Holy Shit! What in the HELL happened to Key West???

When I was there last time (1995) I stayed with friends in their little house close to town---very, very middle class. I bet they didn't make more than 40 grand tops.

There was a lower income section of the city with a restaurant on cinder blocks with chickens running around the yard. The whole town felt somewhat carribean--well...OK, not that far....but, somewhat.

What the hell has happened? I was trying to plan a vacation for Micheal and I...ALL that middle class stuff is gone. Just gone. All the lower income stuff is way gone.

All the restaurants look touristy...and I bet have "conch" burgers on the menu.

Man, this is just disgusting.

Is there anything left down there worth seeing?

Real Estate in the Keys is insane. A TRAILER sells for over 200k down there.

Do they still have those houseboats in the channel between Key West and Stock Island?

:shrug:

Yes, sorry to say but the Keys have fallen victim to the tourism/development industry. God knows we can't leave any section of America untouched with strong regional flavor.

Have you been there recently, or are you just gathering this from what you're finding looking for hotels, etc? Unless things have drastically changed in the past few years, there is still a rich contingent of middle and lower-middle class residents and businesses. And there were still plenty of chickens and six-toed cats wandering around.

decade.

Go look at realtor.com. You will want to throw up. I am not kidding.

BTW--my friends left because it got to expensive for them to maintain the home they OWNED. Now I see why.

I imagine the Hemingway property is humming along just fine; cats do well on Key West regardless of the economy. ;)

x(

seriously, when you get time, go to realtor.com...and take a look at the crap that is "worth" 500,000. That's for the condos---they are just "OK" condos too...not really cool ones. There is one junky nasty one for 350,000. Junky to the point where it doesn't look like a safe neighborhood.

:shrug:

Never been there before we LOVED it. I was told by several people that it is next to impossible to live there any more. The property is so overvalued that the locals ("Conchs") can't afford to pay on their grandmothers crappy shack and have to move out. In come the neuvo riche gobbling up the real estate and it just gets worse....or so I am told.

and so many of the used-to-be-regional small towns in NH and VT.

All turning into mini-enclaves of whatever the big city nearby is, as people flock there for the "color" but then demand that they have all the accoutrements of their home cities, and all the expensive gourmet foods and better restaurants and art shops and blah blah and slowly they choke the community to death, driving out all the local people who can no longer afford to live there, and then the asshole yuppie fuck scum sit around bitching about how the place has "lost its flavor".

Pfagh. Assholes.

Of course it's touristy - you like it, don't you? There is still much fun to be had in an authentic manner.

edit - misread OP at one point.

rinse & repeat.

go to Bozeman Mt. - what people loved about the place is being destroyed as it is developed.

money changes everything.

years ago, when they boxed it in with hotels, etc.

Key West -- Key Weird, as the locals call it -- is my least favorite part of the Keys...has some good bits, but I can really only take a couple of days there (just like I used to feel when visiting Vegas). I've mostly been a Key Largo dude. I love the Keys.

There're some good, reasonable places to eat there, at least, if you look around off the tourist path (which, with the cruise ships dumping their cargo out, is mostly Duval Street and its bazillion T-shirt shops). And some good un reasonable places, too.

I haven't been there since 1989.

What happened? Simple. Man comes to the Keys on vacation and loves the laid back atmosphere. He decides to move here. Now the laid back atmosphere starts to become annoying and inconvenient. All the things that he loved while on vacation (warm breezes; fish sandwiches from a small local pub; street musicians) now become something that must be "modernized"...(keep out the warm breezes by enclosing all the buildings and putting in a/c and cranking it down to 68 degrees; close the small local pubs because they might be unsanitary and go with the big franchise restaurants and hotels; arrest the street musicians because they are probably all bums anyway).

We see it everyday. People come down here from the north because they love the Keys life, but once here, they do everything they can to turn it into the place they left up north that they couldn't stand anymore.

But now the worm is starting to turn. A lot of the same people who did this are now starting to leave, because the islands have "lost their appeal". We're all hoping that they get out of here soon and maybe someday it will revert back to our beloved Keys.