My extended family's assorted houses on Long Beach Island more or less stamped the template for "summer home" onto my brain at an impressionable age. Thanks to countless day spent ingesting gallons of the Atlantic and an older cousin's lurid revelation of the Matawan Man-Eater, I forever see Amity Island, Massachusetts, as the LBI of my youth. Perversely, this has only stoked my hankering to move to a beach town, become a year-round resident, and take up the hobby of watching Carcharadon carcharias kill the local economy*.
I haven't been to Long Beach Island in years, but I still think of it fondly. So it was kind of startling to read, in the space of a week, two different profiles on the area. In today's NYT, there's "22 Vacation Spots, And Ocean for Everybody," which chats up the real estate prospects on the island -- surprisingly affordable from this Californian's perspective, so long as one doesn't factor in the costs of cross-country travel! However, New York's "No Quiet on the Ocean Front" talks about how all that real estate is getting washed into the sea.
The Surfrider Foundation's doing some work on finding an island protection solution that will not also end up snapping the necks of the many surfers in the area. Check out their petition, and their advocacy for dune nourishment as an alternative to building surf breaks. You can keep up with the Jersey Shore chapter's activities here.
* As opposed to moving to an island that, technically, was once a beach town and taking up the hobby of watching the great white sharks contribute to the local economy.
LBI! We used to stay in Ship Bottom and Barnagat. I miss it.
Posted by: freakgirl | 2006.07.17 at 13:13
From the article:
Christine Ferris ... and her husband paid $300,000 for the condo, which is 700 square feet and is four lengthy blocks from the beach in Beach Haven. They plan to use the property for three weeks each summer with their three daughters, who are 9, 6, and 17 months. “We rented for a week last year and it just wasn’t enough,” Mrs. Ferris said.
That's a pretty steep price for a three-week vacation, even by California standards. I think this is still a gig for people with more money than sense.
Posted by: ginger | 2006.07.18 at 10:08
$300K to own 700 sq. ft near the water is not bad.
Just because the owners are only using their property for a few weeks a year doesn't mean that the property itself is necessarily overpriced; it's just overpriced relative to the owner's use, and that's assuming the owner didn't rent it out the rest of the time to recoup some of the costs.
Posted by: Lisa | 2006.07.18 at 10:46
Oh, no, I wasn't suggesting it was overpriced. Just that the owners were overindulging. (And if they don't rent that thing out, they're completely crazy.)
Posted by: ginger | 2006.07.18 at 15:04