Boom brings promise of big bucks, bitterness to Briny Breezes

A Boca Raton, Fla., real-estate developer is offering to make millionaires of many residents of an oceanfront town of mobile homes. Some think what they already have is priceless.

Ocean Land Investments has offered $500 million for the town of Briny Breezes, a 42-acre spit sandwiched between Palm Beach and Boca Raton that has 488 homes overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. That's nearly 12 times the town's appraised value of $42.3 million.

The developer wants to build condominiums, parks and a resort hotel. The condos, with a view Bill Tolford already has from his bamboo-frame couch on Hibiscus Drive, will be priced as high as $8 million.

Tolford's parents paid $4,600 in the 1950s for two lots with clear ocean views. He said he's been offered about $1.46 million, and he's not sure whether he'll accept. Too many questions remain, he says, including tax implications, the final price and the timing.

"Where are you going to get what we have here?" says Tolford, 81, a retired optometrist from Portland, Maine. "You cannot duplicate it."

The deal has to be approved by up to 80 percent of the homeowners in Briny Breezes, a cooperative where some prebuilt homes were rolled onto foundations and others still rest on wheels.

A vote may be held by the end of March, before many of the part-time residents head back north for spring and summer.

Tom Goudreau, 62, a part-year resident, has one of the $1 million offers for a home he bought two years ago for about $50,000. "We like it here, and you can't replace it," he says. "So you end up with $700,000 after taxes, and you buy a condo. The taxes will be higher, and you don't have the community you have here."

Florida's population grew by 24 percent from 1990 to 2000, almost twice the rate of the overall U.S. That population boom has sent home prices surging: The median sale price of a residence in the West Palm Beach-Boca Raton metropolitan area more than tripled to $390,100 from 1995 to 2005, according to the Florida Association of Realtors.

More people and pricier homes have made Briny Breezes a bit of a museum piece, tucked amid the splendor and wealth that sprawl almost uninterrupted for 70 miles from Miami to West Palm Beach.

The town began as a rent-as-you-go trailer park in the 1930s and was turned into a cooperative by residents two decades later. It's governed by a board of directors made up of residents and divided into four districts. The approval of each district is required for the sale to the developer, Ocean Land.

Ocean Land was founded in 1995 by Jean Francois Roy, who started rehabilitating apartment complexes in his native Montreal. Working with developers such as Miami-based Related Group of Florida, Roy has torn down hotels and developed oceanfront condos across South Florida.

Tearing down Briny Breezes would be a special loss, say many residents of the town, which occupies a five-block stretch of Florida's Highway A1A.

Many are retired teachers from the Midwest and Northeast who gather with their Manhattans and wine for late-afternoon "happy hour" on RuthMary Avenue or Hibiscus Drive.

There's a standing afternoon poker game, and a library with books, videos, magazines and the five most recent copies of The Wall Street Journal laid out for investors. It has women's Swimnastics at 10 a.m. on Tuesdays in the town pool and classes on how to arrange dried flowers and paint daisies. And, yes, there's shuffleboard.

Briny residents pay $5 a month to belong to the Chiselers Club. They work table sanders, lathes and jigsaws to make shelves and wooden birds that they plan to sell, using the proceeds to buy more equipment.

"This is your family," says Nancy Boczon, 71, who lives in Clinton, N.J., the rest of the year. "The first thing I did when I heard the news was I ran to my friends down the street and said, 'OK, where are we going?' "

That community feeling has been challenged by the offer, made public late last year, says Goudreau, a Lewiston, Maine, car dealer. He and his wife, Hilja, spend January through March in Briny.

"It's a big family here, except for this year," he says. "They've split over people who want to sell and people who don't want to."

Goudreau says he's going to vote no, even with a $1 million offer in hand. "If the land is worth this much now, it'll be worth that much more in 10 years," he says. "But if the vote is to sell, we'll take it and go. There's nothing else you can do."