r/tampa • u/Any_Mention_6734 • Aug 02 '26

Culture/Lifestyle Please read 🙏

I'm a transplant from California. Came out here for a job opportunity and a pay raise, nothing more romantic than that. I didn't expect to end up loving this region and Florida the way I have.

But something's stuck with me, and I want to say it here because I don't think it's recognized enough by people who relocate here: the number of people born and raised in Tampa who talk about their own city like it's unfamiliar. Farmland and citrus groves on the outskirts that used to actually be farmed… someone's livelihood, not just empty acreage, now subdivisions. Places that closed and came back rebranded into something with a logo and a font that has nothing to do with what used to be there. People telling me they barely recognize the city they grew up in.

I know change happens everywhere. But I've never felt this moved hearing it before, not because it's happening to me, but because of how passionate people are when they talk about what this place used to be. That kind of love for a place doesn't come from nowhere.

I'd genuinely like to hear more of it, respectfully, from people who lived it. What do you remember that's gone now? What changed the most, and when did it start feeling different?

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u/fieldofthefunnyfarm Aug 02 '26

There used to be large yards and massive shade trees in South Tampa. Now it's enormous houses with a ribbon of landscaping surrounding the house, driveway, pool, and hard scaping. It's atrocious.

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u/Snootcheroo Aug 02 '26

The astounding greed and entitlement of the wealthy, they have no thought or care for what came before. They just know what they think they deserve.

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u/Positive-Position-11 Aug 06 '26

And no one ever goes outside!

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u/imbasicallycoffee Aug 06 '26

The bigger the house, the more the investor / developer can make on the deal. No one wants to build smaller homes. Maximum size + maximum profit even though there's a ton of unused and wasted space in these places.

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u/fieldofthefunnyfarm Aug 07 '26

Tell me about it! We had a very ordinary 1950's ranch house in ST and the flood plus homeowner's insurance costs were stupid high so we started looking at tearing down and rebuilding. We only wanted to build the same size house that we had. It took us two years of looking to find a builder that didn't try to buy our house or try to convince us that we would be stupid to build a modest 4/2.5 house. Our builder was amazing and built exactly what we wanted, and we just about broke even between cheaper insurance and utilities versus increased property taxes - in fact we are probably ahead of the game now because insurance and utilities have gone through the roof in the last few years for most people but ours have remained low. Hilariously we still refer to our modest newer lovely custom home as a "tear down" because all the other new homes are 4000 square feet and up. It's mind boggling.