Sunday, September 21, 2014

Doing the Right thing - Protecting single family neighborhoods

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I knew it would happen sooner or later...in today's Palm Beach Post, the editorial addresses all the concerns that we have regarding protecting our single family neighborhoods. It is hard enough when you have to deal with local politics and fight some of them all the way just to keep your neighborhood single family. Every neighborhood association in Lake Worth should 100% support this concept.

More sober houses and vacation rentals are popping up. Investors are buying entire blocks or even entire condo communities and converting them to housing for recovering addicts.  Vacation rentals are changing our neighborhoods into overnight hotels and competing against licensed places of lodging. These investors are motivated by greed and pay no attention to our zoning rules and could care less about our laws.

Read about it... and the Palm Beach Post's opinion that government must protect and preserve the local neighborhoods.

5 comments:

  1. we cant even trust our police force who got caught and arrested for selling steroids and pills on the job with their weapons out of lake worth wellness center and wellington wellness-rick bradshaw handed this case over to the fbi due to many more police officers involved---and they are looking into Dylan Harrison(kava bar who went to prison) comments on this blog that he employs many cops--to be continued

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  2. I do not think our city leaders have done the right thing! They have not protected single family homes at all, especially since we have like 50-70% rental in this city, very few areas in the city have 'real" single family homes in a neighborhood. Most have rentals all over the place even a lot of houses all rented out and renters for the most part do not care nor take pride in our city. Then on top of it we have all these abandoned buildings that people are breaking into and setting up camp in like 1416 and 1418 2nd Ave North and 222-224 N C St. We have so many abandoned buildings boarded up by the city, but with people living and camping out in them, attracting druggies, prostitutes, addicts, our city has gone to hell. We need city leaders that will fight for only single family homes, no more renters and clean up all these abandoned buildings all throughout our city. The city is a big mess right now. Years ago, they used to say they were only allowing single family homes to be built, but then keep building all this low income housing and more rentals. Will our city ever really get better?

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  3. Sounds like our city with all the renters and slumlords we have here in LW!

    "In practical terms, this means neighborhoods where people once lived in the homes they owned, invested in their beautification, and knew their neighbors, are giving way to tracts of rentals owned by profit-focused absentee landlords, and sometimes crammed with the maximum number of residents possible."

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  4. I just so happened to overhear a conversation by 4 men while dining dowtown LW. They were discussinf how easy and profitable it is. One man told the other how he would manage the sober house here with very little training. They said they also were looking at residences in Colorado where they could smoke dope and tie it into their sober house while laughing about it. Also said while they wrote these off as businesses they have great investments for future vacation or retirement.

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  5. The Florida Legislature can return power to local governments to decide how often and how long single-family homes can be rented — something they were stripped of in 2010 due to the activism of vacation rental industry lobbyists.

    Please note the above quote and further note, that if a local government had a short term rental law prior to 2010 that law can be enforced. Please note that the City of LW had and has such a law and that law can be utilized to curb both vacation rentals AND sober homes (assuming they are renting space for less than 3 mos.). There is no reason that the City should not be enforcing this law, except the vacation rental folks (and maybe the sober house people too) have the City running scared of litigation. We should enforce our law and we should defend our law.

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