Snowbirds soldier on where Hurricane Ian laid waste

"A lot of areas down here still don't have internet and electricity," he explains.

Rick is 64, is a Narragansett guy who winters in his mobile home in Englewood, Florida, north of Fort Myers.

Rick was in Rhode Island during the storm, but drove down five days later and has been there since. Englewood was near enough to ground zero to get some of the worst winds – gusts were 170 mph, he says.

"The devastation is unbelievable."

I decide to call Rick after seeing him quoted in the Wall Street Journal about what's happened to property values in the storm zone. He has friends interested in buying, feeling prices will come down as some decide to move.

But Rick, a snowbird with his wife for 18 years, is sticking.

He lives in an over-55 mobile home community called Holiday Estates. Half of its 450 homes were badly damaged. Some of them, he says, look like they were hit by bombs. Many are simply gone. His own double-wide survived with moderate damage but there's still debris throughout the area, with metal junk and insulation snagged in trees.

"My neighbor to the left was a total loss," Rick says. "No roof on the place. The walls are falling down."

But he adds that an army of heroic repair folks have been working long hours to get the grid back up. Stores have reopened.

Still, it will be a long time before things are normal, and plenty of folks Rick knows have decided to remain up north for the season.

Not Rick, despite the upheaval.

He's spent winters here since 2005, when he bought his two-bedroom trailer and the land under it for $100,000. It's on a small canal so he can fish off his dock or motor to Lemon Bay north of Boca Grande and even the Gulf. Because his place is on the water, it has perhaps tripled in value in the past 18 years, though the market is in flux now.

Rick's dad, Dick Lema, was a pioneer of Rhode Island's charter fishing industry – designing his own line of boats and often taking baseball great Ted Williams out off Point Judith. In the late 1980s, Rick himself worked as a charter fishing captain out of Snug Harbor. Later, he spent more than 15 years as a Providence firefighter.

His main residence is still in Rhode Island at the southern end of the Narrow River. During the summers, with his commercial rod and reel license, Rick does a lot of fishing up here, helping pay the bills by selling what he catches.

As for that Wall Street Journal article, Rick says he's begun to see a few for-sale signs go up in Holiday Estates as people decide to leave for good because of the storm.

But I learn the real estate situation is more nuanced when I call Kristen Conti, who grew up in South County and now, with her husband, runs Peacock Premier Properties in Englewood.

Property values are an uncertainty

Kristen tells me that in the long run, values could come down, but paradoxically, they are up now in her area because of a new storm-driven development.

Folks from nearby places like Fort Myers Beach and Sanibel Island, hit even harder, are becoming buyers in towns like Englewood, which are bad but still functioning. She calls it a "black swan event" – a real estate impact few saw coming.

In this case, it's folks with wrecked homes in the worst-hit areas who've decided to stay, but need another place and are buying because there are almost no rentals.

One insight into that: Kristen and her husband have a time-share on Sanibel, but that complex is so badly damaged they were just told it won't be usable until 2024.

I ask if, as a result, prices are dropping in areas like Sanibel and Fort Myers Beach, but Kristen tells me the markets are mostly frozen there. When homes are damaged to a point of being a safety hazard, you can't get insurance or a mortgage, so most people won't be able to sell until they are repaired or demolished.

Kristen found her way to Florida after her dad, Jerry Jordan, who used to fish with Rick Lema's father, bought in Englewood in 2004, and she soon followed, building a new life. She tells me it's a common story down there.

"We'll find our way back," Kristen says. "We're of strong ilk here. A lot of New Englanders with true grit."

Rick Lema is clearly one of them.

He's staying, as are many folks he knows, because they haven't lost faith in their seasonal dream, and people are resilient.

mpatinki@providencejournal.com

Mark Patinkin

Columnist

The Providence Journal

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