Affordable Housing Institute : US

What is your home worth? What’s your town worth?

You can’t put a price on paradise, say the romantics, but the genius of capitalism is that you can — and, in the case of Briny Breezes, Florida, someone has: $510,000,000, an average or $1,045,000 per tiny mobile home. As reported a few weeks back in an article in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel:

December 12, 2006, 1:20 PM EST

BRINY BREEZES — The Briny Breezes board of directors has reached an agreement to sell the mobile-home community to Boca Raton-based Ocean Land Investments for $510 million.

The board voted unanimously to accept the offer at a meeting with property owners Tuesday afternoon.

The contract now requires approval by 67% of the property owners by January 10.

What makes these mobile homes so incredibly valuable?

 

The homes are so close together in Briny, you can hear your neighbors sneeze. The trailer park incorporated as a town in 1963, and today includes 488 metal houses and more than a dozen community buildings. Mostly retired snowbirds, the residents own their lots and houses.

 

Shuffleboard has always been one of the most popular pastimes at Briny. Here, before a recent afternoon match, players draw names from a coffee can to find out who their partner will be. The courts include a shady awning and metal bleachers where fans watch.

 

Aside from the location, two other things:

· They own their land.

· They own their own town!

The deal covers the sale of all 488 home sites on the 43-acre mobile home community. If approved, the contract sets the closing date for March 10, 2009. The date could be extended by one year.

A long closing raises the likelihood of a mutuality of interests:

· The developer needs to line up financing, do a site plan, and probably start pre-marketing the new homes.

· The residents need to plan their relocation.

 

For make no mistake, the developer is buying not to preserve Briny Breezes as it is now constituted but to eradicate it.

Ocean Land was founded in 1995 by Jean Francois Roy, who started rehabilitating apartment complexes in his native Montreal. Working with developers such as Miami-based Related Group of Florida [Whose motto, ominous for old-style Briny, is “redefining the South Florida skyline” — Ed.], Roy has torn down hotels and developed oceanfront condos across South Florida.

 

That possibility is forcing change in Briny. As reported last April in the St. Petersburg Times:

For 70 years, people in Briny didn’t have much to fight about. Then, in October, a developer showed up and put a price on paradise. He offered $500-million to buy Briny, the whole town, so he could build a hotel and massive condos along the surf. He would bulldoze Briny to make room. He would pay each trailer owner enough to make them all millionaires.

 

The middle film in Bill Forsyth’s Glasgow Trilogy is Local Hero, where oil executive McIntyre (a wonderfully droll Peter Riegert) travels from booming Houston to far northern Scotland to buy an entire town, to carve it out into a massive oil tanker refinery and port. At first the locals are skeptical or adamantly opposed, but as the film rolls along we are treated to aging geezers debating the merits of Lamborghinis versus Maseratis.

 

Money can’t buy happiness

But it can buy a lot o’ whisky

And that can bring you happiness.

Something similar happened in Briny:

Some residents were ready to take the money and run. Others said you could never pay them enough to leave their square of sand.

“A few weeks ago, they had a big meeting. And 78% of the people voted not to accept that offer,” said Bob Kraft, 79.

They didn’t refuse to sell. They’re just holding out for a better offer.

 

No, not a hero, just a better offer

Over the ensuing eight months, the residents tested the market:

 

Man, that market’s cold!

The process began last fall when the 43-acre, with frontage along both the Intracoastal Waterway and Atlantic Ocean, received an unsolicited proposal from Ocean Land to buy the park for $500 million. Residents decided to seeks competitive bids.

Four bidders paid the $20,000 registration fee and submitted proposals by the Oct. 15 cutoff.

Briny Breezes is a municipality, a mobile home park, and a corporation named Briny Breezes Inc.

Instructive too is how it became its own municipality:

Briny Breezes has been around since the Depression, when a farmer named Miller started letting “tin can tourists” camp on his land. As long as you were buying his milk and strawberries, you could stay.

By 1937, the year Bob Kraft showed up, Briny had an advertising campaign. Fliers in the Chicago Tribune hawked “America’s Trailer Park Paradise” - 40 travel trailers parked under palm trees. “Families from the north are living here, paying $3 a week rent,” the ad said.

In the early decades of the last century, Florida land salesman was considered synonymous with con artist (as in the Marx Brothers’ classic movie Cocoanuts).

 

Take off your coat and buy some land!

Yet some folks bought anyway:

 

A 1937 flier in the Chicago Tribune hawked Briny Breezes to an early generation of snowbirds:

“This is one of the many trailer towns that have sprung up in Florida in the last two years. Families from the north are lining up here, paying $3 a week rent.

“It is 18 miles south of fashionable Palm Beach where the rich pay $10 to $25 a day hotel rent to enjoy the same sunshine and surf. World-famous polo fields 1/2 mile south.

 

“Bathe and fish, watch the sea and airliners sail by, enjoy the bracing balmy air, suntan in the sands or loll in the shade.”

We have to recall that what we now call mobile homes (even though they’re immobile) really started as genuine trailers:

 

Back then they really were mobile!

Trailers didn’t have bathrooms then, so Briny had bath houses, with showers and toilets. For 25 cents, you could rent a plug for the washtub from the park office. You had to bring your own soap, wring clothes out by hand.

 

Whenever someone hauled in a mess of fish, the man up at the office would grab a megaphone and shout: “Fish! Come and get it!”

“There were mostly families back then, not just retirees,” Bob says. “In the ’40s, we’d have 50 kids waiting for the school bus. I’d go to school here all winter.”

 

Briny hasn’t always been for older folks. In the late 1930s, when this photo was taken, most of the residents were families. More than 50 children rode the bus each winter from Briny Breezes to a nearby elementary school. Bob Kraft, pictured in front, getting ready to board the bus, is 79 now. He still lives in Briny.

 

When Miller decided to retire in 1958, he asked the campers: Would you like to buy a piece of this place?

On such whims do lives and fortunes change. Forty-eight years ago, the residents had a chance to buy their ground at its then fair market value:

He sold the little lots for $2,000, and $2,500 for the ones on the water. People borrowed money, sold stuff, threw their assets in together. For another $1,200, you could buy an 18-foot trailer.

 

For years, the community church was the center of social life at Briny Breezes. In 1955, when this photo was taken, more than 100 of the park’s winter residents posed between the palm trees outside the chapel. Note the harpist in the center. Some wondered how she transported that enormous instrument in her tiny trailer. (From the St. Petersburg Times article.)

 

Like many another place, Briny started as a location but became a spontaneous and long-lived community:

Five generations have wintered here, teachers and machinists from Michigan and Maine. Current residents - most of them retired, all of them white - include a retired history professor who gives Civil War lectures at the clubhouse, a man who made makeup for Avon, a former Miss Mississippi in her 90s. Every one of them scrimped for years so they could buy a single-wide lot in the sun. “A millionaire’s lifestyle without the millions,” Mayor Jack Lee likes to say.

In Briny, you never have to worry about anything. You don’t have to think about dressing up or trying to impress anyone. You are never lonely or bored. You live so close to your neighbors that when you sneeze in your kitchen they say, “Bless you!” Everything you want is within walking distance: the beach and boats, fish and friends, bingo and shuffleboard, Bible study and poker nights.

 

If you get hurt or sick, everyone rallies around and drives you to the doctor and bathes your dog. And the casserole brigade shows up, always does.

As I’ve previously posted, home ownership encourages responsible behavior. Indeed, so responsible that Briny took the law into its own hands:

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2]

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