David Kanter, a corporate lawyer, and his wife, Flora, have been vacationing in Rehoboth Beach for years. Recently, they decided to take the plunge and become homeowners nearby, buying a villa-style single-family house being built at one of the sprawling new residential developments in the once-rural area just inland from Delaware's beach resorts.
The Potomac couple, who are in their early sixties, were looking for a second home that would be attractive enough to lure back their brood of three adult children for holidays. They chose a luxury, golf-oriented waterfront project called the Peninsula on the Indian River Bay, in Millsboro, about 12 miles from Rehoboth Beach. The complex, being built by McLean-based Odyssey Development, is so new that the model homes there were completed over Memorial Day weekend. When the Kanters visited and made their purchase, the site was just farmland.
"It was a leap of faith," Kanter said, adding that his confidence was buoyed because a long-time friend, a bankruptcy lawyer from McLean, was buying a second home there as well, right next door.
Thousands of aging baby boomers are making similar decisions to move to new developments cropping up as fast as corn stalks in coastal eastern Sussex County, Delaware, part of an explosion in the second-home market nationwide. More than a third of all houses sold in the United States now are second properties for their buyers, bought for investment or as vacation dwellings, according to a recent study by the National Association of Realtors. About 85 percent of buyers want homes within 200 miles of their primary homes, which makes mountain and beach locations close to major urban areas primary targets for buyers.
Some people, however, wonder whether the new developments rising near the shoreline are putting the Delaware coast's lazy summertime charm at risk.
The scope of the new projects dwarfs the towns of Rehoboth Beach, Millsboro and Lewes, communities dominated by old-fashioned bungalows and Victorian cottages. The Peninsula on the Indian River Bay will include 1,404 homes, housing more residents than the normal year-round population in nearby Rehoboth Beach. The Plantation Lakes development in Millsboro, which includes 2,500 condominiums, townhouses and single-family homes, will more than triple Millsboro's population over the next decade. When it is completed, the Villages of Five Points outside Lewes will house more people than Lewes, about six miles north of Rehoboth Beach.
"It's mind-boggling to a lot of us," said longtime resident Jody Hudson, a real estate agent who grew up in Lewes. "It's development, after development, after development. It's just overwhelming."
Numerous builders are considering other projects in coastal Sussex County as well, mostly small complexes on major roads. "There's more development there than there has ever been," said Ken Wenhold, Maryland and Virginia director for Metrostudy, a housing research firm based in Houston. "It's been discovered. People are finding out that it is the closest beach -- and it was the most pristine."
The area's appearance is already changing, and the pace of life along with it. Some local residents complain that many of the more visible suburban-style townhouses and condos are little more than unsightly clusters of "beige boxes," with little architectural charm, and that traffic is worsening.
"Most of them are what we call 'barracks on the highway,' because they look like Army barracks -- two to three stories high," said Marnie Laird, 68, a part-time Rehoboth Beach resident whose family has been living or vacationing in the area for three generations. "I think it's destroying Rehoboth. Rehoboth has always been a family place. Now it's hard for families to get here for the weekend because the traffic is so terrible."
Wenhold said that developers are building what most customers want, "a place to crash," he said. "It's all that's being offered because it is the least expensive way to build it. It keeps costs down."
Community activist Mable Granke, a board member of the Rehoboth Beach-based Citizens Action Foundation, said developers are "laughing all the way to the bank" while local officials do little to stop ugly and environmentally destructive developments. Granke, who served on the Montgomery County Planning Board from 1975 to 1986, said that local real estate executives fend off zoning restrictions by charging that any limitations would be unconstitutional violations of owners' property rights. Ten local real estate agencies, for example, co-sponsored a flyer calling a new master plan for Rehoboth Beach a "property rights" issue.
