New York Times View of Brandon Saddens Homegrown Political Activist

Gail Gottlieb isn’t anywhere near the polls today in Brandon, which doesn’t matter from a civic involvement standpoint, since Gottlieb is a registered Democrat.

That doesn’t mean, though, that the issues that weigh heavily on the minds of Republican voters in Florida, as they select their GOP presidential candidate, don’t bode ill for her as well.

That point was driven home to her on a subway ride in New York City, where Gottlieb, a Local Voices blogger for Brandon Patch, said she opened up a print copy of The New York Times and read the headline: “Years of Despair Add to Uncertainty in Florida Race.”

What captured Gottlieb's attention, even before reading the Jan. 29 article, was one of the 14 photographs that accompanied the article, as depicted in the online slide show posted by the New York Times.

Beneath the photo reads the caption: “A children’s park in a housing development in Brandon that residents said was abandoned by the developer.”

“I was on the packed subway, with my New York Times, when I saw my hometown, right there above the fold,” said Gottlieb, a graduate of Brandon High School, whose family moved to Brandon when her mother got a teaching job at .

“It made me a little bit sad for our town, but it wasn’t anything that I hadn’t already noticed,” added Gottleib, who is active with the East Hillsborough County Democratic Club, which meets the second Tuesday of the month at in Brandon. “The neighborhoods when I was growing up in Brandon were well-maintained, a nice mix of professional and skilled employees. A foreclosure was unheard of."

And today?

"Now," she added, "I often see the look of poverty in what I thought was a middle-class community.”

Among the additional images shot by  photographer Chip Litherland was a still from nearby Plant City, of the Lopez family, shopping for clothes at a yard sale.

The caption reads: “We used to shop at J.C. Penney,” said Sofia, 12. “But my mom doesn’t take us there anymore. We find things at places like this.”

The photographs are packaged with an article that leads with the story of Kate and Marcus Freeman, young professionals who moved recently from Worcester, MA, to central Florida.

"One day at a time, that's all you can do," reads the published quote from Kate Freeman, who with her husband, Marcus, a laid-off accountant, were interviewed at an intersection off Interstate 4, "selling chili for $5 a jar to help save their home, which was in foreclosure." 

According to the Times article, written by Susan Saulny, Kate Freeman is "aware that the fight for her house was taking place on an even larger battlefield — the politically crucial Interstate 4 corridor, running from Tampa to Orlando to Daytona Beach over seven diverse and struggling counties that tend to swing the most of any in this swing state."

Also depicted in the slide show were pictures of closed businesses in Lakeland, a novelty shop and hotel in Daytona Beach, a unisex salon in Kissimmee, a rest stop at mile marker 47 on Interstate 4, Dinosaur World in Plant City, Bargain World in Lake Buena Vista, Bagel King Bakery in Deltona, power lines and a closed movie theater in Celebration and a development in Orlando.

The caption accompanying the picture of a "low rate" sign tacked onto a residential garage notes how "optimism was high when Florida's building boom was in full tilt," but that the mood has since soured, "with one of every 360 housing units still in foreclosure."