.... St Joe Peninsula needed a good cleaning of condo
madness but it may clean my boat too. If it also gives St George Is a
good condo beach cleaning it'll be worth it. There is nothing worse
than tacky side by side condos or dumb-ass yankees building monstrous
houses on MY beach. Maybe this'll run em off fer good and leave it to
us natives. See, there's a silver linin in every hurricane.


It's not *your* beach unless you buy it and pay taxes on it.

Fact of life in this increasingly crowded world, woods & shorelines will
be developed sooner rather than later. Until this spring, our dock was
surrounded by very nice woods. Now the woods are bulldozed and condos
are going up.

Brief political digression: it will be interesting to see if the new
'imminent domain' laws will enable developers to sieze trust lands held
by groups like the Nature Conservancy, or state university forestry
preserves.


Howard Peer wrote:
Well I'm a Yankee, or half, the other half Canadian. The Condo cleaning
will provide brief respite. In '62 we had a "NorEaster" hit the Jersey
shore. Gave the barrier island a new inlet. Cleaned out hundreds of
houses. Just made more land for the developers to resell and rebuild
on. They are now tearing down the "old" houses built after '62 to put
up newer and uglier models with more rental rooms.

And what's worse, new building techniques & materials are a lot stronger
and more durable, so they will be a lot harder for the next hurricane to
remove.

... Remember, the real
estate agent makes money on every transaction whether or not the seller
does.

Maybe after we get rid of all the lawyers, they should be next?


My Dad was a bayman. There were about 15 to 20 full time baymen on our
creek, maybe more for there were 3 full time clam houses. Now there are
NONE.


Well, that seems to be the fate of all natural resources. In the 1700s,
Boston Harbor had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of seafood including
large oysters... in fact, oyster were so large & plentiful that they
were scorned as poor folk's food. In the 1800s, Long Island Sound had a
thriving fishing/crabbing/waterman industry. Now the Chesapeake Bay is
gasping it's last and we've stripped the Grand Banks.

How much of this trend is population pressure, and how much is just
greed & stupidity?


The deepest cynical side of me likens a good hurricane to taking a hot
bath to get rid of a case of the crabs. Temporary relief, but unless
you get the eggs the'r gonna come back.

Feeling particularlly crumudgenly this morning I guess.


Maybe it's just an overdose of cold facts. I get that way too.

Regards
Doug King