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Driving growth

Toll collections may not be as high as some expected, but there's no denying that the road seems to be turning the North Suncoast into the suburbs.

By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published February 5, 2006

[Times photo: Edmund Fountain]

Stars and the glow of Tampa illuminate the night sky as cars make their way north and south along the Suncoast Parkway February 1, 2006. The Suncoast is celebrating it's fifth year of operation. Click for gallery

BROOKSVILLE - It's still dark at 6 a.m. on the Suncoast Parkway. The pace of southbound traffic is just under 80 mph. Everybody seems to be in a hurry to get somewhere.

This road is 5 years old this weekend. The 42-mile, half-a-billion-dollar parkway has changed what it means to live on the North Suncoast. Pasco, Hernando and Citrus counties are where they've always been - stacked, like blocks, on top of Hillsborough and Pinellas counties - but it's almost as if this straight strip of asphalt has reached up and pulled them closer to Tampa and St. Petersburg.

The parkway has started to change who lives where.

It has changed how long it takes to drive from here to there.

And it has changed the number of people who do it every day.

But more than anything else, say commuters, Realtors, developers and demographers, the Suncoast Parkway has started to change mind-sets. The North Suncoast, at least stereotypically, used to mean rednecks, retirees and colder numbers on the winter weather map on the late-night news. Now, more and more, it means land that is available, more affordable - and acceptable.

"That's the new suburbs," said Brad Monroe, president of the Greater Tampa Association of Realtors. "It's not the sticks anymore."

Carol Aquilante is a mortgage broker in Spring Hill. She moved from North Providence, R.I., to New Port Richey 10 years ago and used to get good-natured guff from people in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties because of her Pasco County address. Not anymore, she said.

"Because guess where they're moving?"

The road had and has its critics, who point out that it destroyed more than 200 acres of wetlands, that it was built to promote growth rather than to respond to it and that the state's initial economic forecasts were made to boost public support for a road that didn't need to be built. Janet Masaoy of Citizens Opposed to the Suncoast Tollway in Citrus County calls it all "a very frightening thing."

Ridership and revenue stats still aren't what they were projected to be, but they're on the rise, and everyone agrees on one thing: Regardless of the disparity between the expected toll income and the actual toll income, the parkway has at least started to change the shape and the scope of what constitutes the Tampa Bay metropolitan area.

Some numbers:

The populations of Pasco, Hernando and Citrus were 344,765, 130,802 and 118,085, respectively, in the 2000 census. In April 2005, according to the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida, they were 406,898, 150,784 and 132,635.

Pasco building permits for single-family homes went from 4,800 in 2002 to 7,252 in 2005.

Property values are up - way up - in all three counties.

MetroStudy, the national housing research firm, has charts that track the annual housing starts, closings and lot deliveries over the past four-plus years on what is known as the Suncoast Parkway corridor - from the Hillsborough-Pasco line, essentially, to State Road 50 in Brooksville. The lines on the charts look like the trajectory of a plane taking off. A map of the new communities looks like a sprawling dot-to-dot drawing.

The majority of the people who are moving in are younger and more job-and-commute oriented than the traditional buyer on the North Suncoast.

Not all of this is because of the parkway. Low interest rates, the hot real estate market and the increasing housing costs in Pinellas and Hillsborough are factors, too. But the parkway plays a big part.

In Pasco, most of this development was going to happen anyway, developers say, but the $507-million parkway has ramped up the volume and the pace.

The grand opening was Feb. 4, 2001, with hot dogs, confetti and a marching band - and protesters wearing pig snouts and calling the parkway the "porkway." Five years later, the Suncoast Crossings townhouses are on State Road 54 on the west side of the toll road, and the Suncoast Meadows community is on the east side. More to come.

Just off the parkway, on State Roads 54 and 52, construction company signs are stuck into dirt like planted flags in the conquered battlefields of wooden-fence ranch land.

Most of this area sits somewhere between what it once was and what it's about to be.

"The antigrowth people will tell you it wouldn't have happened without the road," Coldwell Banker broker Gary Schraut said from his office in Brooksville. "That's like saying if we hold the clock at 5 a.m. the sun won't come up."

In Hernando, the SR 50 strip has a Ruby Tuesday, a Sam's Club and a Circuit City that weren't there preparkway. The Suncoast Villas townhouses aren't far. And in the works are housing developments such as Southern Hills Plantation, Trillium and the Villages at Avalon - all of them an unprecedented kind of upscale for the county.

Jim Doyle is the vice president of marketing for LandMar Group in Jacksonville. In the early '80s, when he was a student at the University of South Florida, Hernando County was a place for an occasional trip to go rafting on the Withlacoochee River on the weekend. Now he works for a company that is building Southern Hills - million-dollar houses on the south side of Brooksville - in a county where the average price of a home is less than a fifth of that.

"The Suncoast Parkway," he said, "makes this community possible. It doesn't really work without it."

Ditto for Pulte Homes' Trillium near County Line Road. Pulte is the nation's largest home builder. "Without the Suncoast there," said Scott Campbell, the president of Pulte's Tampa division, "we never would've been looking up in Hernando."

Tampa Bay housing analyst Marvin Rose has started to track Hernando. MetroStudy has tracked Hernando for the past 15 years - up until a year and a half ago, though, only in the "active adult" category.

"We did not expect that family buyer to be in that market," MetroStudy Tampa division director Tony Polito said.

Until the parkway.

Citrus County is getting some ripple effects, too, even though the parkway ends at U.S. 98 just south of the county line.

Crystal River's Steve Latiff is the top-selling Realtor in Citrus and the No. 1 ERA Realtor in all of Florida. That's because he has been local for 23 years and works hard, and the market has been good, he says, but the parkway sure hasn't hurt. Latiff has sold pricey second homes in the past few years to people from Tampa.

"We're almost a bedroom community," he said.

Almost.

"The one thing that's surprised me is how quick the growth has followed the Suncoast Parkway," said Jim Kimbrough, the SunTrust Bank/Nature Coast chief executive officer and a backer of the project. "I thought it would take 15 years."

It wasn't that long ago, after all, when the North Suncoast was more of a rural getaway.

Hernando County Circuit Judge Stephen Rushing, who's 59, grew up in St. Petersburg and came up to Hernando as a boy to go to his family's river house to get in canoes and ride dirt bikes and four-wheelers. Now he shoots down the parkway to visit his parents.

"It's like it's moved us 50 miles south," Rushing said.

These days, John Gallagher, the longtime Pasco County administrator and parkway proponent, goes to Tampa Bay Partnership meetings. "And they welcome me," he said. "It's not like, "Let's not talk to that guy.' "

When Mike McHugh, the director of Hernando's Office of Business Development, meets with company owners looking to relocate to the county, they arrive, almost always, he says, 15 to 20 minutes early. The drive is just that much quicker and shorter.

"Traditionally, Brooksville and Hernando County were viewed as being "out there,' " McHugh said. "The parkway has changed our relevance and connectivity to Tampa."

Tampa real estate broker Bill Eshenbaugh says it has blurred all county lines - and the perceptions that went with them.

"They're gone," he said. "Absolutely gone. Totally gone."

The questions, according to Eshenbaugh, are different now.

How big is my house?

What's my drive time to work?

Where's the closest Publix?

"The reality," MetroStudy's Polito said, "is that people live up there and commute down to Tampa and St. Pete."

"It's all part of the same metropolitan area," Tampa Bay Builders Association executive vice president Joseph Narkiewicz said.

But the market tends to change first - and then the mind-set.

Heather Lauro, 27, lives in Spring Hill but was born and raised in Tampa and still has ties. "My friends in Tampa are like, "Oh my gosh, you live in the country,' " she said. "But this is not the country anymore. This is not the country."

"I've always said," Carrollwood ERA Realtor Joe Perez said, "between Brooksville and Tampa, it's going to be one giant city."

On the parkway, closer to Tampa, the exits and the tolls start to come quicker and the traffic gets thicker.

At Hillsborough Avenue, at 6:40 a.m., after the Suncoast Parkway turns into the Veterans Expressway, it's no longer dark - 40 minutes after the Brooksville toll.

Not 45. Not an hour.

Forty minutes flat.

The turnoff to Interstate 275 and the Howard Frankland Bridge across Tampa Bay is coming up on the right. The Tampa skyscrapers are off to the left as the sun starts to come up. The day has just begun.

Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or 352 848-1434.

[Last modified February 5, 2006, 01:23:11]