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The Gentrification Blues
Fernandina Beach's decidedly blue collar character persisted into the 1970s, as workers earned their livings at nearby paper mills and the port. But in the years since, the town has gone through a dramatic change, thanks to a real estate boom on the south end of Amelia Island triggered by upscale developments such as Amelia Island Plantation and a number of luxury condominiums.
As a result, not only has the character of the island's only town changed, but the middle-class workers who provide the services that the affluent increasingly demand -- restaurant workers, retail clerks, secretaries, housekeepers, groundskeepers -- are being priced out. Increasingly, those workers must live off-island, becoming, in effect, migrants whose allegiance to the community where they work is defined only by their paychecks.
Statistics tell the story of the island's rising per-capita incomes and real estate prices. Of some 220 homes for sale this spring in Fernandina Beach, just seven homes were selling for $79,000 or less, most of them in need of major rehabilitation. Meanwhile, along the island's coast to the south, about half a dozen developments offer $1 million condos for sale; a $1.8 million home recently appeared on the Realtors' Multiple Listing Service.
The trend worries 76-year-old Willie Mae Ashley, who grew up in Fernandina Beach and graduated from Peck High School, the 1920s-vintage public school for blacks in the days of formal segregation. She later taught there and still lives across the street. The island, she says, is "becoming a haven for the rich with a deterioration of the people at the roots."
Developer Rick Smyth may be part of the problem, but he's also working on solutions. Smyth says he fell in love with the island when he spent a weekend there a few years ago near the end of a rocky tenure as chairman of a consumer safety products firm, Vista 2000, in Atlanta. He and his wife moved to an oceanfront home at the island's pricey southern end.
A stout, ruddy, restless entrepreneur, 42-year-old Smyth set up an investment firm, Blue Ridge Ventures. He also began scouting business opportunities: Smyth saw potential in the dilapidated Main Beach area, once the center of social and commercial life for Fernandina Beach. This spring, Smyth's $4 million Beachside Commons opened with tourist shops and restaurants; next door, Smyth is building a $6 million timeshare condominium. So, the high-end developments that once were centered in the island's south have moved to the very outskirts of downtown Fernandina Beach.
Unlike many developers, Smyth recognizes the problems inherent in turning the island into an enclave for the rich and is trying to address the imbalance. He has joined an effort to rehab the old Peck High School and transform it into a community center for the surrounding neighborhood. At the end of workdays on the condo project, Smyth sends a construction crew to work on an upscale conference room he's donating to the center.
He is also building a half-dozen $60,000 to $65,000 houses in the Peck neighborhood and says he plans to build up to 300 more; he can make the numbers work, he says, because residential lots there are still only about $6,000 to $12,000. That allows him to put up 1,200-square-foot homes and turn a modest profit. "This is a community service project, but you'd like to not lose your shirt," says Smyth, who is looking to do more, particularly if he can get other developers involved. "There isn't enough profit motive to draw in big guns. You are going to be on razor-thin margins."
But Smyth is swimming against the tide he has helped create. As the resorts and shops continue to generate low-paying retail and service jobs, housing becomes a bigger issue for the island. Indeed, Amelia Island Plantation, one of the island's three largest employers with 1,200 workers during its spring peak, sends vans to shuttle maids and groundskeepers from communities around Jacksonville and rural south Georgia, an hour away.
Even workers a few rungs up the economic ladder now have to look to the mainland for housing. Amelia Island Plantation secretary Jennifer Boswell, a native of Fernandina Beach whose husband is a maintenance worker at the Plantation, scoured the market but found few homes her family could afford, none in decent shape. The Boswells ended up purchasing a $72,000 home to the west near Yulee, 13 miles away across the Intracoastal Waterway.
Architect John Cotner, who's designing the low-cost homes for Smyth, notes some of the costs and consequences of a migrant work force, such as traffic and wear-and-tear on roads and other infrastructure needed to support their commuting. "Economically, when you allow this trickle relocation to occur, you're creating an inefficient system," Cotner says. Also, businesses face higher costs in recruiting and keeping workers, says Marc Smith, associate director of the University of Florida Shimberg Center for Affordable Housing.
Developer Smyth says he's motivated in part by social consciousness, but he repeatedly echoes Cotner's remarks about the economic value of diversity. "Everyone keeps ignoring the entry-level part of the market, but you've got to meet that need to keep the economy going," says Smyth. "People are seduced by the gold at the south end of the island and forget about the rest."
