National Public Radio aired a remarkable series this week on the looming development of 800,000 acres of land in Florida’s panhandle by the state’s largest private landowner, the St. Joe Company. The Florida real estate market has been soft lately, but St. Joe’s marketing efforts focus on aging boomers nationally looking for second homes and retirement real estate. St. Joe was started by a DuPont in the 1920s as a timber company, and has been buying land ever since. It got into real estate about a decade ago, and has been developing planned communities using innovative architecture and principles of new urbanism:

An example of what St. Joe has in mind for the panhandle can be found here in Tallahassee. SouthWood is a planned community on 3,300 acres with a town center, schools, a YMCA and a golf course. After seven years, it’s about halfway built out. Workers are now putting up town homes near the town center.

The company’s timeline for development of the panhandle stretches out for the next 50 years, NPR reports.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 30th, 2007 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Real Estate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.