Comment on Where are all the successful "red cities"?
RBWells@lemmy.world 1 day agoMiami is purple at least. The old guard Cubans are Republicans, the last governor race not so representative. St. George in Utah is really nice, though maybe a town more than a city.
Tampa is nice but all of our potentially fixable problems are from the conservative outlying areas, as so much of the government is county not city. it would be much nicer with more money going to transit in particular.
Horsey@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I spent 3 weeks in Thonotosassa in 2015, and Jesus Christ was downtown Tampa sad. It just was devoid of any culture or any reason to be down there. The Columbia Restaurant and Ybor Cory was fire though and made up for it a little bit; it just wasn’t enough to make up for the rest of the city being dreary.
RBWells@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Well yes, it has come a long way in the past few years. I used to get so mad because we are a better city to live in but St. Pete’s downtown knocked it out of the park, absolute gem of a downtown and ours sucked.
But ours has gotten so much livelier, it’s not just the Tampa Theater and convention center and the Hub, there are a bunch of apartments downtown, the kids of the Columbia people opened a really good restaurant, the city built a much better Riverwalk, there are people out in the nights, concerts, events, it’s completely different.
BTW, when I was growing up we would go downtown on the weekend and it was an absolute ghost town, we wandered the empty streets and made up stories about the buildings. And you could buy houses in Tampa Heights for almost nothing, now they are millions of dollars.