Fort Myers Development

JOINING US. THE MIDTOWN SECTION OF FORT MYERS IS GETTING A MAKEOVER. WHILE TALKS HAVE CONTINUED FOR MORE THAN A DECADE, THE PLAN IS FINALLY MOVING FORWARD. WGCU REPORTER YOUNJOO PARK SPOKE WITH RESIDENTS ON HOW THEY ENVISION QUALITY OF LIFE IN MIDTOWN. The estimated population of Fort Myers was 100,000 residents last year. Then there's Midtown. This is a section of Fort Myers located just south of downtown. And the way residents talk about it, Midtown sounds like a small town. We get on our bicycles and, you know, we went around and we climb orange trees and got, you know, mangoes and stuff out of the tree. And we went fishing inside the the little ditches and catching turtles and whatever else we can find in there. So, I mean, it's a really nice area. I love the area. I don't and I don't never want to leave. Evan Graves grew up here and is now a landlord of several properties. He acknowledges that his old stomping ground could look a bit spiffy for, and needs a little TLC. It's just it needs, it needs street lights. Any sidewalks? It needs it needs to be quiet. It needs to mirror downtown Fort Myers because it is midtown. Graves won't have to wait long. Revitalization projects are in the works. There are plans to demolish City of Palms Park and the News-Press building, so the neighborhood will lose out part of its history. But there is also vision to improve safety, such as new street lights, the construction of a new Fort Myers Police Administration building, as well as the reconstruction of roads and sidewalks. The Fort Myers City Council recently guaranteed $30 million of investment for Midtown revitalization, and residents are invested in its future. New homeowners like Wendy Stein and Robert Thompson moved into Midtown last year and want to make it their neighborhood. It's been really great that I get to live in Midtown, and then I just walk to work and I can walk home for lunch and, you know, patronize a local businesses. And it feels like we live in a community here, which is nice. Thompson says he is excited for new residential development to begin so that he can get more neighbors. When we bought our home, we were excited for Halloween. We said, oh, maybe we'll have trick or treaters, and there nobody ever came to our house. We prepared just in case we're there. We live in an area that the actual community is under utilized. A blank slate for development creates a lot of potential, but also pitfalls to avoid. This concern led Chrissy Penny well to voice her thoughts. I think it's important to have investors who are truly invested in this town. I think we've Fort Myers has been burned by a lot of a lot of people coming in with lots of money and building things. And then then what? You know, it's not really thought out. So it's exciting to have Midtown like a project, really be truly it really feels like they're trying to make it encompassing, trying to really serve a community. And what is this community going to look like and what is it? What are its needs? One goal of the city is to make Midtown a walkable urban core that will benefit people like Jenna Satterfield, who gets around in her walker. One of the selling points was, oh, you're going to be three blocks from Lee Memorial Hospital. I think, you know, I told him, I said, you know, that that's a good selling point. Except for one thing. I don't tend to spend a lot of time at Lee Memorial. It's a place I avoid. Over a dozen people gathered to contribute their vision for Midtown. Urban designer Victor Dover led the public input session. He says the city of Fort Myers is taking the right steps to involve everyone, and that his consultancies role is to crystallize their vision in planning. There's a tendency to write sentences that sound good, that might be non-threatening, like, let's preserve that small town hometown feeling. But when I say those words small town, hometown feeling, you get one mental picture, I get another, someone else gets another mental picture. And we're not sure what that really means. We draw images, draw, and make a drawing of it. Then we said, this is what we aspire to be. And it's a lot more reliable as a way of understanding what it is in each other's minds. For panel, livability means not only development but also esthetics. This community is screaming for art. And so when I came here today, that's sort of my mission, is to make sure this community is thinking about the arts, too, and thinking about, especially with a new development, like, how does that come into play and how can we support that? You know, because that's what really makes a community a community. You know, it's it's not just buildings, right? It's it's buy in from all over the place. So preserving the character of Midtown while enhancing the quality of life is a complex juggling act, an act that will keep midtown bustling with activities over the next couple of years. For WGCU news, I'm Youn Joo Park