The coastal stretch between Miami and Palm Beach is so full of people from the Northeast U.S. that I think of it as “South New York.” Traffic is fast there, and you can buy good bagels. Tampa and St. Petersburg, the nearest large cities to me, are culturally more like Chicago or perhaps Detroit. They’re more blue-collar than Florida’s East Coast cities, and tend to be friendlier and more relaxed, although they have plenty of urban problems, including racial unrest.

Bradenton, where I live, is the heart of Manatee County, an area that’s rapidly going from agricultural to suburban, with enough new housing developments planned to add as many new residents as the current Bradenton population of about 55,000. We have an active local motor speedway out in the hinterlands, but I’m afraid that it will eventually be surrounded by SUV-type suburbanites and forced to close, just as nearly everything else that first drew me to this area seems to be going away.

I love Grower’s Hardware in Palmetto, the town just across the Manatee River from us. It’s a real, genuine, old-style hardware store that carries all kinds of obscure but necessary fittings and fasteners, run by white-haired gentlemen who know where everything is and can offer useful advice on everything from plumbing to the weather. There is a bench out front where you can chat and have a smoke. The place is neat and clean, old but not run down, and the prices are not enough different from Home Depot to matter. I hope someone younger buys this business and keeps it going when the current owners retire, although what will probably happen is that the building the hardware store is in will become an antique store or boutique or some such because downtown Palmetto is being upscaled to the point where an old-fashioned hardware store will soon be unwelcome.

The Shake Pit in Bradenton is another “land that time forgot” operation. Good burgers, fine shakes, patronized by students from nearby Manatee High School since cars had tailfins. Like Grower’s Hardware, it’s old but well-kept, a nice little place that doesn’t lack for business even though Bradenton is well-supplied with Sonic, McDonald’s, Burger King, and other chain-bland fast food joints. This is another business I hope is with us forever, but will probably be replaced sooner or later with a chain drug store or a bank, the two kinds of businesses that seem to be taking over every prime corner along high-traffic Manatee Avenue.

Newer restaurants and businesses are mostly in strip malls, which are all over the damn place here and generally seem to have been designed for maximum ugliness. One of the most tragic strip mall businesses here, in my opinion, is Ezra Cafe, a lovely place with innovative cuisine that ought to be in an old house or repurposed downtown building, but is stuck in a strip mall that totally hides its character from the world. Maybe (sigh) Ezra will find a more appropriate location one day. The city is trying hard to push its future growth in a direction that will give Ezra and similar “too cool for the strip mall” businesses more location options.

Bradenton and other Florida towns are busy developing arts-oriented, mixed-use areas that combine retail, office, and residential space in ways similar to those advocated by Cool Town Studios, backed by the well-run Bradenton Downtown Development Authority, which should not be judged by its crappy website. (For some reason, all Bradenton and Manatee government agencies, along with the Chamber of Commerce and its affiliated Economic Development Council, love to make terrible websites and, to compound the sin, maintain them poorly. This doesn’t mean the agencies or groups behind those sites are inept, just that they are stupid about the World Wide Web.)

The trend toward redeveloping and improving old town centers in Florida is excellent, because they often occupy the most desirable land around. A great, but sad, example is Daytona Beach, a city whose center is right on the water but has become a slum in recent decades while bland tract houses and ugly strip malls got built all around it. Now Daytona Beach is starting to see a little bit of downtown resurgence, although it’s still easier to find a crack house than a nice middle-class house at a reasonable price there. Give it time…

So Florida is changing. Housing prices have gone crazy but now seem to be settling down and may even “correct” (that’s real estate-speak for “drop through the floor”) enough that middle-class people may be able to move here again instead of leaving the state to a mix of overmonied, untaxed, parasitic condomites and illegal immigrants living 10 to a room who cater to the parasites’ whims and do the “jobs even blacks won’t do” — which are jobs Americans of all races would happily take if they didn’t pay so little that they can’t support a decent lifestyle. Florida will probably remain a Right to Work for Peanuts state, but the Republicans currently in power have screwed up so much that we can expect to see more competitive elections, and recent changes in Florida laws regulating lobbyists — originally proposed by a group of non-evil Republicans and (shockingly) voted against only by Democrats, may help make things better here for the middle class.

I also expect to see condominium construction come to a sudden halt sometime in the next year or two. The things are going up all over the place, and I don’t think it will be long before we have the same kind of “luxury condominium” market glut other areas have had — and Florida is so full of exploiters who bought condoms hoping to turn them over in a real estate market that would rise forever that when they start bailing out (and some go broke and their properties are auctioned off), it will not be possible to sell new condoms at all. Sure, things will shake out and keep on keeping on one way or another, and not every construction crane will go to the Crane Graveyard, but I believe it’s possible that the condomization will stop before every last bit of Florida waterfront is hidden by ugly high-rises.

Meanwhile, we’ll see plenty of new people coming to Florida who are too strange to make it in other parts of the country. Some will be old, some will be young, some will be in between. Some will live in new, hip urban areas like what Bradenton is trying to build downtown, but I’m sure enough will choose suburban blandville that all the stores selling bland furniture won’t go broke.

The main thing that’s coming is change. I’ll like some of it, and some of it will turn my stomach. Some of the political and social changes will be good, and some will be bad. But as a child I watched Orange, California (once home of Sunkist’s largest packing plant) go through major changes, and I survived. Now I’m watching Bradenton, Florida (home of Tropicana’s biggest plant) go through similar changes, and I’ll survive them, too.

I’m experiencing California all over again — except with cheaper real estate, and hurricanes instead of earthquakes. And it’s kind of fun.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 1st, 2006 at 8:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.