Walking on Rainbows



I sold my business in Lake Tahoe in 1984 and complained about the cold and the snow for another year before I decided to move to the village on Longboat Key. Twenty-six years later I still feel I made a really good decision to move from an alpine paradise to a tropical island paradise. I appreciate beautiful places and friendly people. At first I leased one of the Whitney cottages on Longboat Drive South. I met some wonderful young neighbors who advised me to buy Rainbow flip-flops. They told me they were the best. I still agree and I have spent the past two and a half decades mostly in tee-shirts shorts and walking on Rainbows. You can buy Rainbows at the surf shop adjacent to Manatee Beach.



In 1985 there were around 5,000 residences on Longboat and the median income was around $40K. Rents were reasonable as were home prices and taxes. There were a number of young people living on the north end. Many of today's condominiums did not yet exist and living was easy. Whitney Plaza was full of fun and interesting shops along with a huge drugstore and a Foodway market. There was an art supply shop frequented by a very busy art center clientèle, along with a high-end kitchen store and cute clothing shops. The village was a sort of Bohemian community filled with artists and other interesting people. It was easy to fall in love with the miles of sunny sugar-sand beaches and the relaxed tempo of island living. Even then the local paper was filled with articles and letters about political turmoil surrounding the developer wars. PIC became active the year I moved here. PIC would soon have 1,100 members. (PIC now has fewer than 115 members including the Key Club, their lawyer and two Chamber board members.) Things were intense for a couple of years. In the end the people prevailed, the developers were reined-in and the density of Longboat was reduced from a proposed seventy-five thousand to twenty-five thousand.

By 1990 there were almost 6,000 residents and the median income had risen to $85K. People with money were pouring onto the island. It was the hay-day of the new American prosperity and Longboat was paradise for sale. What had been a relatively undeveloped beach town with lots of motels was rapidly being transformed into an exclusive seasonal residential retirement oasis.

Whitney Plaza was the center of commercial activity on the island after Paul Neal opened the shopping center in 1971. However, when Publix open their market at Bay Isles in the mid-80's, the two gentlemen who owned the Foodway market at Whitney Plaza put the business up for sale. Within a few years the new shopping center at Bay Isles had a profound negative impact on Whitney Plaza businesses. The Pan Handler and the wonderful art shop closed. The market was obviously in trouble. The new owners could not afford to restock the shelves and soon shopping there became what one might imagine it would be like to go shopping in Siberia. Bay Isles and the Center Shops slowly sucked the life out of Whitney Plaza at a time when tourism, real estate and population were peaking on Longboat. We had lots of tourists, yet Whitney Plaza struggled and slowly deteriorated. Since the businesses that replaced the Plaza's initial array of interesting shops were less prosperous, needed repairs and improvements were never made.

By 2000, the resident population of Longboat had grown to 7,600 and the median income was over $100K. Longboat was one of the wealthiest zip codes in the country. Still Whitney Plaza was languishing and the types of businesses coming into the shopping center catered more and more to tourists. Real estate prices shot up as demand increased. Rents increased along with home values and most of the young renters had to leave paradise. Longboat was at the pinnacle of its development cycle, yet Whitney Plaza was sinking. Why? The Holiday Inn and most of the other hotels/motels were still open. My guess is that Longboat was morphing from being a residential beach community into a town of exclusive, seasonal second homes. Inversely, as the affluence of the property owners increased, the vitality of the community decreased. We became a gathering of gated and very private enclaves for America's wealthy. Nothing wrong with that. However, one consequence of becoming a private community is that all the young people left along with a lot of what made it fun for tourists. Let's be honest young people are more lively and active than what Longboat was becoming.

During the period between 1970 and 1990 Longboat was a relatively undeveloped island. The Old Florida atmosphere and numerous mom-and-pop motels and resorts attracted tourists all winter long. The Key Club was emerging as a major attraction for the more affluent home buyers looking to invest in a second home. Little by little the condominiums replaced the 50s-style seaside resorts and tourists had to find somewhere else to vacation.

Our current commissioners are trying to convince us that only lots of new, and probably tall tourist resorts will bring back Whitney Plaza, and that we need to expand commercial activities to attract tourists to fill the new tall resorts. Of course, along with all of this, there will need to be a considerable increase in density, especially on the Manatee end of the island.

Meanwhile, 13 properties sold on Longboat during March, 2011, the peak real estate sales month on our island. Thirteen. During 2010, 2,225 properties sold in The Villages in central Florida. Our commission would do well to stop pushing on a string and start pulling our community towards home sales liquidity.

From 1980 to 2010, Longboat Key was transformed from a sleepy, relatively undeveloped tourist destination into an upscale residential community. The tourist community no longer exists. Instead, we have become perhaps the most beautifully developed community on the West coast of Florida. Let's not destroy our ambiance with tourist shops and too many people. We already are the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.