Has Anna Maria Island been gentrified?

I’m working on my 14-hour real estate continuing education course which I am required to do thankfully only every two years to keep my Florida real estate license. Every time I work through the questions and an swers I almost always learn something new, and I guess that’s the point. This time I learned about gentrification, and I knew from the very first page that this would be a column.

To quote my course book, “Gentrification is a process of changing the character of a neighborhood through the influx of more affluent residents and businesses. This is a common and often controversial topic in politics and urban planning. Gentrification often increases the economic value of a neighborhood but can force out lowincome residents due to the increased cost of rent and higher cost of goods.”

And there’s more, “The gentrification process is typically the result of increasing attraction to an area by

Castles in the Sand

LOUISE BOLGER

people with higher incomes spilling over from neighboring communities.” Does any of this sound familiar to you? It certainly should since we’ve been living through an island gentrification for the last 10 to 15 years - we just didn’t give it a name.

Anna Maria Island was discovered by a vast number of vacationers when the Island started hitting national publications at least 10 years ago. At first, I thought what fun, little Anna Maria Island has been discovered, but I never dreamed it would keep going to the degree that almost every month you can find something about Anna Maria Island in print. My family in Connecti- cut told me that Connecticut Magazine has an advertisement saying to come to Anna Maria Island and its Old Florida charm courtesy of Avelo Airlines.

As recently as January of this year, the Wall Street Journal profiled just the city of Anna Maria “which is on the north end of a 7-mile-long tropical oasis.” They were profiling the city of Anna Maria’s zip code, which they pointed out is home to Florida’s second most expensive ranked median listing price properties. Miami’s Fisher Island is first.

Florida’s growth is no secret. It was growing before World War II and after the war, it boomed. I once heard a lecturer in a real estate seminar say the growth of Florida is primarily due to air conditioning and mosquito control. Now we can add to that the COVID-19 pandemic, which sent hundreds of thousands of new residents and even more new visitors to our shores.

The result is all based on econom- ics. Old Florida cottages and some not-so-old single-family homes are being replaced with huge new homes sporting multi-million-dollar price tags designed to rent to vacationers or flip as the prices keep going up. Recently in this newspaper, one of our reporters wrote a very enlightening story about the decline in population on the Island. That doesn’t mean fewer people are walking, riding bikes or eating in local restaurants on the Island, it means there are fewer fulltime residents. She reported in one year from 2020 to 2021, the Island lost 1,322 residents, 26.75% from Holmes Beach, 4% from Bradenton Beach and 13% from Anna Maria. Gentrification is all about changing the character of a community and infusing it with tons of money. Sometimes that’s good and sometimes it’s not. Out with the old and in with the new. The only thing they can’t change is the beach - or can they?