09/10/2007: Developers start to wake up sleepy Calhoun County

Originally posted in The Houston Chronicle

By MARK BABINECK
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

Bill Ball has a vision for his bayfront pasture. He sees new homes, wide canals teeming with pleasure boats and fresh economic development for a slice of coastal Texas.

Across the road, Dan Cervenka also has a vision. He likes it now, a mostly pristine coastline specked by a few small homes and old vacation cabins like his. He fears two large developments adjoining his pie-shaped slice of Calhoun County will ruin it all.

"I sincerely feel that anyone who had the opportunity to own property situated where ours is and faced with the issues we have been faced with would fight just as hard as we have to keep it from being ruined," said Cervenka, who worries drainage changes could worsen flooding problems for him and his longtime neighbors, something developers deny.

This pastoral corner of peninsular Calhoun County isn't the only part abuzz with bulldozers. At least seven projects are planned or under construction along the county's bayfronts as the hunger for coastal land shifts to one-time backwaters.

"If you look at what is truly developable in terms of wetlands and access, it narrows down quite a bit," said Ball, an Austin developer who plans to live at his Falcon Point Ranch community some day. "The Seadrift-Port O'Connor area has some opportunity."

According to the National Ocean Service, Texas has 367 miles of coast but nearly 3,000 more miles of tidal shoreline that includes bays and inlets. But take out all the publicly protected lands (South Padre Island National Seashore, Sea Rim State Park), privately protected lands (King Ranch, San Jose Island), coastal marshes, inaccessible areas, industrial zones and previously developed or parceled stretches, and there's not as much available as maps suggest.

The Texas coast has inspired development since the French established the short-lived Fort St. Louis a few miles inland in 1685. Calhoun County itself was the home of the star-crossed port at Indianola, destroyed by hurricanes in 1875 and 1886.

The fabric here in Calhoun, with slightly more than 20,000 residents and the longest shoreline of any Texas county, hasn't changed much since then. Outside of the industrial clusters in the northeast and northwest, it's still all about farming, ranching and the sea.

"What has been a pretty sleepy little place for a long time is just getting unsleepy in a big hurry," said Bill Harvey, who spent a career with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department working on coastal matters before becoming the county's Texas Marine Advisory Service marine agent. Now he's a photographer in Port Lavaca.

"The fact is that there are still very large tracts of land here which are developable and could be done in a manner that's economically feasible," Harvey said.There's still plenty of activity in established communities. Galveston Island, Rockport-Fulton, Mustang Island and South Padre Island are all bustling with projects big and small, including a 729-acre tract at South Padre that's cleared a bankruptcy and is open for development, according to George W. Jones, first vice president at CB Richard Ellis in Houston.

As demand in first-tier areas causes prices to soar, it's created value in off-the-beaten-path markets like Bolivar Peninsula and Matagorda and Calhoun counties.

"We are the third coast, the undiscovered coast, the working coast," said Jones, whose firm was involved in the sale last month of nearly 2,800 acres on Bolivar Peninsula near High Island. "It seems like it has been discovered."

Property taxes rising

Discovery has a price for folks who've spent generations in places like Seadrift, a town of about 1,400 on San Antonio Bay that's accustomed to making a living aboard boats harvesting shrimp, oysters and crabs.

More valuable land means higher property taxes, something that wasn't a problem back when developers ignored this wild stretch of coast.

"Seadrift is just a small fishing community, always has been," said Sue Blevins, whose home has more than doubled in value on the tax rolls since 2000. "We're going through the process of getting pushed out in the name of progress. I know you can't stop progress, but there are better ways to handle it."

Blevins, a shrimper's wife, has seen this before. She watched her native Rockport transform from a similar fishing village to an artsy tourist haven. Fancy yachts slowly replaced shrimp trawlers, who moved to more blue-collar ports like Aransas Pass and Seadrift.

"Now you get over the causeway and it's just solid" development, Blevins said wistfully.

Rockport Mayor Todd Pearson concedes the town, where less than half of the 4,500 homes are occupied full-time, is no longer a working-class harbor. But he points to local polling that shows a majority of residents are either neutral or positive about the changes.

Cities like Rockport have two choices, he said: Let growth run unabated or try to control it by pursuing redevelopment of the harbor, encouraging denser construction on previously cleared sites and enacting a strict ordinance to preserve the veritable live oak forest that runs through town.

Coast-bound boomers

Stopping development is a pipe dream, he said.

"Here's what we'd have to do. First we'll run every real estate agent out of town and, second, we'll make it illegal to sell property," Pearson said. "I'm always amazed at the restrictions people want to put on property they don't own."

In Seadrift, Ball is fighting Cervenka and other neighbors over a state sewage treatment permit and environmentalists who fear his marina-construction application could lead to infringement on the nearby whooping crane habitat. He said he's trying his best not to spoil the unspoiled nature of San Antonio Bay.

"Don't you want a sensitive, intelligent developer?" he said. "I do one project at a time. This is just the best one I've ever gotten to do. We can do it right. We can make it to where I think people are going to come a long way to see."

Lot prices vary from $149,000 to waterfronts at $350,000. Ball said about half the interest has come from Texans - it's within three hours of Houston, Corpus Christi, San Antonio and Austin - and he's fielded interest from all over the country.

Ball and others agree that as much as anything, demographics are driving waterfront development. The leading edge of the Baby Boomer generation is hitting retirement age, and homebuilders believe they'll flock to the coast.

"In 10 years folks won't recognize it here," said Harvey, the former marine agent. "Maybe five years. It's coming. I think you can come here and there's still a sense you have a little part of the old Texas Gulf Coast. It hasn't lost that flavor yet.

"Unfortunately people who have been here historically for generations have fished and oystered, and that life is disappearing rapidly. It's just Calhoun County's turn."

About Falcon Point Ranch
Bay Club at Falcon Point Ranch is the finest master-planned coastal real estate community in Texas, featuring exclusive waterfront property and waterview homesites, a luxury lodge and miles of protected shoreline, all surrounded by a 6,000-acre ranch and wildlife preserve.

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