Making the right move
A couple leave behind cold winters, puzzled friends and high-profile jobs after lengthy research leads them to a home on Davis Islands.
By RICHARD HORGAN, Special to the Times
© St. Petersburg Times
published November 23, 2002
When high-powered Washington, D.C., executives Leigh Shein and Betsy D'Jamoos came to Tampa for the first time, in December 2000, their four-day visit was bookended by an outdoor wedding in Ybor City's Centennial Park and a double rainbow high above the city.
Today, the couple live in a Davis Islands home built in 1949 and are more confident than ever that their painstaking research of U.S. cities was instrumental in helping them successfully orchestrate a fundamental change in their way of life.
[Times photo: Fraser Hale ]
Betsy D’Jamoos, sitting, and Leigh Shein lounge by the pool of their Davis Islands home. The couple left Washington, D.C., and moved to Tampa looking to put down roots after researching the 350 largest U.S. cities.
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"For years, Betsy and I moved based on our careers, living in Washington, London, Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago," said Leigh, 41. "We finally decided we were long overdue in putting down roots in a city that we wanted to be in, by our own choice. "We started with a list of the 350 largest U.S. cities and looked at everything, including weather, education, cultural life, cost of living, job outlook, crime, health care, transportation, recreation and livability. In the end, we were able to narrow it down to two finalists, Tampa and Austin, Texas."
The couple used a number of sources to compile information, including the venerable Places Rated Almanac and a demographic system developed by Claritas Inc., PRIZM, which filters its findings by ZIP code. The character of each city was also important.
Finally, they flew on consecutive weekends to Tampa and Austin to make their decision, racking up hundreds of rental-car miles as they crisscrossed each city to talk with residents.
Although Austin seemed to hold more appeal at first glance, it gradually lost its standing as Leigh and Betsy took note of the desolate desert landscape beyond the city limits, the minimal access to waterfront recreation areas and what they viewed as early signs of poor urban growth management: traffic, rising housing prices, few in-town housing options.
"The only preconceived notion we had about the Tampa Bay area was that it was in Florida, which to us was the east coast cities and towns," said Betsy, 42. "We had never really been to the west coast other than a few trips to Naples to visit relatives.
"During our initial visit, we sought out people who had moved from big cities and had been in Tampa for a while," she said. They chatted up people in stores, restaurants, nightclubs, at the beach. "Just about everyone we asked had a similar response. They loved it here, the weather was great and whatever they missed from Philadelphia, New York or Atlanta they got when they returned there to visit friends and family."
In March 2001, Leigh and Betsy packed up their belongings and drove to Tampa to live in an apartment in Hyde Park; they had rented it on the Internet a few weeks after returning from their initial visit.
They left behind cold winter weather, puzzled friends and high-profile Washington jobs. Leigh was chief of staff for the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which manages human resources for the federal government's 1.8-million employees and assets of more than $500-billion in the largest employer-sponsored retirement, health and life insurance programs.
Betsy was deputy assistant secretary for policy initiatives in the Office of Management and Budget of the Department of Health and Human Services. As second in command, she oversaw the largest domestic federal budget, $395-billion, as well as management activities for the department's 60,000 employees.
"While Washington has become a great place in terms of culture, entertainment and lifestyle, it is, unfortunately, a one-industry town around which everything revolves," Betsy said. "It can be exhausting, often without being satisfying.
"We decided 81/2 years was more than enough. We hit the 40-year-old mark and felt it was time to engineer a midlife crisis together and make a drastic change to our lives. We're also no strangers to looking at a change in our environment as a positive force."
Once in Tampa, the couple canvassed the city's neighborhoods to determine where they wanted to buy a home. They narrowed the candidates to Hyde Park and Davis Islands, mainly because both areas provided the option of walking to neighborhood grocery stores and other conveniences. Last December, Leigh and Betsy settled on a 2,300-square-foot home on Davis Islands with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a home office and a pool; they paid $300,000, county records show.
Betsy now works as chief operating officer for J.E.D. of Southwest Florida, a company based in Naples that is developing more than 3-million square feet of commercial real estate. Leigh is working as a consultant and dabbling in acting.
As tried and true urbanites, both would have chosen to live in downtown Tampa or the Channel District if either area had offered a sufficiently developed neighborhood: grocery stores, other retail, a residential community of decent size. They are committed to helping rejuvenate the city center, with Leigh volunteering for the Downtown Corps as vice president for community affairs, in addition to his duties as vice president of marketing for the Davis Islands Chamber of Commerce.
"There is a real diversity of sights and sounds here in Tampa," Leigh said. "We love the train and the river running through downtown, the cruise ships and the tankers in the port, and the skyline and the bay.
"The city has the largest performing arts center south of Washington, D.C., not to mention a diverse culture, from cigarmakers and Ybor nightclubs to major universities and sunsets at the beach. Ultimately we chose Tampa as our home because of its people, character, opportunity and potential."
According to "Why People Move," a Census Bureau report released in the spring, less than 10 percent of the people who relocate beyond county or state lines each year have the luxury of doing so to support a personal lifestyle decision. A vast majority are driven by reasons relating to work, families or cost of housing.
For Leigh and Betsy, news of the serial sniper shooting at the Home Depot in northern Virginia they once frequented was disturbing, as were the events of Sept. 11, 2001; their last home was seven blocks from the Pentagon.
But over the course of 81/2 years in Washington, they said, they became accustomed to living with the possibility of disaster where they worked and lived, enduring bomb scares after Oklahoma City, riots and anthrax-related evacuations.
"I don't think fear ever entered into the equation as we closed one chapter and opened another," Betsy said. "There was a lot of excitement and passion to find a place where we believed we could put down roots, something we had really never done before.
"Of course, everyone thought we were crazy to move to a place we had only been to once for four days, where we knew no one and had very few references to contact, especially at our age," she said. "We were entering into a phase without stability and security. A lot of folks could not understand that."
Checking places out
Here are some of the Web sites Leigh Shein and Betsy D'Jamoos used to research their move to Tampa, as well as some other helpful online sources.
The Claritas PRIZM system, "You Are Where You Live," is at cluster2.claritas.com/YAWYL/Default.wjsp?System=WL This system describes U.S. neighborhoods in terms of 62 lifestyle types.
Partners for Livable Communities is at www.livable.com This nonprofit organization is committed to improving community well-being through economic development, social equity, amenity assets and quality of life. The site has information about livable communities and profiles of some of the 33 cities the group has selected as "America's Most Livable Communities."
Coldwell Banker maintains a Home Price Comparison Index at www.coldwellbanker.com Click on "buyer" on the home page, then on "resource center" at the lower right of the tool bar at the bottom of the screen. Then choose "Home Price Comparison Index" from the list on the left side of the screen. Type in your home's market value, then choose up to three other cities and see how much your home might cost in 300 cities.
The National Climatic Data Center is at LWF.NCDC.NOAA.gov/oa/ncdc.html It calls itself "the world's largest archive of weather data."
Selected information from the Statistical Abstract of the United States is available at www.census.gov/statab/www/ Here you will find the "State and Metropolitan Area Data Book," "USA Counties," with more than 5,000 data items for each county, and "County and City Data Book," with information about counties and cities with populations of more than 25,000.
The National Weather Service is at www.nws.noaa.gov
At the Southeast Regional Climate Center site, www.dnr.state.sc.us/climate/sercc click on "products" to find historical climatic summaries and averages, as well as temperature and precipitation records.
www.movingvan.com/tools/compare provides statistical information about cities and allows comparisons of a variety of indicators: crime, education, salary, temperature, house prices, taxes, rents, etc.
At www.findyourspot.com take the quiz; the site suggests cities in which you might like to live.
www.monstermoving.com/Find_A_Place/compare2cities provides comparisons between cities you select on a variety of indicators, including taxes, home prices, quality of life issues, electricity costs, high school graduation rates and population density. Offers city profiles, several calculators.
www.bestplaces.net based on Bert Sperling's Best Places books and research, provides cost of living and salary calculators, city profiles, school statistics, crime and climate profiles. The "Find Your Best Places" tool lets you describe your ideal city, then offers matches.
-- Places Rated Almanac, by David Savageau with Ralph D'Agostino, is published by IDG Books Worldwide (www.idgbooks.com).
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