Talking Sides

It depends on who you ask. For many residents living on the West side of town, Gainesville is a sea of resources and development. It boasts a top-ranked state university, one of the best hospitals in the state, many nature preserves, and a quaint downtown with many local restaurants and bars. For other residents—disproportionately those who live Out East—their Gainesville is a desert that is often isolated from access to quality food, jobs, schools, healthcare, housing, and consistent transportation.

To understand what’s happening in the city of Gainesville, let’s first look at Florida as a whole. Florida is a low-tax state, which means that local governments must fund social services, often relying heavily on property taxes. High-income residents tend to buy higher valued homes, which leads to a higher tax base and more services. All of this concentrates in affluent areas.

With a large portion of Alachua County off the tax rolls due to University of Florida and other state/federal institutions, the taxable property value in Alachua County is 38% lower than the Florida average. Counties with low tax value often compensate by setting high tax rates, reducing services, or both. When this happens, less affluent areas tend to be first to lose.

Bounded to the West by Main Street, East Gainesville is a tight-knit community that is predominantly Black. Many East Gainesville residents have lived there for multiple generations. In the 1960s, the construction of Interstate 75 to the West of Gainesville caused a population decline on the east side due to limited economic investment.

Today, many East Gainesville residents are living at or below the poverty line and have not been able to accumulate wealth/assets, in large part due to systemic and institutionalized racial discrimination. Less than half of East Gainesville residents are homeowners, and Gainesville’s rejection rate of Black applicants for home loans is one of the highest in the nation. Many homes on the East side were constructed in the 1950s and are valued less than those in other areas, leading to a low tax base and extremely limited social services. The lack of wealth—along with the significant amount of protected natural land in East Gainesville—motivates development focused unevenly on the West side of town.