Rapid, uncontrolled growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.
County Administrator MICHAEL DAVID WANCHICK and Sheriff DAVID BERNArd SHOAR, who legally changed his name from "HOAR" in 1994. Partners in crime.
Here's another shallow article by SHOAR toady and dingbat developer fanboy STUART KORFHAGE.
It does not quote elected officials, law professors, or environmentalists. STUART KORFHAGE is the "development" beat reporter and deluded by big dollar developers.
I predict STUART KORFHAGE will have a high-paid career incorporate PR, in the spirit of Knoxville reporters who went to work for the Tennessee Valley Authority. This article stinks on ice. Article omits:
1. Corruption.
2. Unsophisticated local governments, led by unjust stewards like St. Augustine Beach City Manager BRUCE MAX ROYLE and St. Johns County Administrator MICHAEL DAVID WANCHICK, and their henchmen, who never saw a developer they didn't like.
3. St. Johns County Sheriff Neal Perry, et ux., Syd Perry, The Issues Group, Sheriff David Shoar and secretive LLC funding of campaigns by clear-cutting, wetland-destroying "developers." Devious "developers" used The Issues Group to handpick all Commissioners elected 1998-2004, the year that reform Commissioner Ben Rich, Sr. was elected.
4. Lax local news media failing to investigate developer influence, low-quality construction and prevalence of Planned Unit Developments (de facto contract zoning), miserably failing for years to fulfill the "watchdog" function our Founders expected of newspapers.
5. Elimination of public access tv by county government, which once allowed "Bubba" Rowe to expose misconduct before he got elected to County Commission.
6. One-party Republican misrule.
7. Democrats failing to run anyone for countywide partisan races in 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, catering to developers instead of average residents.
8. Local landowners selling their land for peanuts, allowing destruction of wildlife, wetlands & forests. Locals now drive to S.C. to hunt, due to destruction of our local forests.
9. Promiscuous approval of "developments" pushed by RogersTowers, the late George Morris McClure, et al.
10. No Ombuds.
11. No independent Inspector General.
12. No county ethics commission.
13. Citizens euchred into voting for putative "conservatives" who rubber-stamp bad projects for developers.
Enough flummery, dupery and nincompoopery.
I'm voting for Cathy Guevarra, Democrat, for Commission.
What spurred St. Johns County’s rapid growth?
Since its groundbreaking in 2005, Nocatee (pictured here) has become one of the fastest growing master-planned communities in the country. [Christina Kelso/The Record]
By Stuart Korfhage
Posted at 2:00 AM
Updated at 7:59 AM
St. Augustine Record
In 1980, St. Johns County was a place with just more than 50,000 full-time residents. It was known for some nice beachfront areas and a quaint downtown in St. Augustine.
Twenty years later, the population more than doubled to 125,000, and plans had been laid to pretty much double the population again by 2020.
So what happened in the last three or four decades? Do people really like the beach that much?
Well, yes they do. They also like new homes with neighborhood swimming pools and clubhouses, good schools, bearable commuting times and low taxes.
Welcome to St. Johns County.
The massive growth here — to an estimated 235,000 in 2016 — is linked to a lot of factors and trends. Some of them are broad national trends, but a lot of this area’s appeal is unique to what’s here.
“I believe people are coming because it’s a wonderful place to live,” said local attorney Ellen Avery-Smith, who represents many developers in the area. “Hopefully we’re not doing anything to change that.”
My, how we’ve grown
1970: Population of St. Johns County is about 30,000
1975: Caballos del Mar DRI (Sawgrass development) approved by County Commission
1980: Population of St. Johns County is about 51,000
1984: Roger O’Steen and Greg Barbour buy land off of State Road A1A to develop Marsh Creek Country Club
1990: Population of St. Johns County is about 84,000
1991: St. Johns County chosen as home of PGA Tour Hall of Fame (later changed to World Golf Hall of Fame)
1998: Formal grand opening ceremony of World Golf Village
2000: Population of St. Johns County is about 125,000
2001: Nocatee approved by County Commission for 12,500 homes
2005: Nocatee groundbreaking
2014: Mattamy Homes buys RiverTown (4,950 homes)
2016: Population of St. Johns County is about 235,000
Why here?
Part of the reason St. Johns County has been discovered is simple proximity to the ocean and proximity to a growing coastal city in Jacksonville.
Lots of Americans are migrating to the coasts for various reasons. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “counties directly on the shoreline constitute less than 10 percent of the total land area (not including Alaska) but account for 39 percent of the total population. From 1970 to 2010, the population of these counties increased by almost 40 percent and are projected to increase by an additional 10 million people or 8 percent by 2020.”
With the push toward the water, it was inevitable that those looking to relocate would consider this county. Yet that alone doesn’t account for the explosive growth. After all, more than half of Florida’s 67 counties front the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico. So there’s a lot of competition.
Non-coastal areas don’t always see the same growth. For instance, bordering Putnam County has a population of about 73,000, which is an increase of just about 8,000 residents since 1990.
John Kinsey, who is the developer of Beachwalk on County Road 210, said the main reason why so many developments in St. Johns County have succeeded is because there are jobs available to those considering a move. Adding natural beauty and top-rated schools, and St. Johns County has become a juggernaut.
“The economic growth in Jacksonville, that I think is a surprise to the rest of the state of Florida, is (a major factor),” Kinsey said. “The willingness of major companies to realize that they don’t have to have their people all headquartered in what were formerly major business centers. Why be paying people New York wages and New York taxes when you can have them doing the same work in Florida at a better quality of life and a lower cost?”
In St. Johns County in the 1980s, there was an incredible abundance of land suitable for development. And much of it was in the hands of a few large landowners. The willingness of the Fletchers, the Davis family and others to make their holdings available created opportunities for development.
“As family owners of land decided to monetize some of their assets, you kind of had the perfect storm of the growth of Jacksonville creating the demand for housing (in surrounding counties),” Kinsey said. “The decision of the large land owners to open their land up and then the quality of the school system just turned it into a perfect storm.”
It was the realization of that trend that gave Kinsey the confidence to invest millions in infrastructure improvements (widening C.R. 210) and to build the Crystal Lagoon as the centerpiece of the Beachwalk development.
The first success
Kinsey gave credit to those who came before him that proved large, master-planned communities could work in this market.
While Sawgrass was the first major upscale community in the modern era to succeed in the county, the two developments that set the stage for the huge recent residential growth were World Golf Village and Nocatee.
World Golf Village was probably the riskiest venture of its era.
Unlike other developments, WGV lacked proximity to the beach or any major employment market. It was an experiment of building “in the middle of nowhere.”
And it took a long time to come together. The first plan, a Development of Regional Impact, was approved in 1986. But the original developers didn’t have much of a plan or even all of the land in one ownership group at that time.
Developer Jim Davidson, who first rejected the offer to direct the development, took over and guided WGV through the process of going from a vague concept to a concrete plan.
The major turning point came in 1991 when the county was chosen to be the site of the PGA Tour Hall of Fame. That later morphed into the World Golf Hall of Fame, and it became the anchor for the development, with the design led by Rick Pariani.
More than a decade in the making, WGV finally opened in 1998.
“In the late 1980s, the stage was set for a significant burst of development,” Pariani said in an email to The Record. “Land was plentiful. Demand was growing. Awareness of the regional attributes and the county’s desirability was expanding daily. Investors came.”
Now matured for almost 20 years, Pariani is proud of what he helped create in central St. Johns County. Fellow developers certainly took note.
“To go out and plant a flag that far out, literally in the middle of nowhere, it takes obviously a lot of guts,” Kinsey said.
Added Nocatee developer Roger O’Steen: “We are fortunate to have an unusual number of well-planned communities in St. Johns County starting with the various Sawgrass communities including Marsh Landing, The Plantation and more recently communities such as Palencia, Bartram Park and Shearwater. These communities have planned for parks, schools, transportation and other significant infrastructure needs.”
Nocatee’s place
While WGV was seeing strong sales activity at the turn of the century, an even more ambitious project was in the making.
O’Steen, who developed Marsh Creek on Anastasia Island with Greg Barbour, formed the PARC Group and eventually embarked on what is the biggest master-planned community in the county at up to 12,500 homes.
The groundbreaking took place in 2005 just before the nationwide collapse of the housing market, but it soon recovered to become one of the fastest-growing master-planned communities in the country.
It’s often been held up as the standard for subsequent developments to follow.
That’s not only for the design of the community and variety of the homes available but because of the fact that so much of the infrastructure and amenities were built before most of the move-ins took place. That work started in 2005.
“The two significant comments that we continue to hear (from residents) were that the backbone infrastructure was built and the amenities were built in the early years,” O’Steen said. “That provided a lot of credibility and was significant to show that we were committed to this plan. This was reality. This wasn’t a dream on a piece of paper.
“It took a lot of conviction and commitment on the part of the Davis family (who owned the land) to stay with the plan and to build all of the committed infrastructure, which added significant credibility in the marketplace, particularly during the downturn.”
The next step
As much as growth fatigue might be hitting longtime county residents, there is no respite in sight.
At a recent meeting of the county Planning and Zoning Agency, a resident of a rural area lamented that: “We moved out to this area to be in the country. Next door to me, you’re talking about adding thousands of people.”
That is clearly becoming the reality for most residents who don’t live next to a conservation zone or own a large parcel of land themselves.
With the booming economy, low mortgage rates and continued tax advantages to living in Florida, there is no reason to think growth will slow.
The University of Florida predicts the population of St. Johns County will be 250,000 in 2020 and 320,000 by 2030. Those people will need homes, and there should be plenty of neighborhoods to choose from.
“Good growth and good development flourishes when competition in that business sector is healthy and strong,” Pariani said. “Hopefully, the next wave of good growth will bring economically sound business and job opportunities in close proximity to communities — making for a more sustainable live-work-play balance.”
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