Tracey Gore drives down Estero Boulevard on Fort Myers Beach, pointing out the landmarks that no longer exist. “Red Coconut—gone. Junkanoo—gone. All these beachfront houses—gone, gone, gone,” she says. “Chapel by the Sea was right there. That was Armando’s Day Spa. That was Town Hall, but not anymore.” She points to another empty lot, starts to name what was there before Hurricane Ian, but then stops and considers before shaking her head. “I lived here my entire life, and I’m already forgetting what was here.”

Gore’s roots run deep on Fort Myers Beach. She’s served as a Beach Town Council member, vice mayor and mayor. Her mother, Joanne Semmer, runs the Ostego Bay Foundation. Her husband, Henry, owns a shrimp boat. Her uncle, Bill Semmer—recently passed—owned Bonita Bill’s, a local staple for cheap beer and fresh peel-n-eat shrimp. But the island where Gore grew up is in the process of disappearing.

In a single day in September 2022, Hurricane Ian did to Fort Myers Beach what developers have been slowly doing for years: It erased what was left of the small beach community that had first taken root early last century. Once a working island with a shrimp fleet and a commercial fishing industry, a place where folks could afford a little beach cottage for their retirement, Fort Myers Beach was being turned over to the well-heeled. In recent years, more and more of the old cottages have been pulled down to build massive new structures that—some argue—lack the charm and character of the original Fort Myers Beach. Many beach residents have fought this shift for years, filing injunctions and pleading their cases to the town council. But after Ian, many locals lost the strength or resources to keep fighting. Now, big changes are afoot on Fort Myers Beach. In a few years, the beach will be unrecognizable—even to the people who knew it best.

In many ways, Fort Myers Beach is a microcosm of what’s happening everywhere in the state of Florida. Between post-hurricane gentrification, the dying out of established industries and the voracious sweep of development, many people are worried that the state as we know it won’t be around for much longer.

A New Version of Florida

Shrimping has defined Fort Myers Beach since the 1950s, when fishermen discovered an abundance of pink Gulf shrimp in the waters off the coast. Crews moved from the over-fished seas up north to the Gulf of Mexico and San Carlos Island, where “pink gold” could bring in a fortune. Ancillary industries including boat yards and marine stores sprang up to meet the needs of the growing shrimp business, and nearly everyone on Fort Myers Beach seemed to have a role in the industry. The annual blessing of the fleet and the yearly Shrimp Festival were big affairs on the island. Shrimpers’ kids went to Beach Elementary. Peel-n-eats became the unofficial island dish.

With a three-man crew and a commitment to hard work, shrimpers could bring in enough money to pay off their boats, their trucks and eventually their mortgages. Shrimping was hard work and, for a time, lucrative work. But in the 1970s, the landscape changed with a series of industry setbacks. The 1973 oil crisis drove the price of gas skyward, and the increased costs to send shrimp boats offshore ate into margins. Cheap, farm-raised shrimp from overseas began flooding the U.S. market, which drove the price of shrimp down. In 2021, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the United States imported 1.8 billion pounds of shrimp. The top supplier was India. At the same time, U.S. regulators began limiting the number of shrimp boats allowed to trawl the Gulf, further driving up costs for shrimpers. The Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council currently has a moratorium on new shrimping permits in effect until 2026.

Today, the once-profitable shrimping industry on San Carlos Island has lost its footing. The number of boats operating off the San Carlos Island docks has dwindled. The boat yards and marine stores have closed. Last fall, after suffering major losses from Hurricane Ian, one of the two remaining legacy shrimp companies—Trico—shut down. This left a single legacy shrimp company operating on San Carlos Island: Erickson & Jensen.

“We’re not giving up,” says Anna Erickson, the latest generation to run her great-grandfather’s shrimping company. The business lost half its fleet after Hurricane Ian, but Erickson is resolute in pushing forward. “It’s one foot in front of the next,” she says.

Similar to many of the old industries in Florida, Erickson knows that her family’s company will have to adapt if it’s going to survive in this state. “If that means turning our supply shop into an open-air bar with food trucks serving our shrimp,” she says, “we’ll make it work.”

“We still want to be shrimpers,” her father, Grant Erickson, says. “There’s as much pink shrimp in the Gulf as there ever was—maybe more. We still want to bring in this great product. It’ll just be for a new version of Florida.”

A Changing Terrain

It’s not just the buildings and industry of old Florida that are dying out. The shape of the land and water is changing, too. In December 2023, Florida State Rep. Adam Botana (R-Bonita Springs) and Florida Sen. Jonathan Martin (R-Fort Myers) submitted bills to the Florida Legislature that would have reduced the size of the Estero Bay Aquatic Preserve. The area removed from the preserve would then be open to dredging and available for the development of hotels, condos and marinas. Founded in 1966, Estero Bay Aquatic Preserve was the state’s first aquatic preserve, nearly 14,000 acres of critical habitat for mangroves, seagrass beds, bird rookeries and fish hatcheries.

Bill Veach, former Fort Myers Beach City Council member, is on a mission to protect the borders of the preserve. “There are certain things I consider untouchable,” he says. “For me, the preserve is sacred.”

It’s not just an ecological issue, Veach believes, it’s also an economic one. The preserve is essential to the local fishing community, both commercial and recreational. “You get rid of those mangroves, and then fishing starts to decline,” he says.

The preserve’s acres of mangroves are also important to local water quality—a major issue for Southwest Florida’s tourism and fishing industries. “Five rivers feed into the preserve. Anything that slows that water down is important for water quality,” Veach says. “To threaten water quality for the sake of a few seems to me to be an unbalanced approach to our future. People forget this is a one-way street—we can’t make new preserves.”

Though the proposed legislation eventually died in subcommittee in March 2024, Veach believes this is just the first step toward the preserve’s ultimate destruction. “They’ll keep chipping away until eventually they have success,” he says.

A Public-Private Partnership

Some have started asking if there is a route forward for the state, a way to protect Old Florida while leaning into the inevitability of change. Absolutely there is, said Neil Anderson, president and CEO of the Wonder Gardens in Bonita Springs.

The Wonder Gardens first sprang up as a roadside attraction in the 1930s on the heels of the newly constructed Tamiami Trail, which joined Tampa and Miami. Originally a showcase for exotic reptiles, the Gardens took on different forms over the years before settling into its current incarnation—a botanical garden, a home for rescued and nonreleasable birds and reptiles and one of the top-rated tourist attractions in the area. The Wonder Gardens has achieved something nearly miraculous: It’s survived when so many other cornerstones of Old Florida have disappeared. How?

“Community support,” Anderson says. “Once you get that, then you really have something.”

That support began showing up in a tangible way in 2015, when the city of Bonita Springs extended a loan to the Wonder Gardens to keep the attraction from being swallowed by commercial development. Not long afterward, the city bought the property the Gardens sits on while having the long-standing nonprofit continue to run it. This public-private partnership has been a boon for the Wonder Gardens, keeping the local icon safe in the face of ongoing gentrification. “It will be the key to the success of the Wonder Gardens moving forward,” Anderson says.

Other Old Florida attractions, such as the Calusa Nature Center in Fort Myers, have benefited from similar public-private partnerships. The Nature Center was formed in 1972 as a site for environmental and science education. It received a lease from the city of Fort Myers for 105 acres of land that, at the time, was located virtually in the middle of nowhere. Today, the Nature Center sits at the busy intersection of Ortiz Avenue and Colonial Boulevard on a highly valuable plot of land, the kind that builders would love to get their hands on. Each year, the Fort Myers community holds its breath, wondering if the Nature Center will continue to survive.

You Can’t Stop Change

Wayne Simmons, president of Labelle Fruit Company and former president of the Gulf Citrus Growers Association, has lived in Florida all his life. “You can’t stop change,” he says. “You can just get your arms around it.”

In the last 20 years, citrus has suffered its own decline from the wildly lucrative years of the 1990s. Among hurricane damage to the groves, the blight of citrus greening and the cash-rich offers of developers, the state’s citrus industry by many estimates is on its way out. In May 2024, the Gulf Citrus Growers Alliance—a 40-year-old institution dedicated to promoting the interests of local growers—had to close its doors, forced to shut down due to lack of funds.

One way the state is “getting its arms around” change to old agricultural lands is through conservation easements, buying the development rights to pastureland and letting the owners stay on the property to maintain it. This keeps these undeveloped parcels in the hands of ranchers and farmers and out of the grip of suburban sprawl. But conservation easements have so far been dedicated to ranchland, not citrus groves. And each year, more groves are abandoned as citrus growers throw in the towel on an increasingly unprofitable industry.

“I want to be optimistic that citrus will still survive in some form,” Simmons says. “It’s just not going to be grove after grove after grove, the air smelling like orange blossoms, the way it used to.”

Simmons has seen many of the old groves “gobbled up” by housing developments and solar panel fields, especially in the last few years of post-pandemic growth when new residents flooded the state. “It’s just so disappointing that the uniqueness of Florida is going away as more and more people move in,” he says.

State of Change

The story of the state of Florida has always been a story of change. Three hundred years ago, a young lieutenant in the Second Seminole War called it a “barren, sandy, swampy and good-for-nothing peninsula.” But then the wetlands of the southern half of the state were drained, and suddenly that good-for-nothing peninsula became rich farmland. In the 1920s land boom, territory that was once considered uninhabitable became the winter playground for northern elites. Then the bottom fell out of the Florida land market, and many of those elites went home. They would, of course, be back. In the meantime, industries rose and fell. Shrimping and citrus had a golden age. Then a steep decline. Houses went up and were torn down. Hurricanes passed through. What defined this state was always shifting and changing.

“It’s inevitable that Florida’s going to change,” Simmons says. “Everything does. It’s like growing old. We don’t have to like it. That’s just the way it is.”