South Gate Turned Down $170,000 to Save a Pool the County Wanted to Fill In
On a Thursday evening in South Gate, the smell of a food truck parked near the Community Center mixes with the green, mineral smell of Phillippi Creek. Kids cut across the lawn toward the pool gate. A few dog walkers loop the grounds under the oaks. Somebody's engagement photos are happening near the water while a rental crew sets up folding chairs for a wedding two days out. It looks like exactly what it is: a mid-century neighborhood clubhouse that has been doing this same job, on the same five acres, since 1956.
What most people walking through that gate do not know is how close they came to walking into a filled-in hole in the ground instead.
The offer nobody wanted to take
In May 2021, Sarasota County put a number on the table for the South Gate Community Association's five-acre parcel on Phillippi Creek: $170,000, through the county's Neighborhood Parkland Acquisition Program. The county's letter was blunt about what would happen to the pool if the deal went through. Officials described it as being in poor condition, a liability and operating expense the county did not want to inherit, and made clear that acquisition meant demolishing and filling it.
Context matters here. That offer landed in the middle of one of the hottest real estate stretches Sarasota County has ever seen. The county's own median price for single-family homes hit $407,000 that same May, an all-time high at the time and a 36.6 percent jump from May 2020. Against that backdrop, $170,000 for five waterfront acres with a historic building on it looked less like a rescue and more like a clearance sale.
Board member Allison Werner said as much to the Sarasota Observer at the time, calling the number "a laughable offer." The association turned it down.
That decision is easy to admire and hard to actually pull off, because saying no to the county did not solve the underlying problem. It just left South Gate holding the bill.
This was not the first rescue attempt
The 2021 vote gets talked about, but it was not the community's first swing at saving this place. Back in 2015, a group of residents formed a dedicated nonprofit, the Foundation for the Preservation of Victor Lundy's South Gate Community House, specifically to raise the money needed to restore the building. It ran for four years and dissolved in 2019 without hitting its goal.
By the time the county's offer arrived in 2021, the association was staring down a new roof and a new air conditioning system, each quoted at roughly $15,000, according to reporting in Sarasota Magazine. One board member, quoted in that same coverage, summed up the fundraising math the association had been running through for years: "We looked at grants and loans." A special tax district, a private sale, a sale to the county. None of it was a clean fix. The membership vote to keep the property came down to something closer to principle than budget certainty, since at the time only about 10 percent of the community was even paying the association's annual dues.
Why the building was worth fighting for in the first place
The reason any of this mattered enough to organize a nonprofit and reject a county buyout comes down to who built it. The South Gate Community Center hall was designed by Victor Lundy, one of the defining names of the Sarasota School of Architecture, the postwar modernist movement that put this stretch of the Gulf Coast on the architectural map. The General Services Administration later made an entire documentary about his career, titled "Victor Lundy: Sculptor of Space." The hall and the pool are both designated locally historic on the county register, and the pool itself holds a specific distinction: it is the oldest continuously operated public pool in the Sarasota area.
That designation sounds like protection. It is not the same kind of protection a National Register listing carries. Sarasota's Umbrella House on Lido Shores, another local mid-century landmark, sits on the National Register. South Gate's pool and hall do not. A local historic designation can slow a demolition conversation, but it cannot stop a private owner, or a cash-strapped volunteer association, from eventually deciding the math no longer works.
That gap between "historic" and "protected" is exactly why the Sarasota Historic Preservation Alliance chose the South Gate Community Center as the gathering spot for its 2024 "Six to Save" briefing, the annual list of local buildings the alliance considers most at risk. The building was not a coincidental venue. It is a working example of the tension the alliance spends its year trying to explain to people who assume old automatically means safe.
What's actually happening on the ground in 2026
The pool never closed. The wedding rentals never stopped. But the fundraising appeal has not gone away either. The association's current messaging still describes the pool as the community's go-to spot for 68 years, a figure that has not been updated in a while for an all-volunteer group that is, by its own admission, stretched thin just keeping the gate open and the water clear. That small inconsistency tells you almost as much about how this place runs as the big vote in 2021 did.
For 2026, membership runs $200 for South Gate residents, $275 for non-residents, and $100 for business associates, and that membership is what keeps the food trucks, the pool parties, and the holiday gatherings on the calendar. The rhythm of the year still runs through a short, recognizable list:
None of that changes because a county letter from five years ago got filed away. What it does mean is that every one of those evenings by the pool is underwritten by a group of neighbors who are still, quietly, doing the same math the 2015 foundation and the 2021 board did: what does it cost to keep this, and who is going to pay it.
The part worth sitting with
The county's letter in 2021 was not written by people who disliked South Gate. It was written by people doing a straightforward cost calculation on an aging pool and a five-acre parcel, and the number they landed on happened to conflict with what the neighborhood actually valued about the place. That is the tension underneath a lot of historic preservation in a fast-growing county: the version of "worth" that shows up in an acquisition offer and the version that shows up when someone's kid learns to swim in the same pool their grandparents did are not the same spreadsheet.
South Gate chose the second version in 2021. It is choosing it again every year a membership check gets written instead of a for-sale sign going up. Nobody has promised that choice gets made forever. The building has no federal protection, no guaranteed funding source, and a documented history of running out of runway. What it has is a neighborhood that keeps showing up anyway, one food truck Friday at a time.
If you already live in South Gate, that membership form is worth a second look next time it lands in your inbox. If you are new to the neighborhood, or thinking about what makes a place like this different from a subdivision with no center at all, that is exactly the kind of texture Juli Pearce spends her time helping clients understand about Sarasota's older neighborhoods. Let's Connect if you want to talk about what living near a place like this actually looks like, day to day.
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