My daughter’s moving back to town and we stayed out of the decision-making process. Sure, it would have been swell for her to live next door. The next block would have sufficed. But parents shouldn’t meddle; let ‘em make their own mistakes.
Laura and Darin decided to buy a lot and build in Julington Creek, about 25 minutes from us. Even though getting to them will involve battling Mandarin, we decided that it’s OK - it isn’t close, but at least it isn’t as far as it could have been.
So, after church, we drove out to see what she had bought. In the process, we realized just how fast things move around here.
I had been out to Julington Creek about six months ago. A golf meeting at the club to write a story for our sister paper, Golf News. As always happens when I go to Julington Creek, I got lost, which means I saw a few neighborhoods.
That was maybe six months ago. It was astounding what has happened since.
I guess it’s a credit to a lot of people. Real estate agents for selling. Builders for getting homes constructed quickly. St. Johns County for being able to get infrastructure in place.
Of course, I got lost again, but I might have had an excuse - the place has grown so rapidly that there’s no way to connect the old landmarks.
We stopped by the model home to see which floor plan Laura had chosen. It turned out that it was the same as the model, so we got a good look. Well, maybe it wasn’t what we would have chosen, but the young ... what can you tell ‘em?
The site agent told us that the Plantation was almost sold out and you can believe it. Where did all those homes come from? Wasn’t Racetrack Road just a skinny country road just a few months ago?
The next day, I went the other way. I hadn’t been to OakLeaf Plantation since the groundbreaking (my main impressions then: they built a big swimming pool and they had a good caterer) and my reaction was the same. How can they sell and build this fast?
Where am I going with this?
I guess the moral is that the world is growing faster than we can imagine. I recall a theory in the book “Future Shock”: the world now is moving at a geometric pace, rather than arithmetic. Instead of a gentle 1-2-3-4 progression, we now are 1-2-4-8. It may start the same, but it takes a lot less time to get to, say, 64 than it ever did.
For our newspaper, it showed me that we need to move around more; the impressions of 2000 absolutely aren’t the realities of 2003.
For those of us licensed in either (or both) the real estate or construction trades, it tells me that a lot is happening that may be quicker than we can process, and that we need to take advantage of every resource available. It’s no longer good enough to say “That county has better schools” without taking a look to see if that really is so - those new schools may already be overcrowded, and they may be going down the same road as the neighboring, poor-school county.
And, for those who have some influence on government, it indicates that they better work harder if they want to be effective. Jacksonville, where I live, still has 19 City Council seats and many of those districts have doubled in people in the last 20 years. All politics are local, but “local” has been redefined.
It used to be a big world out there. Now, it looks even bigger, but with a lot more going on.
- Fred Seely is the editor of Realty/Builder Connection and editorial director of Bailey Publishing & Communications In. He can be reached at [email protected].