Cape Gazette Questions Series: Future Growth in and Around Lewes

The Cape Gazette sent a series of questions to each of the candidates for Lewes City Council for publication in the May 2 edition.

The proposed Highland Heights and Point Farm communities are very controversial among residents. What is your vision for future growth in and around Lewes?

We know we cannot stop growth. People want to be here. We wanted to be here. We have to remember why we found Lewes so attractive and work to guide future development into a similar pattern.

This means supporting a mixture of different residential densities, low-level industry, open space, and local-scale retail and restaurants.

We can allow for growth where it is appropriate. We can use our city codes to minimize environmental, traffic, flooding and other risks.

 We will work with developers to maintain the intimate scale of the City and encourage pedestrian and bicycle connections. This will require regular updates of city codes and a willingness to seek out advice and input where ever we can find it.

My Blue-Collar Village

I slept-in a bit this morning. We were all up very late rehearsing the Nutcracker Ballet, which goes before an audience this evening. I was awakened at by the 7:00 o'clock horn that sounds automatically each morning (Sundays excepted) from downtown. I believe the horn is mounted on the old power plant that used to provide all of our electricity and still serves as a power distribution point and shop for the Board of Public Works.

That horn reminds me that my small city -- Lewes, Delaware -- has very blue-collar roots. It blew each morning at seven to call the workers from their small frame houses in several neighborhoods of the old town, through mercantile downtown, past the busy fishing port, and to their jobs at the fish factories that once lined the Delaware Bay shore out towards Fort Miles and its shore defenses batteries.

The horn still calls out each morning. I sometimes hear it as I head out for my commute to Dover. On week-ends it occasionally calls me from my bed to my jobs around the house. The small frame worker's houses have been restored as mini-Victorians. Downtown's hardware store, five-n-dime and grocery have become a series of lovely boutiques. The working fishing boats have gone from the port, replaced by sailboats, tourist head-boats and the sleek powerboats of recreational anglers. The fish factories that once gave Lewes its distinctive odor have been plowed-under for a new crop of large beach-front and near beach-front homes. Some with full-time residents; many as vacation homes for people whose working life is hours away. Fort Miles lives on as a museum piece within Cape Henlopen State Park.

Lewes has changed in the 20 years I've lived here. Change is a constant in all life, of course, but my town has changed profoundly, I think. And not all for the best.

I remember when I first discovered Lewes. I had just begun working at a local radio station and was sent out as part of a remote broadcast from Lewes' Second Street. I loved it. It had high-end shops and a five-n-dime. The hardware store had hardwood floors and a hammered tin ceiling. The street was busy with both vacationers and local farmers and workers. It felt to me like what a small town in America should feel like. Rich and poor, white and black, workers and retirees all going about their several different sorts of business.

I knew that this was the sort of real town I wanted to be a part of. I was more familiar with Rehoboth Beach and Bethany Beach; resort towns I had visited each summer of my childhood. I love both of those towns. But, in looking for a place to settle, I wanted a year-round small town, not a busy summer resort. That was the Lewes I found.

Now, I find, my year-round working town filled with folks from all walks of life is becoming a place for wealthy people. Some are retired here. Some are here in their second homes as often as they can be and are looking ahead to retiring here.

Many of the shops are marketing to retirees and vacationers. There is still a small grocery, but for most day-to-day shopping I must leave town. The hardware store is gone. The five-n-dime is gone.

Work in Lewes is now largely retail. But retail workers can't afford to live here. There is still a hospital and medical professions abound. But, except for the Doctors, most who work in that part of Lewes' economy can't afford to live here. We're losing our economic and racial diversity. And we are losing our age-range diversity. At 45 I am often one of the youngest people at public meetings in town.

These changes hit me in the heart the other day. I was on the phone with a part-time resident who has become active in efforts to control growth around Lewes (a laudable effort). I am a part of the Lewes Planning Commission and so often find myself in conversations of this sort. I can't quote exactly what this woman told me, but it was something along the lines of "we must protect our lovely Village." I know she used the word "Village" because I remember thinking, "it's a city, dammit, please don't turn it into a quaint little retirement Village."

That's not who we were and not who we should be.

Our Beaches Are Expanding?

Well. They are expanding at least in the sense that real estate agents are greatly expanding the area that they market as "at the beach." The News Journal has a story this morning on the growing tendency of the real estate industry to market western Sussex County as beach lands.

In Marketers offer beach living in Bridgeville, Rachael Jackson looks at Heritage Shores, the large 55-and-older subdivision that has been tacked-on to Bridgeville. She notes that, while the development is about 45 minutes drive from the beaches, it is marketed as a beach development. She notes that this is a growing trend, not only here but nationally.

"It's definitely something that we're seeing going around nationally," said David E. Johnson, chief executive of Strategic Vision LLC, an Atlanta-based public relations and marketing agency that works with developers. Johnson said that in Florida, it's not uncommon for "beach" developments to be as much as an hour away from the sea.

I've been thinking about this trend lately. I touched on it last fall in a post that started out as a look at trends in development-naming. I was annoyed then by a development named "...at Rehoboth" that is a good 10 mile drive west of Rehoboth Beach. This isn't a large urban area, where you can go 10 miles and still be in the same place. I counted at least five named places between Rehoboth Beach and "...at Rehoboth."

What's going on is fairly simple. The land that is actually at the beach is just about completely developed. There is still room of course, but as it becomes less and less, the value goes ever higher and the new places at the beach rise out of the price range of most of the market.

So we build farther away from the beach. But "The Beach" is the main marketing tool for this area. So we have to redefine what constitutes "The Beach."

Vicki York, Realtor at Millville-based At the Beach Realty, said that beach boundaries have been redefined. Today, with an office as far west as Dagsboro, she said only 25 percent of the properties she works with are east of the Assawoman Canal, the traditional marker for the beach property area.

"If you get five minutes away from the beach, some people are like, 'What's another 10 or 15 minutes?' " she said.

Well, I'd say that it's another 10 or 15 minutes in a car, burning fossil fuels, adding air pollution, and clogging roads that are not designed to handle the load.