Incoming Tide: Vero needs to open up its mind

Back home in Chicago, word is spreading of Lee and Tarie Harris’ choice of Vero Beach as home for the second half of life: just last week, two Chicago friends in their 40s emailed them for more info on Vero. How Lee and Tarie – and others in the leading edge of the baby boomer bubble choosing Vero to live – respond may be a significant force in Vero’s growth. Natural beauty, blissful climate, uncongested streets. High property taxes, lack of nightlife, older demographic – whatever, Vero is being talked about. In Incoming Tide, Vero Beach 32963 looks at Vero’s new movers and shakers, boomers moving in and shaking things up. Here’s what Lee and Tarie have to say:

When Lee Harris first laid eyes on Vero Beach, his initial reaction was to call his wife Tarie in Chicago. “I said, ‘Tarie, I think you need to come down here.’ It was just so incredibly beautiful, I knew she would love it.’ ” And she did. Five years later, Lee and Tarie Harris spend seven months a year here developing friendships, investing in beachside real estate, and learning the politics of transition in a slow-growth, conservative community.

Their other home couldn’t be more at the other end of the housing spectrum: They have just finished a three-year conversion of an old factory in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood into a home and art studio for Lee’s glass and metal sculpting. Lee says he is dedicating the second half of life to his art, what he calls “a hot dance with gravity: fourteen pounds of molten glass on the end of a five-foot steel pipe.” Risky, unpredictable, transformational: not unlike his three decades in Chicago real estate, buying and rehabbing buildings. “In Lincoln Park, every building is uniquely beautiful. Selling a building there was like selling a painting.” The factory was probably their 40 th re-do, Lee estimates, with Tarie designing and overseeing the project. Now completed, their nesting urge has shifted south to the subtropics, and like birds with twigs, they find themselves frantically flying back and forth.

“I go back to Chicago to work on my art and to check on real estate, but then I miss Tarie. We’ve got this dual parallel life.” So parallel, in fact, that after 29 years of marriage, a conversation with the couple shifts seamlessly from one voice to the other. Both proudly own what they call naivete -- an optimism that pushes through the upheaval of change toward the settled pleasures of nature, home, family and friends.

Tarie, a lifelong gardener who just finished a roof garden in Chicago, now visualizes frangipani canopies and trellised bougainvillea to frame the spectacular river vistas beyond their Moorings backyard. Framing their own views – on politics, culture, the environment – to a conservative, older circle of new friends, has proved a creative challenge, too. Partly through their relative youth – Lee is 54, Tarie is 55 -- and perhaps influenced by daughters Lauren, 24, who is starting a cookie company in L.A., and Shayna, 27, on a Fulbright scholarship studying fair trade farming in Brazil, they see Vero’s own future through the eyes of the next generation.

“Vero needs to open up its mind to a global way of thinking,” says Tarie. “More people need to run for office who are progressive thinkers. I don’t believe that there are people so staid and against progress that in their heart of hearts they want to leave the next generation with nothing, and say ‘I don’t care what happens, let our kids figure it out.’ ”

A first step, says Tarie, is to bring younger people into Vero’s philanthropic scene by lowering the $500 to $1,000 ticket price of the beach’s benefits. “You have to bring them into the process early on,” says Tarie. “For $75 or $100 a plate, they might come.”

That sort of broadening of social scope is something the Harris’s have always sought. Both grew up in working class Chicago neighborhoods two miles apart, though they didn’t meet until college, marrying in their mid-20s. They bought a townhouse in pre-gentrification Lincoln Park. It took a sense of humor to get through those years, says Tarie. “The parks were desperate, beer bottles were everywhere, no seats on the swings, no place to buy diapers.” Because public schools were so inadequate, they had their daughters at a Jewish day school ( Lee grew up Jewish in a Catholic neighborhood; Tarie, a Catholic, had converted to Judaism.) Yet both strongly wanted their daughters around all sorts of children.

“I wanted our kids to have a more expanded education, to experience people of all backgrounds and become global thinkers.” When they decided to move to the suburbs, Tarie chose an area close enough to the city to ensure the public schools would be filled with children of diverse backgrounds. “I went to an all-girl Catholic high school, and I remember looking down on the public school, thinking, subconsciously maybe, they’re not as good as us. I didn’t want that for my kids. ”

Parental expectations played a big role in Lee’s upbringing. His father saw his potential for entrepreneurship. When he found him at age eight painting on an easel made of plant stakes, Lee declared: “I want to be an artist,” he remembers. “You don’t want to be an artist,” said his dad. “If you don’t have the brains to be a doctor or a lawyer, be a salesman.”

“He’d go crazy everytime I earned any money. That really made it fun.” Lee started off selling decals in grammar school. “I would send letters to the presidents of companies and they would send me free decals. I’d sell them for 50 cents, and be making $60 a week.” In eighth grade, Lee’s father, who ran a leather factory, gave him a briefcase for his paperwork. In high school, Lee helped his brother, a photographer, get work at ad agencies by visiting Chicago’s biggest PR firms on his behalf. In college, Lee started selling frozen steaks at factories, then got the idea to visit bars on Friday nights when workers had just gotten their paychecks. “They’d be feeling guilty for being at a bar, so they’d buy steaks to take home to their wives. At one point, I was making $1,000 a week.”

With a degree in sales and marketing, Lee went into real estate in 1979. With Tarie working as a floral buyer for a chain of grocery stores, Lee earned only $6,500 in the first six months of his career. Just as she was starting her family, Tarie went back to college for a three-year degree in design. Lee got his broker’s license, leased a basement space, bought a desk at the Salvation Army and opened shop as a real estate financial consultant.

His first investment was a five-unit rental near Wrigley Field that he bought with his father. “Make me a million dollars,” his dad told him. That winter, there was a horrible deep freeze for 45 days. The plumbing froze, and his father wanted out. They held on, opened all the faucets for the thaw that was bound to come, and sold the property after ten years. By then, Lee was soaring past his dad’s $1 million goal.

Today, many smart investments later, the Chicago real estate market is in something less than a deep freeze: sluggish, but not as inactive as Vero, Lee says. He thinks the market here could heat up faster than elsewhere, but only if it warms up to a new kind of newcomer as well.

“Not that I’m for uncontrolled growth, with high rises and busy streets,” says Tarie. “But there has to be more to do for baby boomers who don’t necessarily want to lie on the beach or play golf all day. And we all have a right to paradise, just as we all have a right to our beliefs."