Margate residents question aggressive building and over-development OK’ed by Margate’s Planning and Zoning Board.
Watch video clips from recent Margate Homeowners Assn meeting of May 28, 2022.
The downside of over-development. Towering home heights. Skinny frontage. Loss of parking.
There are 3 builders on Margate’s Planning Board that have personal interest in more construction?
Rules are changing daily. Margate Planning Board is throwing caution to the wind.
Margate Resident
Mayor Becker appoints the Margate Planning & Zoning Board.
Only 700 full-time residents voted in the last Margate election.
We need to have more concern about aesthetics.
Margate public comment
Pools squeezed in everywhere. Loss of curb parking. What about drainage?
Driving pilings caused vibration that could damage adjacent homes.
Only way to change this, is at the voting booth.
MHA’s Jay Weintraub
Margate prohibits meeting participation from those who want to comment remotely. Meetings are scheduled at inconvenient times.
What always separated Margate from Ocean City was common sense leadership. Ross, Rimm, Markowski.
Too many units no parking. As a 40 yr resident I enjoy the summer and all that visit. I get it. But is over-developing the only way?
Honest immediate property assessment needs to happen, or at least give homeowners a parking spot in front.
Make the spots red if your an owner.
The new construction in Margate is out of scale with the town itself. I spent every summer of my childhood there, in a 3 bedroom house that suited 6 kids just fine, mostly because we were always outside. No one cares about back-in-the-day anymore, I get it, but modern Margate is depressing and ostentatious. The mansions had their place and the little brick capes had theirs, now it’s all just one showy behemoth on top of another.
You are so right and it’s time to allow renovation to these homes, not make them teardowns.
What is preventing renovation of the old homes? Nothing. Their owners are willing to sell them for huge sums, and developers are then granted per permits for new constructions. And if the larger, more expensive homes aren’t approved, then be careful what you wish for as a result in terms of steep tax increases.
Look at the parkway. Such a disgrace. Old homes are torn down.
Again, there is nothing PREVENTING renovation of existing homes except the choice of their current owners to sell, and ability for contractors/developers to get approval for what they want – including huge properties.
You are spot on with your comment. Couldn’t agree with you more.
As a year round resident, I find the construction of new homes astounding. A few of the new homes actually had signs saying (unapologetically), the price of the new construction was $2.8 million, where a modest home had been for decades. Is this IT now?
The influx of 2nd homeowners here, swamps the local community and our services. The trash left all over the town this weekend was shocking! Bottles (glass and plastic) left half empty on curbs, lawns, benches, green spaces and the beach without any consideration for the local residents. Dog owners not picking up dog waste. All trash bins on the beach overflowing in the early afternoon. Parking was indiscriminate without any oversight to violations (blocking residential driveways, in handicap zones w/o handicap placards, etc.)
Do we really want Margate to be a ghost town from September to May for the sake of higher taxes and pop-up, 4-story glitzy new construction homes put up in a matter of months? Where is the balance of a community for our year round residents, our retired, our working family, those on a limited income, our elderly, the affordable housing community? Please consider this when permitting the demolishment of a decades old beach cottage for yet another a new $2.8+mn vacation home.
When you claim that the influx of 2nd home owners swamp the services, who do you think pays for 75% of your services and only uses them 6 months out of the year? If it wasn’t for the 2nd home owners the “locals” would either pay three times in tax money or go without a lot of the services they enjoy, and if you live in a decades old cottage you pay about 5K a year in taxes and the monstrosities pay close to 10 times that amount. They are the same folks making it affordable for seniors, retired, working families to live in a beach resort town year round.
This was the “first” weekend of the summer, in summers past I see public works folks empty the beach trash cans during the course of the day so maybe they are just getting up to speed.
As far as people not picking up after their dogs , well they are exactly what they are leaving behind, a big pile of dog doo.
Sadly, the economics are not on their side. When home prices increase, taxes will follow. Medium income homeowners will be pushed out. That’s what gentrification is.
P.S. If you own a pet, clean it up. There are kids that play around the beach and parks. Be responsible.
The construction of new/larger properties with significantly higher taxes doesn’t push existing homeowners out – if anything, it helps keeps taxes reasonable on their existing properties by putting more tax revenue in the city coffers.