Amy Le

Florida Homes Built on Former Bombing Range

Homeowners across the country have been seeing their property values sink with the slumping housing market, but residents in one Florida community have a more explosive reason behind their depreciating home values. According to a Foxnews.com report from the Associated Press, an 8-year-old development in Orlando, FL, was built on a World War II bombing range that wasn't thoroughly cleared. Now the residents are scared for their lives and investments and angry with the developers (Lennar Corp., which built many of the homes) and local government officials, who residents claim shouldn't have allowed constuction on that site in the first place.

The value of the homes — which originally cost $200,000 to $600,000 — has dropped by at least a third, residents say. That's compared with a roughly 20 percent decline across Florida caused by the real estate slump.

There are hundreds of former bombing and artillery training ranges across the United States, but few have 2,000 homes sitting on them, the AP reported. Since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began sweeping the Orlando neighborhoods a year ago, they've found more than 200 munitions and other potentially volatile remnants.

Some weighed up to 23 pounds. Most were recovered on the grounds of a middle school, including one lodged beneath the landing pit for the long jump, the AP reported.

Not the first time
The Army Corps says it's extremely unlikely any of the buried munitions would detonate, but if you ask me, that's a risk I wouldn't take. These Orlando residents are not the first to be sleeping on a former military bombing site. A subdivision in Arlington, TX, which was built on an old bombing range in the early 2000s, has spurred several lawsuits that continue to smolder. The Army Corps's top priority recently has been in Spring Valley in Washington, DC, where residents live above ground polluted by World War I chemical-weapons testing and unexploded munitions.

One of the developers, Lennar Corp., hired its own inspection crews to find munitions around the homes it built, inciting a legal battle with the Army Corps over those expenses. Newland Communities Inc., the San Diego-based company that developed the affected areas, declined comment through an attorney, citing pending litigation. Home builders Taylor Morrison and K. Hovnanian were also tight-lipped, the AP reported. Officials from the Army Corps say they have produced dozens of documents dating back to the 1940s that detail the Orlando site's history as a bombing range, and Army Corps spokeswoman Amanda Ellison says they have always been public records. But city officials claim their records were stripped of that information.

Information is power
As the Army Corps, local officials an d developers point fingers at each other, the residents who invested in these properties are now stuck with homes that are going be extremely difficult to sell.

As consumers, we trust that the city officials and developers take our safety into consideration when they're passing zoning laws and building our homes. But when you hear stories like this, you can't help but reminded of how important it is to conduct your own research. No one thinks to ask when you're moving into a new development if the area was a former military bombing site. But maybe we should start asking? Your local officials should also have access to land records, which are usually open to the public. When I was a newspaper reporter, I found that local historians were really great resources and usually knew more about a neighborhood than a city council member or alderman.

Got hot local housing tips or a story you want to share? Contact Amy Le at openingdoorsblog@HomeFinder.com.