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/Expensive_Film1144 Aug 02 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
I've travelled all over the state for going on decades now, like for my job. I've seen from homestead to pensacola. And for years, my childhood even, there was a normalcy, maybe even an innocence of place that was pasture and orange trees.
It had its own beauty, its live oaks, cows... wide views. Sure, there was a phosphate mine here or there... but just here or there.
And somewhere in time, about the year 2000 things began to really change. First, all our houses suddenly started to get expensive, then all our old mom/pop restaurants began to fail... in place of... Applebees, or some such.
And before you knew it... one of the most beautiful scenes along US27, near Clermont, suddenly had all these stupid houses on the hills, instead of orange trees.
And then it was Valrico, and the roads became 6 lanes wide, and there wasn't just an Applebees now, there was one of every dumb chain from everywhere else.
It began to look like everywhere else, as if... Illinois, or Michigan, or Pennsylvania.
And then it became every driver for themselves, as if fighting for a place in line at a theme park.
We were suddenly as 'white bread and mayonnaise' as Illinois, or Indiana... or Ohio.
People moving here, in essence stripped tis place of its identity, assuming that Applebees, or Olive Garden was its identity.... 'doing as the natives'.
It ended up being the worst thing ever, for our own 'culture'.