[OldDave]

It seems to me that the Town Squares appeal to a couple of different audience, certainly with some crossover. First, the music and dance crowd. From another thread going on here about a county grant to help pay for the nightly music, it is clear that this is very important to many folks. Although I do wonder just how narrow that group is. With the two squares previous packed, I'm guessing that couldn't have been more than a few hundred in each location. That's really not very high out of 80-100,000 residents, not to mention locals who want a free show. But if I had to guess at why there are bleachers there, I would guess it was the never ending complaining about people saving chairs when I first started reading this site a year ago. The bleachers will certainly stop people from moving chairs around. I also recall a post saying for the chairs that are at Brownwood, they now have a monitor to keep you from taking more than one for yourself. So someone may have been listening to your complaints and trying to respond.

The other audience is certainly those coming to shop and eat. Many people have said they are disappointed, but clearly this is going to take a bit of time to develop. You really cannot expect people to open stores without enough traffic. But certainly it will come with the new building. It also seems they've set aside more room for growth, than say Lake Sumter.

You know once you get beyond the initial excitement of the squares, there is a certain artifical sameness about them. That could be good say having movie theatres at each place. It's good to have the same restaurant, if you like it. If you don't it's disappointing not to have something different. But as I look at the two squares that existed, in my mind Spanish Springs is so much better. Not because the square is better or worse, but because all of the outside development that grew nearby and across the street. It really is a one stop shopping area. Lake Sumter cannot be because it's closed in.

It appears Brownwood has much more area around it for bigger shopping venues. Of course I wasn't there when Lake Sumter went up. Perhaps it was built way before the houses around it like Brownwood.

I initially wondered why TV would build so far past all the houses, even the planned ones. I think that has been well answered by all the new land acquistion that is starting to show up. In 10 years, I'm guessing Brownwood will be surrounded like Sumter, but I'm guessing with a lot more shopping with it.

One other thing I have to mention is the farmer's market. There have been nothing but raves about it from everyone here, other than a couple of people who should never shop outdoors. Frankly we're really looking forward to seeing that in March. We drove to a couple of markets around TV this summer, but found very little homegrown stuff. I hope it really goes. (Now if we could get an actually fresh florida seafood store...so you can actually tell we're in Florida.) We spent a week on Marco Island a couple of years ago and twice a week they set up a farmer's market in a park. It was huge, well attend, the the produce and baked good were extraordinary.

So, I think Brownwood will grow, albeit slowly.