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COVER STORY
The Carolina Connection
Floridians are buying up homes in North Carolina -- and Florida builders are hot on their heels. But the Sunshine State's brand of development is creating tension in the hills.
Flatlanders on the ridges
 [Photo courtesy Landmark Realty Group] |
When it comes to importing Sunshine State grandiosity, no Florida developer is doing it bigger than Celebration-based Ginn Resorts. Ginn’s 6,000-acre Laurelmor, a luxury golf community that covers parts of Watauga and Wilkes counties, is larger than the nearby towns of Boone and Blowing Rock combined. With hoopla reminiscent of Florida land companies circa the 1950s, Ginn threw an enormous opening party on the mountaintop last November and flew potential buyers — many from Florida — over the property in helicopters.
Buyers were impressed, snapping up 240 lots that day, ranging from $450,000 to $1.2 million. But many residents of still-quaint Boone and Blowing Rock are not. They worry that the development will further drive up home prices in their communities, which are increasingly unaffordable for families. Environmentalists fear Laurelmor will aggravate water-supply problems.
To ease environmental concerns, Ginn has agreed to put at least 2,000 acres, including 63 miles of streams, in a conservation easement. Other Florida developers also are setting aside significant preservation land as part of community amenities. However, too many don’t, says Jose Rosado of Coral Gables, developer of Great Camps of the Smokies in Graham County. Rosado is CEO of IBEX Mountain Group, which has purchased more than 1,000 acres of wilderness bordering Nantahala National Forest and Great Smoky Mountain National Park and plans to build four communities with hundreds of high-end, rustic homes. Rosado has pledged 70% of each community will be preserved as wilderness commons areas.
“A lot of Florida developers have been doing some real high-quality stuff, but there’s a few that have come in and done it wrong,” he says, for example, taking “checkerboard” plans and plunking them down in the mountains.
Rosado says Florida developers “by and large don’t have experience with steep terrain” and encounter problems with erosion and drainage. Most local governments lack laws, such as “steep-slope” ordinances, designed to avoid such problems. In fact, the majority of western North Carolina counties have no planning or zoning laws whatsoever. Fort Myers luxury-home builder Bill Ennen tells of walking into the Yancey County Courthouse, asking directions to the zoning office and getting a puzzled look. There is no zoning office. “People have been very opposed to any sort of subdivision ordinances here because property rights are sacred,” says Higgins, the Yancey newspaper owner. “But now people are suddenly seeing the mountains being chopped all to pieces, and there’s finally a groundswell to do something.”
