Rehoboth, to some, seems cramped and antsy

There's a different vibe in Rehoboth Beach this year.

Beach and boardwalk crowds have grown more dense and, at times, less friendly.

The tension that has always lurked beneath the surface between year-round and summer residents has escalated into sometimes ugly public fights.

Is Rehoboth getting too big? Is it losing the charm that makes it special?

Police Chief Keith Banks has noticed a difference. He said a hard-to-pin-down curtness is evident to him and to his officers.

Nearly every category of crime tracked locally is up this summer compared to last year. Disorderly conduct arrests are up 19 percent; alcohol violations are up 37 percent; criminal mischief collars rose 89 percent – with dozens of arrests for each. Only theft arrests are down through July, about 9 percent, according to police figures.

"This isn't to offend anyone, I guess I have to be careful, but what I see of some of the behavior on the boardwalk and walking around town, people have little tolerance for their fellow person," Banks said. "Is it different this year? Yes, there's a different tone, a different element."

The city has dealt with controversies over luxury home trends, pools, noise and parking this summer. And many circle back to a familiar worry — that the intense demand to develop Rehoboth is threatening to crush its spirit as an idyllic town of worn screen doors and lazy living.

Banks assigns some blame for the rise in arrests to the growing prevalence of heroin use throughout Delaware. Rehoboth Beach and its surrounding area is not exempt from that trend; Delaware State Police detectives in Sussex County said earlier this year that nearly every burglar investigated these days has, at his or her roots, an obsessive drive to obtain heroin.

But interviews with Rehoboth's year-round residents did not yield much concern about rising drug or property crime. What preoccupies them is development. The rising home prices, the increasing size of new and remodeled homes, the popularity of backyard pools that some complain bring noise and rowdy behavior to quiet neighborhoods.

"I don't know those people who speculate on real estate. I don't have that kind of mentality. But there's a lot of money riding on it for them," said Donna Mabry, a member of the civic group Save Our City. Since 2002, the group has pressed Rehoboth officials to constrain what they saw as sprawling, stifling development.

"They're devaluing and degrading our asset," Mabry said of the resort's investors. "What they're doing will, in the long term, run property values down."

The "too big, too quickly" view is being contested by other property owners, including a sizable number of year-round residents, who say they've been spooked by town officials' willingness to limit how homes are built and remodeled.

Their activism led to the defeat of a proposed ban on vacation renters' use of backyard pools, and has influenced a debate on the Board of Commissioners over how many off-street parking spaces new homes must provide.

"I don't know anybody in town who owns a property that's not an investment," said Paul Kuhns, a resident and former commissioner who ran again for the office this summer. "There are too many people saying, 'I've got mine, I don't want you to have yours.' "

A growing resort

Rehoboth is clearly busier and more crowded than it was in the 1960s, even the 1980s. But is it measurably denser this summer even compared to the summer of 2014? And was last summer busier than the one before it? Many signs point to yes.

The Rehoboth Chamber of Commerce tracks how many hotel rooms are occupied by paying customers week-to-week, a gauge of the city's success at plying its main industry, tourism.

Total occupancy through the third week of June in 2013, according the chamber's statistics, came to 58,810 rooms. Through the same stretch in 2014, 59,673 rooms were filled, a 1.5 percent bump.

By the third week of June this year, 61,749 rooms had been rented. That's a 3.5 percent increase year-to-year, and 5 percent growth in just a two-year span.

Rehoboth's evolution has been happening for much longer than two years. In some ways, the image of Rehoboth even today as a quiet, quaint town where simple, historic cottages are the norm is more memory than reality.

U.S. Census figures show that of the 3,182 housing units in Rehoboth Beach in 2013, just 271 had been constructed before 1939. A plurality of the homes, 41 percent, were built between 1970 and 1989, the start of the modern, investment-heavy era of Delaware beach living.

And houses are not cheap, as anyone who has looked at beach real estate knows. In the 2010 census, the median Rehoboth Beach home value was $876,000; more than a third were valued above $1 million.

To figure out what is going on inside Rehoboth Beach, Krys Johnson, executive director of Rehoboth Beach Main Street, suggests you need only look beyond the city limits to "the massive urban growth and sprawl around us. ... Look at Highway One and the massive development. That definitely impacts business."

James Falk, a coastal tourism specialist at the University of Delaware Sea Grant Program, took a closer look at the 2010 census data for Sussex County and found that while the entire county has grown, the resort area and an area he described as secondary coastal has changed dramatically over the last 20 years.

The coastal area which includes all of the resort towns from Lewes south to Fenwick Island, has 248 people per square mile and over the last 20 years grew by 72 percent. The next closest area to the coast from Milford south to Millville and Ocean View is even more densely populated with 305 people per square mile. It experienced a 90 percent growth rate.

Those big crowds walking the boardwalk, riding the rides, playing the arcade games and eating the ice cream, all came from someplace else, and they drove in and parked.

"The question is where are those people going," she said. "It's real. You don't need a fancy study."

It turns out that much of the growth in housing has been just outside of Rehoboth, Lewes and to the south, Bethany Beach. It's less costly to buy there. Rehoboth has many rental homes but so, too, does this area just beyond the town limits.

It is this area that is drawing people from New York and New Jersey, Everhart said.

The homes are less expensive and often, the mortgage is less than the property taxes were in their home states, she said.

"They love us," Everhart said. Many discovered Rehoboth Beach after Superstorm Sandy and since then, they've just kept coming back.

"Their plan is to make it a city from Route 113 to the beach," said Joan Deaver, a Sussex County Council member whose district includes Rehoboth Beach. "It will be a city. It will be urban. Well, OK, but I want to know in advance. I want people to know when they buy homes."

What the city looks like, sounds like and feels like is, of course, different for every visitor and resident. This past Thursday night in Rehoboth Beach, the city was packed and the crowd was just what city officials hope to attract – extended families, with children. There were long lines for the most popular rides at Funland and adults and kids waited for a chance to play skeeball at 25 cents a game.

The only change between now and 1979: a 25 cent round of skeeball used to cost a nickel and these days the old mechanical scoreboard is digitized. Winners walk around with big, plush Minions or the tried and true tiny gray dolphins.

On the boardwalk, it's the same, crowded place with waves of people between Delaware and Wilmington avenues. There is barely a parking space to be had. It is 9:30 and everyone seems to be carrying an ice cream cone, the twirled soft-serve custard from Kohr Brothers, or the dipped, sometimes funky flavors at the Ice Cream Shop just around the corner on Rehoboth Avenue.

By 10, it's like someone has pulled the plug. Crowds thin, cars disappear and on the side streets it's so quiet you can hear the crickets.

Dylan Johns, of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, stands out in this clean-cut crowd. He's wearing a horse's head. It is the season's novelty like the pet rock of the 1980s and the invisible dog of the 1970s Rehoboth Beach Boardwalk.

Johns is 13 and he's borrowed the horse head – a rubbery, over-the-head mask with a fake fur mane – from his friend Abbey Smith, 15. They bought it at Sunsations and Johns' own make is a unicorn – very popular with the ladies, it turns out. The previous night, he had eight girls walk up to him to take a selfie.

"It's good, clean fun," he said. He's been coming to Rehoboth Beach for five summers and he loves everything about the city: "Everything. The ocean, the food."

Alethea Kreiser, also from Carlisle, who is Abbey's mom, has been coming to Rehoboth Beach for as long as she can remember.

Has it changed? "I honestly think it is the same," she said.

Why then, are so many people talking about a changing Rehoboth this summer? Why all the controversy over pools and house size?

"I don't think there's a whole lot of difference," said longtime Rehoboth Beach mayor and lifelong resident Sam Cooper.

But there have been changes. The new houses are bigger. Renters bring more cars. Parking is at a premium. And the places with pools become their own little resorts within a resort, Cooper said.

Cooper said he believes savvy buyers target only the largest lots in the city. When Rehoboth was founded, the town was laid out in 50- by 100-foot building lots. Some bought a single lot, others two or more.

So block by block in Rehoboth, there are houses shoehorned onto 50- by 100-square feet lots and others with wide yards and trees. It also used to be, Cooper said, that people built within the zoning code. By that he means there were a large variety of homes and sizes from ranch-style to two-story colonials. Now, he said, people build to the zoning code – fitting as much house on the land as they can under the law.

"Now, suddenly, there is a house across the street with 7 or 8 cars," he said. There isn't parking on site so the extra cars take up spaces on the street. With a swimming pool in the back yard, the house can fetch the owner $6,000 to $7,000 a week in rental income, he said. For some, "they've made an industry out of it."

Kuhns takes exception to that analysis. "What these people are calling mini-hotels, they all conform to the city's code they put in place in 2006," he said. "It's not as if, overnight, they snuck these things in here."

Thursday is the new Saturday in the resort, said Carol Everhart, president and CEO of the Rehoboth Beach-Dewey Beach Chamber of Commerce. Used to be that Rehoboth Beach had two kinds of visitors: weekly renters who stayed either at a cottage or a hotel, and the day trippers who arrived in the morning, spent the day at the beach, had dinner and then drove home.

Now, most likely because of the economy, there are more and more people who come for an extended weekend, arriving Thursday and leaving Sunday or Monday, she said. That leaves the midweek days of Tuesday and Wednesday as soft as melting ice cream for area businesses, whether they are out on Del. 1 or in downtown Rehoboth and Dewey Beach.

"That is not a good thing for the business community," she said. Add to that "the visitor is watching their expenditures." They buy the sale items or the less costly ones, she said. "The eyes are doing the shopping, not necessarily the wallet, and even if a restaurant is full, they are not buying the higher priced plate."

She also attributes the shift to the busy lives of families and suggests that "while the economy is better, we are not where we were."

What's next

Banks, the police chief, doesn't see Rehoboth Beach as having lost its charm, its independent spirit, despite the crowds and, his figures show, some rise in crime.

"With that much traffic, tolerance may not be as good as it could be. But again, for the most part, I think we still have the small-town charm," Banks said. "I just think the economy's increasing, people might have a little bit extra money they're spending, and alcohol affects some of that. You just don't see the courtesy this year that we're used to seeing. It's still a very clean, safe, friendly environment."

Rehoboth's elected officials, for the most part, have spent the past year brainstorming ways to keep a lid on the city's population growth. That's resulted in an overhaul of the zoning code to box in property owners who want to build homes of five, six bedrooms or more.

The code change, and other proposals that failed to pass the Board of Commissioners, has been controversial. While they don't require existing homes to be modified, they would make any renovations to nearly all of Rehoboth's homes a more complicated affair, since they would be deemed "nonconforming" to current code.

"How can an ordinance preserve the character of a city if, at its core, its terms make the existing properties noncompliant?" resident Bob Worthing asked the commissioners at a July public hearing.

Vince Robertson, an attorney whose family has long owned Rehoboth property, counseled the city to be wary of enacting rule after rule to govern how homes are built, saying that course of action could itself harm the town's beachy vibe.

"Right now you do have good builders who can work within the numbers and build something that looks nice," Robertson said to the commissioners. "If you start shrinking those numbers, you're squeezing out the design and the diversity. If you want to renovate a house, it becomes easier just to tear it down and build to code.... if we've got a character problem now, we're gonna have another character problem with this ordinance."

So what now? "I never wanted Rehoboth to be an exclusive place," Cooper said. "If you go up on the boardwalk, it clearly is not becoming gentrified."

But there has been a shift. Cooper said he sees it, too, with the change in the days when visitors arrive. If Thursday is the new Saturday, what does that make Saturday?

"Lord help you on the weekend," Cooper said.

Contact James Fisher at (302) 983-6772, on Twitter @JamesFisherTNJ or jfisher@delawareonline.com. Reach Molly Murray at (302) 463-3334 or mmurray@delawareonline.com. Follow her on Twitter @MollyMurraytnj.