Palm Harbor

[xbillyx]

Originally Posted by Aconite

For those moving from "up north", Palm Harbor isn't so much a town with a town center as a series of subdivisions united by strip malls. You can find it anywhere in the country-- a vista of McMansions, Olive Garden, and Lowe's, with the occasional local business tucked between. Our version has some palm trees and azaleas. It's nice, in a bland and deed-restricted sort of way. Dunedin has a town center and is more cohesive. You can live downtown and walk to a bagpipe concert or the Green Market in the park. Dunedin is also more diverse chronologically, ethnically, socially and socioeconomically, which is either good or bad depending on your own personal opinions.
Generally speaking Palm Harbor tends to have decent schools (with the qualifier "for Florida"-- nobody in his right mind moves to this county for the schools), largely because there's always been an influential school board member or two in the area. When Clayton Wilcox was superintendent, he lived in Dunedin, but redistricted his neighborhood so his kids could go to school in Palm Harbor. Dunedin, which lacks political clout, has since become sort of a dumping ground for the ghetto between downtown Clearwater and the southern edge of town. (Almost all of the kids who attend Dunedin Elementary are Clearwater residents, due to the county's weird boundary lines.)

I noticed that Palm Harbor doesn't really have a town center/downtown as well. I wish it did. Palm Harbor has great schools and appears to be really safe but it's missing more of an identity. I wish the city/town planners had built it to be more walkable and focused more on identity. Personally, I think it's silly to waste the great weather that's so conducive to being outside by building isolated, stale, cookie cutter neighborhoods nowhere near daily amenities.