Who Sold the Sun? – The Razing of Florida’s Soul for High-Rises and Asphalt
- Aug 8, 2025
- 5 min read
Nichell has done over 10,000 readings. She uses a person's Astrological Natal Birth Chart to read from. A birth chart is like a blueprint of a person's mind, body, and spirit.
As high rises rise, temperatures spike, beaches rot, and nature dies, Floridians are left wondering: when did we sell our soul?
When I moved to Sarasota four years ago, it felt like a well-kept secret. A sanctuary. A resort town with a peak season (October to May) and an off-peak season (May to October). This is the kind of place where time stretched long and slow, where the land still whispered, where the Gulf still shimmered like a healing balm. Lido Key Beach was quiet in the summer. The air felt sacred. It was a place where you could feel your soul unclench.
But now?
Every square inch of this land is up for sale. Drive through Sarasota, and it hits you like grief: “For Sale,” “For Lease,” “Future Development,” scrawled across every building, house, and empty lot like gravestones for the Earth. The green spaces are vanishing. The trees are falling. And the silence has been swallowed by the roar of bulldozers and backhoes.
This isn’t just urban sprawl. This is soul theft.
Concrete, heat, and the stench of greed
July in Sarasota used to be calm. Tourists were gone, locals reclaimed the beaches, and the Gulf offered warm, gentle waters. This year? It felt like December. The traffic mirrored NYC gridlock. The beaches were packed in rows, wall-to-wall strangers soaking in a sun that feels harsher by the day.
And the water?
It’s sick. Some days it reeks of dead fish. Other days, it looks yellow and cloudy, with mysterious brown specks and slicks of oil gliding across the surface. In Venice, a summer camp was canceled due to dangerous levels of bacteria in the water. That’s not an isolated incident. It’s the new normal.
We are quite literally watching paradise die in real time.
Wetlands to wastelands
Many developers from the New York City Tri-State area descended on Florida during the pandemic like locusts. They didn’t just bring money. They brought their vision: a blueprint for asphalt, sameness, and unchecked vertical growth. Sarasota, once a place with soul and story, is now being stamped out with condos, copy-paste commercial strips, and “luxury” gated communities nobody local can afford.
They are building directly on wetlands. Grass squishes with two to three inches of standing water underfoot. These lands are sacred. They were designed to breathe, to soak, to nourish life. But now they’re being sealed under concrete choked, suffocated, drowned in profit.
And the heat?
It’s not just rising, it’s radiating. We’re seeing temperatures well above 100°F, made worse by all the blacktop and cement reflecting that heat back into the atmosphere. Asphalt doesn’t cool. Condos don’t shade. What once was green and soft is now scorching and sharp. You can’t even be outside between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. without feeling like you’re walking through a furnace.
The legalized erasure of Florida’s identity
This destruction isn’t just happening in secret. It’s been legislated.
According to a recent piece by Walter Duke + Partners titled “Unlocking Hidden Density: How Housing Policy is Reshaping South Florida’s Development Landscape” (July 11, 2025), the “Live Local Act” has essentially legalized the bypassing of local zoning protections across the entire state of Florida. They write:
“Florida’s landmark ‘Live Local Act,’ especially with its 2025 amendments, marks a tectonic shift in housing development policy. The law is designed to bypass traditional local barriers like contentious zoning battles and lengthy public hearings, which have historically stifled affordable housing production. Its provisions are critical for developers seeking to unlock new opportunities.”
In other words: no more public hearings. No more community input. No more resistance. Just bulldozers. Just asphalt. Just profit.
Under the guise of “affordable housing,” this law has become a blank check for overdevelopment, erasing not just the environment, but democracy itself. The public doesn’t get a voice. The land doesn’t get a choice. And our culture, our very identity, is being sold to the highest bidder.
And the desecration doesn’t stop at city limits or commercial zones, it’s cutting deep into preserved lands, state parks, and the wild lungs of Florida herself. Developers, emboldened by lax oversight and legal loopholes, are encroaching on the Everglades, threatening one of the most vital ecosystems in the world. This isn’t fringe speculation, it’s happening now, with roads, drainage systems, and luxury developments creeping closer and closer to lands that were once untouchable. Even Alligator Alley, once a sacred stretch of swampland highway teeming with life and silence, is being flanked by industrial sprawl and proposed real estate projects. What was meant to be preserved in perpetuity is now being carved up, divided, and sold off, parcel by parcel. These aren’t just lands, they’re the beating heart of Florida’s ecological identity. To build here is not just irresponsible, it is ecological violence masquerading as “progress.
Who benefits from this?
Not the residents. Not the environment. Not the animals whose habitats are being erased or the children who can’t swim in the water without risking illness.
The only beneficiaries are the developers. The investors. The out-of-state speculators who see Florida not as a living place, but as a portfolio.
This isn’t development. It’s desecration.
Florida was never meant to be Manhattan
We’re not just losing land, we’re losing soul, memory, magic. The very rhythm that made Florida is being replaced by sameness and sprawl.
Our wetlands are not obstacles, they are organs. Our beaches are not assets, they are living shorelines. And this sun? This is not a product to be sold. It is a birthright to be protected.
So I ask again: Who sold the sun?
Who signed the paperwork that allowed paradise to be paved? Who looked at a field of wildflowers and saw dollar signs? Who traded our soul for a strip mall and a Starbucks?
And more importantly: who’s going to stop it?
A call to remembrance and resistance
We have a choice. We can be witnesses to Florida’s extinction, or we can become stewards of her resurrection. We can demand new laws. We can vote for officials who protect the land, not sell it. We can say no to “density” that erases community, and yes to development that honors place, people, and planet.
The soul of Florida is still here. But it’s on life support. And it’s up to us to fight for her breath.
Read more from Nichell Delvaille
Nichell Delvaille, Holistic Soul Coach, Intuitive Astrologer
Nichell is a Wellness Practitioner. Healing affects all aspects of a person. She is a Holistic Soul Coach, Intuitive Astrologer, Reiki Master and Herbalist. Nichell also has certifications in Yoga, Meditation and Ayurveda.
