{"id":97662,"count":8,"description":"Reporting by Noah Goldberg from his home in Sarasota, Florida.\r\n\r\nSarasota County is a beautiful ocean-front gatekeeper.\u00a0The city of Sarasota includes a large number of retirees on either end of Ringling Bridge, which connects to St. Armand's Key and Longboat Key, two significant retirement communities.\r\n\r\n\r\nSnowbirds may flock in from the North for the entirety of winter, however \"Gen Zers\" are no strangers to the area.\u00a0 Siesta Key Beach was awarded \"America's Best Beach\" in 2011, drawing in massive crowds of spring breakers. In 2019, over 2.7 million visitors came to Sarasota, spending $1.88 billion, generating $3.1 billion in total impact and creating over 25,000 jobs.\r\n\r\n\r\nWhile the location of its population is fluid, as many retirement and spring break communities are, the racial makeup is not.\u00a0 Sarasota County's population is 91.5% white. Despite a major minority population, it has been home to racially charged incidents.\u00a0 On July 4th, 2018, one African-American family staying at the Art Ovation hotel discovered a post-it note stuck to a lamp bulb with racist commentary. \"Unacknowledged segregation makes it easy for affluent, white residents to overlook the 'invisible' black community, which in turn perpetuates the delusion that we don\u2019t have any race problem,\" Carrie Siedman wrote in an opinion piece for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in 2018.\r\n\r\n\r\nRingling is a name visitors to Sarasota will hear often.\u00a0John Ringling, the primary of the five founding brothers of the Ringling Brothers Circus, moved the winter quarters of the circus\u00a0to Sarasota in 1927 with Charles Ringling, where the two held real estate interests.\u00a0They were seen as pioneers of development in the city for creating a major tourist attraction with the circus.\u00a0Today, their legacy lives on at the Ringling Museum, a popular local institution.","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/category\/sarasota-fl\/","name":"Sarasota, FL","slug":"sarasota-fl","taxonomy":"category","parent":0,"meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories\/97662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/taxonomies\/category"}],"wp:post_type":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts?categories=97662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}