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Battle at America's far edge
Hatteras on front lines of East Coast's development clashes
By Hal Herring
Page 2 of 7
Hatteras Island is one of the few places on earth where both the superheated Gulf Stream, and the Labrador Current, a frigid soup of creatures swept from the northern seas, collide, creating world famous surf fishing, and creating that mariner's nightmare, the 12-mile long maelstrom called Diamond Shoals. The Banks are swept by hurricanes and storm tides, assailed by winds that determine the course of activity of every single day of commercial fishermen's lives. Those same winds and currents can also be fantastically benevolent, producing gin clear seas, warm calm days in February, breezy summers, a surf and sound alive with gamefish, oysters, crabs -- the vast wealth of the saltwater which has attracted humans to this far edge since long before white men ever set eyes upon it.
Through the years, fortune seekers have come here and opened up whaling stations, porpoise fisheries, terrapin dredges, seaweed harvesting operations. Most of them have gone away empty-handed. Until the recent real estate boom, very few people have ever gotten rich on the Outer Banks.
Nag's Head has already been pretty much built to capacity, and land prices are astronomical, even in comparison to some selected lots on Hatteras Island, which are now on the market for as much as $875,000 for less than a half-acre. Those kinds of prices preclude the traditional moderate-sized family beachhouses that were built during the past decades, and which housed hardcore sportfishermen and seekers of unspoiled beaches. (Some of which are preserved still by the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, a vast 70-mile long entity whose existence has enraged free-market devotees and many local residents since it was established in 1953; public access to those miles of undeveloped beaches, and the fact that the amount of land for sale is limited by the National Seashore, is a major factor in producing such high land prices.)
These days, the Banks have become a playing field for non-resident investors who expect a solid return on their money. How? Build what angry residents call "mini-hotels" or "rental machines." These houses are still termed "single family dwellings" under the law, but it is highly unlikely that a single family will ever inhabit them, since they have as many as 16 bedrooms, 14 bathrooms, and in some instances, elevators and movie theaters, and rent for as high as $9,000 per week. Clearly, the clientele for these huge houses, not to mention the community infrastructure they expect, differs from the beachbuggy-driving bluefish and channel bass fishermen that once dominated local tourism.
Residents like Ricki Shepherd say the out-of-control development is about to kill the goose that laid the golden egg for the Outer Banks. "What we have offered to visitors is a healthy fishery, and a unique and historic place, and both of those things are being destroyed," says Shepherd. "When the developers are finished with us, we'll be just like the Jersey shore, and then why will anybody want to come here? They can just stay up there in New Jersey and have the same damn thing."
Dare County has some of the least restrictive zoning regulations on the American East Coast. Richard Midgett, whose family came to the Banks as early as 1722, says that's because residents wanted it that way. "The opposition to zoning has always come from our fishermen," Midgett said, "who didn't want people telling them they couldn't have nets and boats or crab pots out in their yards."
Midgett and his family have created a successful real estate development business on the Outer Banks, and he lives across the Slash from the Dixon/Hoyle project. He points out that no matter what reservations he may have about the Slash project, the developers have the right to build whatever they decide will be most profitable. "The people have failed to agree on any kind of planning, year after year, so this was bound to happen," he said. "Skip Dixon saw prices in Nag's Head and Kill Devil Hills going through the roof, and we were still pretty much undiscovered down here, so he headed south."
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