2. In addition to strengthening local planning and land use controls, state governments should enact stronger legislation protecting critical environmental areas including wetlands, shorelines, coastlines, mountains, and other environmentally fragile lands.

• Statewide land use plans should identify areas suitable and unsuitable for recreational land development, including criteria for guiding the location of development. These guidelines should be designed to avoid conflicts between development and prime agricultural lands, critical environmental areas, and lands needed for the expansion of public recreational facilities such as state parks.

• Priorities for designating critical environmental areas should take into account existing or potential development pressures to ensure that critical areas are not preempted by subdivisions.

• Environmental impact statement procedures should be applied to private developments in critical environmental areas.

⚫ States should set up ongoing data systems which monitor trends in both rural land subdivision activity and second home construction.

3. Existing state policies and programs for acquiring public lands such as parks, recreational areas, and wildlife refuges should be reviewed in light of shifting recreational land development pressures.

• Priorities for such programs should be adjusted and implementation speeded up as necessary to prevent the preemption of areas which, due to their location and natural features, would better serve the recreation needs of the general public. The recent economic slowdown in the recreational properties market offers some excellent opportunities to acquire natural areas for preservation and public use at reduced costs.

• The accessibility to existing public recreational areas such as lakeshores and coastlines should be reviewed and the necessary steps taken (e.g., acquisition, easement) to guarantee that public access into these areas is not restricted or hindered by private development.

4. State governments should strengthen existing land sales legislation in order to improve consumer protection. • State land sales laws should be amended where necessary to prohbit the advertising or sale of any lot or dwelling unit until financial guarantees (e.g., performance bonds, escrow funds) are in force ensuring that promised improvements and facilities will be constructed.

• Cooling off periods in which consumers may reconsider sales terms should be extended to 14 days. • Developers should be required to substantiate claims of resale land values or be restricted from making them. Developers should also be required to

disclose the success records of any resale programs which they operate.

FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

The federal government has several important roles to play in encouraging high quality recreational land development, including providing financial incentives and assistance for state and local land use planning and critical area protection, and strengthening consumer protection

measures.

1. The federal government should provide a major impetus in strenthening state and local planning and development controls.

• The federal government should take full advantage of its existing legislative mandates (e.g., HUD 701 programs, Section 208 planning requirements, coastal zone management, etc.) to encourage adequate land management through existing federal funding programs to state and local agencies.

• Congress should enact additional legislation as needed to provide financial aid to state and local governments for land use planning and management.

2. Steps should be taken by the federal government to reduce the negative impacts and management conflicts between public lands and recreational development on adjacent private lands.

• Any future federal land use legislation should include provisions requiring the coordination of land use plans and development controls between federal agencies managing public lands (e.g., the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service) and state and local units of government with authority over adjacent private lands.

• Federal agencies managing public lands should be more discriminating in their granting of special use permits and land trades with private developers, considering the full range of potential impacts of private development on public lands.

3. Federal policies and programs for open space protection and public acquisition should be reviewed and adjusted in light of existing and potential land development pressures to avoid the preemption of lands needed to meet the recreational needs of the general public in the years to come.

4. The federal government should take further steps to strengthen existing consumer protection legislation in land sales.

• Regulations enforced by HUD's Office of Interstate Land Sales Registration under the Interstate Land Sales Full Disclosure Act should be amended to include the provisions recommended above for strengthing state land sales laws.

• In addition to the further tightening of advertising regulations administered by OILSR, the Federal Trade Commission should more aggressively exercise its full authority to prosecute unscrupulous land sales firms which persist in making false and misleading advertising claims.

The private ownership of land and housing purely for recreational use had long been a luxury restricted to the wealthy until during the 1950s and increasingly in the 1960s when a number of factors came into play which brought the ownership of recreational property within reach of a massive middle income market. Increasingly higher levels of disposable income, increasing amounts of vacation and leisure time, improved mobility through better highways (especially the Interstate Highway System) and widespread automobile ownership, nationwide advertising campaigns, and high-pressure sales techniques all were major factors in creating an unprecedented recreational land development boom during the late 1960s and extending through 1973 when hard hit by economic recession. (The country experienced a similar but smaller land sales boom during the 1920s in Florida and to a lesser extent in California .)

Prior to the 1960s, most recreational property occurred as individually scattered lots and second homes, but today's recreational land development is almost synonymous with large-scale subdivisions similar in design to most conventional suburban subdivisions, although typically with fewer improvements and facilities. In spite of its "recreational" label, much of this property has been marketed to consumers interested in speculative investments rather than vacation or permanent homesites.

This chapter presents a quantitative overview of recreational land development in the U.S.--the extent of development, its location, rate of growth, physical characteristics, and how this property is being used. It also includes a brief discussion of the industry itself, and the factors which caused the growth of the recreational properties market and will shape its future. The chapter is divided into two sections, one focusing on the land (recreational lots); the other focusing on the housing (second homes). Wherever possible the data presented here are related to the three project types defined in Chapter 1 (unimproved recreational subdivisions, improved second home projects, and re

The best available data indicate that there are at least 10 million subdivided recreational lots in the U.S. today, and possibly many more. This figure is based on several estimates. For example, since its formation in 1969, developers have registered 3,900 recreational subdivisions with HUD's Office of Interstate Land Sales Registration (OILSR), accounting for 3,375,821 recreational lots covering 7,146,229 acres of land as of January, 1974.1 Lots registered with OILSR account for only a fraction of the total recreational lots in the country since a substantial amount of subdivision activity occurred prior to 1969. OILSR officials estimate that only about 40 per cent of the current recreational subdivisions subject to the Interstate Land Sales Full Disclosure Act have been registered.2 Comparisons of OILSR data with a recent study in Utah show that OILSR filings represent only 14 per cent of the projects and 24 per cent of the recreational lots in that state. 3

According to estimates derived from a sample survey of 7,190 U.S. households conducted for this study, some 2.3 million families own a recreational lot. 4 If lots sold account for only one-third to one-half of all the lots subdivided, as some industry surveys indicate, the total number subdivided would amount to between 4.5 and 7 million lots. .5

Another estimate can be derived from industry data. A 1973 survey conducted by the American Land Development Association (ALDA) reported that the responding recreational land development companies had subdivided an average of over 2,400 lots each.6 ALDA estimates that there were approximately 10,000 recreational land sales and development firms in the

country in 1973.7 If each had subdivided 2,000 lots,

the total national stock of recreational lots would

Figure 2.

Recreational Land Developments Registered with OILSR, 1973 (1 dot = 1 subdivision)

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Interstate Land Sales Registration, Unpublished material obtained from the files, June, 1973.

Note: Since the data for this figure were collected (June, 1973), project filings from Texas increased from 65 to 463, by January, 1974, giving it four-fifths as many recreational subdivisions as Florida.

Source:

exceed 20 million. This estimate is probably much too high since respondents to the ALDA survey did not represent many of the very smallest firms in the industry.

Finally, as early as 1966 there were over 14 million vacant, single family lots in the U.S. according to the 1967 Census of Governments.8 Although the Census did not distinguish between recreational lots and primary home lots, it did report that half the vacant lots were outside of Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas.

The extent of recreational land development seems proportionately much greater when viewed from a local rather than a national perspective. In many counties and even some states, there have already been enough recreational lots subdivided to accommodate more than double the existing permanent population. For example, in 1971 Nevada County, California, had enough recreational lots to house three times its existing population. While the population of Box Elder County, Utah declined by 940 between 1962 and 1972, more than 58,000 acres of land in the county were subdivided into recreational lots during the same period.10 In 1972, Summit County, Colorado, with a population of 3,743, had almost twice as many recreational lots as existing residents.11 And a recent study from Arizona reports

that there were enough vacant lots in remote subdivisions in the unincorporated areas of that state to accommodate more than double its 1974 population. 12

Number of Recreational Lots Subdivided Annually Recréational land development activity was heaviest during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Data on lot sales trends are not available on a national basis, however, it appears that development activity grew steadily during this period. In annual membership surveys conducted by the National Association of Real Estate Boards, an average of 83.5 per cent of the respondents stated that the volume of transfers of recreational land were the

same or higher every year between 1963 and 1972.13 In 1971, the year which some observers consider near the peak of the recreational land boom, ALDA estimated that some 650,000 recreational lots were sold. 14 Figure 1 presents four selected state examples of recent trends showing cumulative growth

in recreational lots over time. (These data do not reflect the recent slump in the recreational land market.)

National Distribution of Recreational Lots

The distribution of recreational subdivisions is highly concentrated in several states as shown in Figure 2. Ten states contained nearly two-thirds (65 per cent) of all recreational subdivisions filed with OILSR as of January, 1974 (Florida, Texas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Missouri, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, and Michigan). Only North Dakota and Rhode Island had no recreational subdi

visions registered with OILSR.15

The distribution of recreational lots is more highly concentrated than subdivisions, since recreational subdivisions in the South and Southwest tend to be larger than those in other parts of the country. Florida and Texas contain only one-fourth (26 per cent) of all recreational subdivisions filed with OILSR, but contain nearly half (48 per cent) of all recreational lots filed. Seven states (Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Colorado, and Pennsylvania) contain three-fourths (75.3 per cent) of all recreational lots filed with OILSR (as shown in Figure 3), accounting for 82.3 per cent of