FROZEN IN TIME

On a Stone Harbor street, surrounded by multistory homes with massive white decks, sits a tiny red cottage. It is less than 400 square feet inside, with a screened-in front porch. Behind a wood fence, holly, pine, and bayberry trees tower high above the roof.

To passersby, the home may look like a relic, evoking a simpler, less opulent era down the Shore. To Linda Galer, the place is simply home.

“It’s like frozen in time,” Galer said. “Even when we’re sitting on the porch, I still feel like it’s years and years ago.”

Walk off the porch and it’s clear that the area has changed dramatically since Galer’s family bought the property 60 years ago.

In the past year, the median value of homes sold on Seven Mile Island, which consists of Avalon and Stone Harbor, has been around $4 million, according to Ann Delaney, a real estate broker who specializes in the area.

“What were considered large homes when I was growing up are now the small, obsolete homes,” said Delaney, of Tim Kerr Sotheby’s International Realty, an Avalon native with 40 years of experience in the industry.

An Avalon home built in the 1960s was bought for $3.75 million in 2021, and the new construction on that lot was listed on the market at $10.8 million, as of July. A cottage in Stone Harbor that was bought for $658,000 in 1993 sold for $10 million last year.

While these towns are among the ritziest zip codes down the Shore, other nearby beach communities have also seen housing prices skyrocket.

And as for the bungalows, there are few left, and they’re hard to maintain, said Delaney.

“The building codes have been so strict that it sometimes forces an owner to do something more dramatic because they can’t renovate without bringing their house up to code,” Delaney said. “Oftentimes, that is why a home is torn down.”

Galer’s Stone Harbor property, which she said was bought for about $6,000, is now worth more than $2 million.

And she and other bungalow owners pay for it in taxes: Three homeowners with whom The Inquirer spoke to are estimated to have paid between $3,700 and nearly $9,000 in taxes in 2023, according to public records.

Here’s why they are holding onto their tiny homes.

Galer still remembers the spring day in 1960 when her family came down to look at the little red house on the edge of Stone Harbor. Galer, who was 12 at the time, recalls the house being surrounded only by dunes, a Coast Guard station, and a bustling bird sanctuary.

“It was so wild,” she said. “The bird sanctuary was just teeming with birds. You’d hear them at night.”

For Galer, so many memories come streaming back whenever she returns to their little hideaway.

“I just love it,” she said. “I’m a teenager again when I walk in the front door.”

But for decades, Galer, who inherited the house from her parents in the mid-2000s, has watched the town change around their cottage.

Behind it, Stone Harbor now extends to 122nd Street. The neighborhood includes trees and grass, not just sand and dunes. Galer sees more tourists during the day and hears fewer birds at night.

And the houses around hers are gargantuan, even more so in comparison to her bungalow.

“Boy, right now they’re just building every inch they can. It’s really a shame,” she said. “There were great little houses down there for so, so long.”

“Now these houses have eight bathrooms. Some have elevators. It’s incredible,” Galer added. “It’s almost like everybody is trying to outdo the other person.”

For Galer and her husband, William Flynn, their tiny home is the perfect size.

They’re both retired — she from a family janitorial supply business, he from an advertising career — and live full-time in Flourtown, Montgomery County. The Stone Harbor house is their part-time oasis from spring through Thanksgiving, when they have to turn off the water. During the summertime, they drive down midweek to avoid the traffic.

They often arrive to find letters in their mailbox from people interested in buying their property. Some are from families, which perplexes Galer. She doesn’t know of any family who could happily live in a house that small. Some write notes swearing they would keep the home exactly the same.

“When they say that I say, ‘Oh, sure,’” she said. “It’ll be torn down in 20 minutes.”

The couple have no interest in selling, and they weigh to whom to leave the home to ensure it stays in its current condition.

“We think about what we’re going to do when we’re gone,” Galer said. “I would love it to be saved.”

“Boy, right now they’re just building every inch they can. It’s really a shame. There were great little houses down there for so, so long.”

Bernie and Karen O’Hara have received offers to sell their home in Avalon, and although they’ve considered it, they’re planning to hold onto it.

“It’s just our special place to go,” said Karen, a retired nurse. “We’re trying to maintain it the best we can.”

They’ve noticed throughout the years how the area has changed, including the appearance of golf carts and a transition from college students to more families vacationing. They’ve also watched as smaller homes have been progressively torn down to build bigger properties with pools.

“Obviously we’re probably, you know, in the bottom dozen or so houses as far as square footage now on the island,” said Bernie, who works as a senior consultant for an engineering firm. ”We’re getting surrounded by much bigger places.”

Their house experienced some damage when Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012, and it took on a foot and a half of water. The reconstruction work included cutting the lower two feet of walls, and replacing cabinets in the kitchen. They also explored raising the house but found it was not possible because of the cinder block walls.

“It would literally crumble,” said Karen.

They’ve thought about building a new home on the lot of around 1,800 square feet and had started to get the plans together before the pandemic. But with all of the new construction going on in the area for larger homes, they’ve been priced out of the market for that work.

“We weren’t looking for the six-bedroom, five-bath mansions that they’re building. We were looking for a more traditional three-bedroom house,” Bernie said.

The O’Haras originally purchased the property as a second home but have spent more than just the summer days at the Shore. They’ve been there for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve.

“It’s more than just a summer place to go. It’s just a lovely community,” Bernie said. “That’s why we don’t want to move on.”

They sometimes sit on the porch on a nice day and appreciate when a passerby stops in front of their home.

“They’re walking by all these big, beautiful homes, and they always stop and look at our house and say, ‘I really like this,’” Karen said. “It’s the realization for them that with all the big houses, we’re still a little place that’s a realistic vacation spot that somebody still has, and they just kind of look at it and smile.”

“It’s more than just a summer place to go. It’s just a lovely community.”

When Betty Ann Jones was a child during World War II and her father was on a boat supplying oil to ships in the Pacific Ocean, she remembers going out to Ocean City to her great aunt’s house.

“At the time, there were photos of me, and I slept in a drawer,” she said. “They put a drawer between two chairs, and that’s how I became somebody in Ocean City.”

Later as an educator in Bucks County and Philadelphia, she took a sabbatical and spent some time in Brigantine. There, she stayed on the same street where she eventually bought her own home in the mid-1990s.

“It’s like an old shoe. The first time I tried it on, it was comfortable, and I said, ‘This needs to be shared.’”

Jones has opened her Shore home to people experiencing grief, sickness, losing a home, or simply needing to get away.

“I made it a policy that anybody that needed a retreat could use it under my guidance, and I would not charge them, and they could feel secure,” she said.

The place is intended to be a retreat and doesn’t have a phone or home WiFi system, though there are several radios.

Jones’ three-bedroom property is spread out across one level. In the living room, she keeps seashells that have been signed by her guests over the years. In a tall glass vase she has the ones that are pre-Sandy, and the rest going forward are in a wide ceramic bowl. She estimates that she’s amassed a collection of around 45 shells to date. She signed the first one herself when she moved in.

Although she’s received offers to sell the home, she wants to preserve it and ensure it can be used to host people in the future like she’s been doing. She’s seen the area change throughout the years as homes in Brigantine have been bought and torn down to build bigger residences, including ones immediately surrounding hers.

She describes her home as a “place of rest.”

“It’s just a little house.”

“I made it a policy that anybody that needed a retreat could use it under my guidance, and I would not charge them, and they could feel secure.”

Methodology: The properties’ current values are based on estimates from the real estate marketplace Zillow. The square-footage metrics are based on the homeowner’s estimates and Zillow.