Editorial: Leadership needed to protect, preserve local...

Strong editorial piece from the Palm Beach Post on how our neighborhoods are changing character after the Great Recession.  Included in the discussion of sober homes, short-term rentals for tourists made possible through a matching process courtesy of the Internet and how many homes in existing communities are changing over to rental properties.

Fully 65 percent of all homes bought locally in the second quarter of 2014 were bought for cash, the highest rate in the nation. Nearly 10 percent of all home sales were to institutional investors like Wall Street hedge funds. And while the county once enjoyed a homeownership rate of 71 percent in 2005, that rate has slid to 58.7 percent as of December, according to The Post’s Kimberly Miller.
In practical terms, this means neighborhoods where people once lived in the homes they owned, invested in their beautification, and knew their neighbors, are giving way to tracts of rentals owned by profit-focused absentee landlords, and sometimes crammed with the maximum number of residents possible.
Meanwhile, lucrative, unregulated sober homes, cloaked in the protection of the federal Americans with Disabilities Act, are taking over entire streets. Some deliver what’s promised — a chance to take the final step from treatment to stable life. But many are owned by unscrupulous, greedy companies that flout communities’ zoning rules, advertise themselves to addicts globally, and drain families of assets while providing little in the way of real rehabilitation.
These over-occupied single-family homes are burdening local services like police, fire and garbage, without paying their fair share of taxes.