Friday, September 2, 2016

Westward Ho! Find your new housing community out in western Palm Beach County. Then onward into the Everglades we go!

Nothing has changed much since the blog post (below) was first posted in April 2015. Western sprawl in Palm Beach County continues at breakneck speed towards, and ultimately through the Everglades. Just the latest example is another massive development west of Lake Worth near the Turnpike. The enviro activists, especially some of the "19 Best Environmentalists [2 from Lake Worth] in South Florida" are in no small part responsible for all this sprawl by forcing development and new housing away from urban coastal areas and I-95 corridor.

Hopefully the public will come to understand how much damage the NIMBY's, especially those in the "environmental community", have done to the environment and quality of life here in South Florida. Without further ado, the blog post from last year that could have been newly posted today for the first time:

Below is a map from The Palm Beach Post. This appears in the "New Homes" section, page R4 (Thursday, 4/30/15):
It's not my intention to beat a dead horse, and no disrespect intended towards all my friends in the environmental community (especially here in Lake Worth). My recent post about the NIMBY's and the "Cost of Anti-Growth Policies" is the proof and you can see it with your own eyes. 

When you look at the map along the coast from Northlake Blvd in Palm Beach Gardens all the way south to Boca Raton you see only two "New Communities" close to the coast. Number 21 on the map is the Kolter Group's Two City Plaza in West Palm Beach and number 27 is the Lucenté in downtown Lake Worth by Kennedy Homes. 

Now look at all the new communities out west. I count nine west of the Turnpike; twenty-five total west of I-95. The term "home" is broadly defined (with a few exceptions) as a stand-alone structure within a larger community or a townhome with 2+ bedrooms, a 2-car garage (or three), and are "elegant", in "luxury", "gated", "maintenance-free" and the word "golf" is used a lot. 

Sure, there is construction along the coast to accommodate new residents moving to Palm Beach County but as the article in Planetizen points out, it's "comparatively scarce" in relation to the number of new homes needed. It's hard not to see the trend for home builders, it's "Westward Ho".

If you're a NIMBY or enviro and spend most of your existence in the City of Lake Worth, for example, it's easy to get fooled into thinking you had a part in thwarting some "evil developer" at some point. You didn't. They just went somewhere else. 

Home builders are responding to an economic reality and if they can't build along the coast they'll go further west. It's as simple as that. "Out of sight, out of mind" is just fine for some though.