(This piece appeared in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune on April 27, 2009.)

In 2004, when I returned to my hometown roots of Sarasota, real estate was the hot, hot, hot “topic du jour.” And, while not exactly big league, Sarasota had certainly become big bucks in the years I’d been living in Boston.

Familiar landmarks — like the Simple Sam’s market that used to be a standard stop on the way to Siesta Key — had disappeared, and countless small, knock-the-sand-off-your-feet-style Florida homes had been leveled in a buy-and-bulldoze frenzy. And everywhere I went that first year back, the art of conversation was lost to loud talk of deals in the making, dollars for the taking, and which side of the Trail you lived on.

For several heady years, real estate was the new religion in this town. People who should have known better — particularly those in the real estate industry — were flipping condos, building monster-sized homes on minuscule lots, and jacking up housing costs to an obscene level in a town that already had big problems attracting and keeping qualified workers.

Yes, a lot of people made a lot of money, and most of it was done with little regard to how regular folks would survive the seemingly unending upward spiral of housing costs and the correlative costs of living in what had become, essentially, a rich man’s town.

And now, even as housing costs are coming down to a slightly more egalitarian level, the pay scale in Sarasota remains one that, for most of us working folks, might allow us to live in paradise, but doesn’t allow us to enjoy it very much. It’s hard to enjoy the beach when you don’t have the gas money to get to it. It’s hard to afford the culture, even as event organizers drop the costs of their tickets 25 and 30 percent, as the Sarasota Film Festival recently did, when even discounted prices are way beyond the means of ordinary folks.

Back in the day, you could rattle around Sarasota with plenty of gas in your beat-up Datsun and go to your waitress job without having to pull a double shift, and still come home to a little cottage even, gasp, west of the Trail — with enough money left over to live with some fun and dignity. You could throw a line over the bridge and catch your dinner without having to pay somebody somewhere a fee for doing so.

But now, with the real estate boom gone bust, the bank bailouts, employers shifting health insurance costs completely to employees, and the downward availability of jobs, heck, forget about getting rich; it’s getting harder and harder to just be poor in this town. If some powers-that-be have their way, we’ll have to pay to just to go downtown, park our cars, and meet our equally unemployed friends for an overpriced coffee.

The devolving economy is drawing an increasingly finer bead in Sarasota when it comes to the haves and the have-nots. The diminishing middle class that scrambled to survive the early stages of the real estate bust by cashing out and buying down, or by simply moving out of Florida altogether, now struggles to keep their heads above the water that their homes are way under. An even worse off working poor is lining up by the hundreds for jobs that will go to just a few. Folks who until just a year ago might not have ever seen the inside of a food pantry, or ever donated to one, are now intimately acquainted with the best days and times to get grocery staples to keep their children fed.

It’s a mess. But I’d like to think that things are already turning around, that is, at least in a man-on-the-street kind of way. I notice a lot of people being kinder these days. Writers I know are trying to spread what little work there is around to one another. Friends are giving donations to food banks in lieu of birthday presents. Everywhere I go, folks seem to be smiling and telling one another, “Hang in there.”

I’m sorry to see some of this newfound gentility coming at such an excruciating economic and personal cost. But at the same time, the air of camaraderie is almost palpable, and if we’re smart, we’ll figure out a way to preserve this newfound community spirit when the good times begin to roll again — and they will, eventually.

In the meantime, there’s still a golden basket of sun shining down on this little piece of paradise we all call home. And there’s no price tag on sunshine.

At least not yet.