Boca Chica Village, Texas

The town was founded as Kennedy Shores in 1967 by John Caputa, a Chicagoan property developer, and was initially aimed at working class Polish migrants.[4] Shortly after building a community of about 30 ranch-style houses, the settlement was devastated by Hurricane Beulah later that year, which destroyed the restaurant and public utility systems. Electricity was restored, but many of the homes did not have potable water even decades later.[5]

In 1975, local resident Stanley Piotrowicz was voted in as town mayor, who renamed the village Kopernik Shores after Nicolaus Copernicus, and attempted to have the village recognised as an incorporated community, but this was denied. In 1990 and 2000, the population was 26 people. As of 2008, only six people were permanent residents of the village,[6] and that number was down to four people in two homes by 2017, with an average of approximately 12 seasonal residents.

In 2012, private space exploration company SpaceX named Boca Chica as a possible location for the construction of their future private commercial launch site. In August 2014, SpaceX announced that they had selected Boca Chica as the location for their South Texas spaceport, and construction began the same year.[7] By May 2018, the site was expected to be used exclusively for launches of their fully reusable launch vehicle, and was no longer planned to become a third launch site for Falcon 9.[8] The launch facilities are close enough that—as rocket tests with propellant loads began to be done in 2019—residents were warned to leave their homes during some tests of completed tank structures: "at a minimum, you must exit your home or structure and be outside of any building on your property....to avoid or minimize the risk of injury."[9]

Flight testing of the SpaceX Starship with a newly designed Raptor rocket engine began in 2019. With the village only a short distance from the test site, Cameron County officials began to request residents to stand outside their homes during the tests in August 2019, due to perceived danger from shock-wave induced broken windows in the event of a test anomaly and explosion.[10]

In September 2019, SpaceX extended an offer to buy each of the houses in Boca Chica Village for three times the fair market value along with an offer of VIP invitations to future launch events. The amount of the offer (3x) was said to be "non-negotiable." Homeowners were initially given two weeks for that particular offer to remain valid.[11][12] Some Boca Chica property owners were happy with the offer and made plans to accept, including one South Dakota owner who was happy to receive 3x what she paid for the property in 2012. But other owners were not, noting that they had made substantial improvements to their properties and that the base valuation used by the September process used county tax assessment valuations and did not look at the specifics of each house so could not be a full appraised valuation.[13] The county seems to be taking a broader view of what is best for the "local economy, educational system and quality of living in a region that is one of the poorest in the state."[13] Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño Jr. specifically mentioned consideration of the "450,000, 500,000 people that make up Cameron County, and the other million that make up the Valley, and also all the residents of Texas ... [even though] it is terrible, personally, for those 10 or 20 remaining residential owners" in Boca Chica Village.[13] The New York Times reported in late September that SpaceX extended the original two-week offer period by three weeks, in order to allow property owners to work with the county appraiser in order to potentially get their assessed valuations adjusted upward based on improvements beyond what the previous appraisal understood.[14] Many residents who accepted purchase offers had moved away by March 2020.[15]