3/24/2024 0 Comments For the damaged coda lossless![]() Politically and culturally, I’m more Left Coast than I had been two decades ago, to be sure-but I spent most of my previous Florida years in Tampa or its suburbs, or the wealthy, culturally rich city of Sarasota. I am not in the same place in Florida as I was when I left. When I left Florida, Jeb Bush had just won reelection I’ve returned to a state where Republicans would consider Jeb too suspiciously liberal to elect him to a municipal utility board. Flags and bumper stickers and banners, and an ugliness I can’t remember seeing in America in my lifetime. And there are many, many flags for Trump. On a similar drive today, though, the flags are almost exclusively for Trump. Disney.Ī drive around rural Florida a quarter-century ago would have certainly taken you past houses and farms flying confederate battle flags the state’s panhandle has long been an epicenter for the neo-confederate movement. Every day brings a new attack on the rights of people DeSantis and his supporters have identified as The Enemy. And, not to put too fine a point on it, Florida Republicans lead the charge to make that party indistinguishable from the far-right fascist parties plaguing Europe and Central America. There are still Florida liberals and leftists, but the Florida of 2023 is a one-party state. It was, back then, a relatively purple state overall. Great cocktail bars are the hardest to find here, I’ve found, but they are here.įlorida is not the same place it was when I left. Dade City itself has a great craft brewery and a solid coffee shop, and there are far more throughout Tampa/St. Wesley Chapel, about a half-hour south along I-75, is a surprisingly large suburb of Tampa now.Ī year ago, I wrote that you can find great coffee shops and craft breweries and cocktail bars in any metro area, and that’s true here, too. The next “big small town” over, Clermont, has blossomed from a near-abandoned downtown into a genuinely interesting suburb, even if it’s hard to figure out just what it’s a suburb of. The town I’ve moved to, Ridge Manor, is an unincorporated area a few miles north of still-tiny Dade City, on a state road that goes straight east-west between I-75 and Orlando. Some of the areas that were truly nothing twenty years ago have become, well, something. ![]() Pete’s Central Avenue reminds me-a little-of K and J Streets in midtown Sacramento, smaller towns like Gulfport and Dunedin remind me-a little-of the smaller walkable towns back in California like Danville, Campbell, and Livermore. ![]() Tampa’s downtown no longer feels like they roll up the sidewalks at five (a problem that San Jose struggled to solve for years as well). Petersburg now has blocks of walkable downtown, starting from the waterfront museums and moving west through the Edge District, on to Kenwood and Grand Central, where they recently held one of the biggest Pride festivals in the country. But a lot of what I’ve been finding now simply wasn’t there two decades ago. Some of that is undoubtedly on me, on my failure to explore them adequately back in the 1990s. ![]() The metros feel more urban, more alive, than I remember. Of 2 Older Posts → A year back in FloridaĪbout a year ago, I moved away from the San Francisco Bay Area, back to Tampa Bay, Florida, where I’d lived for (mostly) all my previous life.įlorida is not the same place it was when I left.
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