explain Wilton Manors area (Fort Lauderdale, Oakland Park: transplants, for sale, hair salon)

[katskill]

I observed Wilton Manors housing values outpacing the neighboring areas.
Given that their schools are quite bad as per ratings, I’m trying to understand what makes it so desirable.
What kind of people are moving there? Professionals? Young families? Retirees?

[Jimrob1]

Originally Posted by katskill

I observed Wilton Manors housing values outpacing the neighboring areas.
Given that their schools are quite bad as per ratings, I’m trying to understand what makes it so desirable.
What kind of people are moving there? Professionals? Young families? Retirees?

Quite a few gay people live in that community. That could mean a higher income resident, and housing cost.

[Mr. Lee]

Mostly gays who are very often people who do well in their livelihoods.

LGBT Life in Wilton Manors

Second Gayest City in America

[LifeIsGood01]

Originally Posted by katskill

I observed Wilton Manors housing values outpacing the neighboring areas.
Given that their schools are quite bad as per ratings, I’m trying to understand what makes it so desirable.
What kind of people are moving there? Professionals? Young families? Retirees?

A lot of gay men live there and mostly over 40 gay men, probably even over 50, they don't have kids so they don't care about the schools as much and as long as it stays the same it should not matter if they continue to sell to other gay people. Taxes are very high there too. It's surrounded by a few not so great area but people want to say they live there I guess. Oakland Park borders it and is cheaper. Middle River terrace in Fort Lauderdale borders it and is much nicer too. Also most of these people are transplants from other parts of the country and not from there originally.

[HotandHumid]

Wilton Manors used to be a run down area with cheap housing. Mostly younger Gays started to move into the area for the cheap rents years ago and either opened up or worked in clothing stores, hair salons and vintage stores on Wilton Drive.


Once the area became considered, "safe', wealthy Gay retirees have moved into the area and the rents and prices of houses and condos have gone up dramatically. As a result, you'll always see For Sale signs out in front of many of the older homes that haven't been renovated, and even those that have been recently renovated are for sale as many people have gotten into the business of buying older homes (not cheap anymore), renovating them and then putting them back on the market to make a tidy profit. Wealthy people from up north are also buying properties as vacation properties that they rent out at high prices when they aren't using them, although Wilton Manors has been trying to put a stop to this.


After I got my real estate license years ago , I found that many of my fellow agents in the office didn't even show properties, they just got a license so that they could check the real estate listings daily in order to find new properties on the market that they could buy and then flip.


Of course the above combined factors have caused Wilton Manors to become very unaffordable for a lot of working Gays considering that the minimum wage in Florida is below $9. per hour, even though Governor Scott likes to brag that most people in the State of Florida make an average of $15 an hour, which I think is another one of his fantasies he's trying to shove down the throat of Florida voters in order to be elected as a senator from Florida.


Maybe they're making that average wage in some other parts of the state but the Fort Lauderdale area is now rated as the third most expensive area to live in the U.S. per capita because of what the average worker makes in comparison to what they have to pay for housing here.


Several businesses have either relocated off of Wilton Drive or closed down because of rising rents. The gym that serviced the area has been closed for several years and none has opened to replace it. A popular Gay owned pizza parlor called, Humpy's, closed down due to rent increases. Catalog X, a Gay themed men's clothing store closed their store that was next to Humpy's. A large hair salon for men closed down near the Manor night club and there's several vacant store fronts directly on Wilton Drive
along with a property that used to be a beer garden restaurant that's been empty for several years now. Landlords who own lots of properties that are rented out just use these empty spaces as tax write offs until they can find someone who can afford to pay their high rents.


The Pride Center, the Gay community center in Wilton Manors, wants to build some affordable housing for seniors 55 and over but most of that housing will be for those with disabilities. Some of the neighbors are fighting it as they think their property values will go down if it's built.


It's probably not the best location to build housing on anyway as a river runs next to the back part of the property and that river goes up during high tides as all the waterways in the area are connected to the ocean and the ground can get pretty soggy next to the river.


A lot of people don't read the reports about rising seas or things get left out of the reports such as the fact that since the soil here is so sandy and that there's no bedrock here, that even if you build a seawall to hold back rising waters, eventually, once the water level next to the seawall is higher than the land behind the seawall, water seeps through the sand under the seawall and up onto the properties the seawall was built on to keep the water out of.


Wilton Manors calls itself the Island City because it's surrounded by rivers, which of course go up and down with the tides because the rivers are connected to the ocean. There are no plans in place to put in a series of locks at the mouth of the rivers to control the water levels of the rivers and canals that travel inland because there are multi-million dollar homes built on the mouths of the rivers at the Intracoastal and no local community without federal government funding would be able to buy up those homes and build fortifications to keep high tides from flowing up the rivers into the canals as they currently do now.


Parts of the low lying neighborhood that's in Wilton Manors behind where the K-Mart used to be on Oakland Park Boulevard flooded during Hurricane Irma because there was a high tide, and coupled with the heavy rains from the hurricane, the river next to that neighborhood went up over the seawall. A man I know showed me the water line from the muddy water that was in his house during the storm. That muddy water line was a foot up the wall and his furniture, area rugs, etc., all were wet.


Even though the county had opened the gates to the canals out west before Hurricane Irma hit, hoping the rising river and canal levels would drain into the Everglades, the river came up too fast in that part of Wilton Manors to do any good.

[StarryKnight1]

A very insightful post by HotandHumid, thank you

[FloridaDude]

Ive lived on the water here for decades. Never had any issues. Not even in the last hurricane, which was extreme, water wise, for our area.