How rising tides and housing prices impact the Jersey Shore
Philadelphians love their vacations at the Shore, but they’ll soon have to face the reality that it’s becoming unaffordable and unsustainable.
On a fall night, Sheila Hagan Holst and her husband, Bernie, searched for a place to grab a drink in the now-quiet beach town of Surf City, NJ. They drove along Long Beach Boulevard, which during the peak summer months would be buzzing with traffic but now had only a handful of cars. They pulled into the parking lot of NorthSide Bar & Grille, “Long Beach Island’s Best Sport Bar,” and found it to be vacant, except for the bartender. The silence, save for the radio, seemed to bounce off the cool blue walls and white tile floor and emphasize the emptiness of the bar.
Sheila and Bernie live in Bryn Mawr, a suburb of Philadelphia, but made the approximately two-hour trip to check in on their vacation home in Brant Beach, two towns over from Surf City. They began talking to the bartender and their conversation quickly turned to the elephant in the room: the empty bar. The bartender explained that this was a pretty normal sight for the offseason as the number of full-time residents continues to dwindle.
Surf City isn’t the only New Jersey Shore town to experience a decline in full-time residents. Many towns along the coast go into hibernation during the winter months but in the last several years they’ve gone into a deeper sleep than usual. A few miles down the coast in the Borough of Beach Haven, the number of full-time residents has dropped from 1,278 to 1,022 since 2000, and the number of residents above the age of 60 continues to rise.
In the summer, it’s an entirely different story. Families flock to the beach in the thousands, with traffic on the Garden State Parkway and Atlantic City Expressway often jammed for hours, especially on Friday nights and Saturday mornings. Beach Haven Mayor Nancy Davis says the population of the borough increases to 20,000 or 30,000 — a drastic change from the thousand full-time residents. While Shore communities thrive in the summer and Shore vacations have become a staple in many Philadelphians’ lives, changes in recent years suggest that the struggles that happen behind the scenes — in the winter when the boardwalk is empty and the rides are closed — might just define the future of their beloved vacations at the Jersey Shore.
As early as the 1800s, wealthy Philadelphians began traveling to Cape May on the southern tip of New Jersey to escape the city air that was filled with diseases in the summertime. Gradually, boarding houses and hotels started popping up. In 1854, the first train ran from Camden, NJ, to Absecon Island near Atlantic City, which made the Shore easily accessible to Philadelphia’s working class and began the special attachment between Philadelphians and the Jersey Shore.
To the north, Long Branch became a haven for New York’s wealthy society. The middle of the coast, known today as Long Beach Island, remained mostly unknown to tourists because it was hard to reach from Philadelphia. In 1954, the Garden State Parkway opened, which made Long Beach Island reachable by car. Middle-class families who could afford second homes quickly built houses and established small towns along the barrier island.
Some of the older houses at the Jersey Shore are Victorian mansions, but many were modest bungalows that families had built. Families would come down in June, spend the entire summer, then lock up in August. For many middle-class families in the Philadelphia area, this became an annual tradition. It was normal — something they always did.
“A lot of people in this region feel like they have a stake, even if all they do is rent,” says Karen O’Neill, an associate professor in the human ecology department at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. She conducted research about the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy on the Shore and is an editor of Taking Chances: The Coast After Hurricane Sandy. She notes that in her research, another place where people had a similar level of attachment was in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and most of those were full-time homes.
“It’s very interesting to me,” she adds about the Shore. “I don’t think [this attachment] exists in many other recreational places.”
A catalyst for change
On October 29, 2012, a category 1 hurricane — later referred to as Superstorm Sandy — made landfall in New Jersey and accelerated the trajectory of development at the Jersey Shore. The hurricane wreaked havoc along the Shore, leaving many homes completely destroyed.
Because it took so long — and some people are still waiting — to receive FEMA aid, people either had to pay out of pocket to rebuild their homes or they had to sell them. In Brant Beach, Sheila Hagan Holst estimates that as of last summer, there were about 100 “ghost houses,” houses people had to abandon because they couldn’t afford repairs. Many of those were older bungalows and Cape Cod-style houses that had been paid off and passed down from parents to children. Homeowners are required to purchase flood insurance only if they still have a mortgage on the home, so people who owned older homes ran into trouble.
The Holsts had been renting for about 26 years before they bought their house in Brant Beach a few months after Hurricane Sandy. The owners had died and their children wanted to sell it, but it had not been fixed up in at least 30 years. The Holsts could afford the house because the sellers were desperate to get it off their hands, but that isn’t the case anymore — Sheila said there was about a year-long window of opportunity to buy property before investors and developers swooped in.
Developers took advantage of the real estate situation by purchasing and knocking down smaller homes to build what O’Neill calls party houses, which are either rented out during the summer or purchased by people who are wealthy enough to own a second home. They might even own other vacation homes, so they visit their Shore house for only a few weeks while it sits vacant the rest of the year.
“The thing that I always loved about LBI was just the quaintness of it, just a beachside family town,” Sheila says. “It definitely feels like there’s a much wealthier crowd going there now that is replacing the family side.” Data from Kevin Gillen at The Lindy Institute of Urban Innovation at Drexel University supports Sheila’s observations: the average price for a house in Avalon and Stone Harbor was around $200,000 in 1980, while houses there today average over $1.4 million.
As purchase prices increase, so do rental prices. When Beach Haven Mayor Nancy Davis was growing up, a group of teenagers could afford to rent a house and work at the Shore all summer, but now that rentals cost several thousand dollars per week, it’s almost unthinkable. She still considers Beach Haven a family town, but says the demography has changed; when she was a kid, most people came from Philadelphia, but now many vacation homeowners are from New York.
Many of Beach Haven’s full-time residents are fairly affluent retirees who moved from the Philadelphia suburbs and split their time between Beach Haven and homes in Florida, Arizona or even Utah. “They’re not necessarily just hanging around here all winter,” Davis says. “There’s an active group of people in the community and there’s a lot happening so it’s not totally dead, but it’s not anything like the summer.”
Johnny Dunlap, a student at Syracuse University, has lived in Beach Haven all his life. “I tell people that we live on the island and they automatically assume that we’re like loaded, especially nowadays, which just isn’t the case,” he says. Although his family’s house fared relatively well during Hurricane Sandy, they plan on moving soon to higher ground as the flooding worsens. Dunlap’s parents — a real estate agent and a retired police officer — bought their first house “for pennies.” By the time they sold it, the value had significantly increased, so they could afford to buy their current bigger home.
As more houses are built, Dunlap says there’s less and less to do on the island. For instance, there used to be three movie theaters on the island, but they’ve all been replaced by housing developments. While this may not be a problem for summer beachgoers, it is a problem for the full-time residents.
“It seems like people are prioritizing making a short-term profit over the long term wellbeing of the community,” Dunlap says. “Middle-class people — it won’t be long before they can’t afford to live there. Kinda sucks.”
Looking ahead
In addition to building new houses and repairing those damaged during Sandy, other developments are underway. In January 2013, new federal flood maps were introduced to redefine flood zones, and homeowners in those zones had two choices — elevate their homes on wooden stilts so living space is several feet above street level, or pay higher premiums on flood insurance in the future. Essentially, homeowners had to decide between spending the money now to protect their home, or take a chance and risk paying more later. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie gave an example of a homeowner in a “V zone” — where breaking waves are possible — who chose not to elevate their home now and who could eventually pay a flood insurance premium of up to $31,000 per year. By contrast, a homeowner who raised their house now to the recommended elevation — which could cost anywhere from $40,000 to $150,000 — would pay $7,000 per year.
Officials in Beach Haven are working to address regular flooding, which Davis says can be almost worse than the flooding from Hurricane Sandy. Since Sandy, the boulevard and evacuation route connecting Beach Haven to the mainland has been closed 40 times due to flooding. Before that, it was rarely closed which makes some people believe that the bay was changed after Sandy, Davis says. Beach replenishment projects are also in the works, but according to Karen O’Neill even those are unsustainable because the specific type of sand needed is either contaminated or part of threatened ecosystems.
O’Neill says Shore towns have been developed and treated like suburbs with a view, when they are actually ecologically delicate landscapes. Except for the northern towns like Belmar, Asbury Park and Long Branch, most Jersey Shore towns are on fragile barrier islands. Because of the increasing risk of flooding, O’Neill says the best thing to do would be to buy property with the intention of renting it out rather than keeping it as a family home, just like developers have already started doing. “In some ways it is logical there to be this gentrification of the Shore because people are treating it more like an asset and not like a home,” O’Neill says. “That’s a way to distance yourself from the risk.”
Despite the growing environmental threats, development at the Shore continues. In Beach Haven, Mayor Davis says that while the historic district hasn’t changed much, development is allowed on the main boulevard, and the city is encouraging buildings with retail on the ground floor and condos above. She says they’ve also implemented an affordable housing project with the hope of attracting new full-time residents to town. One unit is being built now, and they hope to have six by summer 2019.
In the five years since Hurricane Sandy, there hasn’t been a storm of the same magnitude to hit the Jersey Shore but that isn’t to say another “superstorm” won’t happen again. O’Neill says that depending on how badly towns were affected by Sandy determines their perceived threat of another storm. Towns that weren’t hit feel like they dodged a bullet and towns that were have the mentality of “that’s it, we’re recovering,” she says.
The question is not if development at the Jersey Shore will continue, but how long will it be able to continue before people realize it’s unsustainable.
