Everglades City by the Numbers: What the Census Says

The Number That Matters

The 2020 Census counted 208 people in Everglades City. The town’s own sign, the one you pass on State Road 29, says 352. Both are true. The difference is the shape of the town: a working place with a second life as a seasonal one.

Of the 343 total housing units in town, 234 are vacant. That is not abandonment. That is the rhythm of the coast. Of those units, 203 are held for seasonal or recreational use. The town swells and contracts with the stone crab season and the winter sun. In February, the Everglades Seafood Festival brings 40,000 to 50,000 people into a town built for a few hundred. Three days of live country music, carnival rides, arts and crafts, and the stone crab this coast is named for. Proceeds go to schools, local charities, hurricane relief, and the commercial fishing fleet.

The permanent population is older. The median age is 59.1 years. That is not a retirement community’s number, exactly, but it is the number of a place where people stay. Where the ones who leave come back. Where the work has always been outdoors and the knees give out eventually.

The Work and the Money

The unemployment rate is 0 percent. That is a census snapshot, not a promise. It means that in the week the census takers asked, everyone who wanted a job had one. In a town this size, that is not a statistic. That is a fact of life. You do not live here without something to do.

The median household income is $75,163. That is respectable for a town of 208 people, and it is high for a place whose economy runs on fishing, guiding, and park service work. The median home value is $371,400. The median gross rent is $1,987. The gap between those numbers and the income tells you what the housing market is: scarce, seasonal, and priced for people who are not here in July.

A third of the town has a bachelor’s degree or higher. 32.8 percent. For a working water town, that is not what you expect. But this is also the gateway to Everglades National Park, and the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Visitor Center sits right here. The people who study the river of grass, who guide it, who interpret it—they live here too.

The Reason It Exists

Everglades City was not built to be a town. It was built to build a road. In 1922, Barron Collier began buying land here. The community incorporated as the Town of Everglades in 1923, the same year Collier County was created and Everglades City became its seat. The town is named for the Everglades it sits at the edge of. Its successive charters renamed it twice before the present form—the City of Everglades City—stuck in 1965.

Collier funded State Road 29 from Everglades City to Immokalee. It was finished in 1929, ahead of the Tamiami Trail itself. In 1928, the Atlantic Coast Line reached town—the southernmost point that railroad ever got. The railroad is gone. The road remains. State Road 29 is still the way in and the way out.

What the County Seat Lost

Everglades City was the seat of Collier County from the county’s creation in 1923 until two years after Hurricane Donna struck in 1960. The storm hit in September of that year. The water came over the islands and the town. Two years later, the legislature moved the county seat to East Naples. The town lost its reason for being, at least on paper.

It kept its reason in practice. The fishing fleet stayed. The park stayed. The road stayed. The town did not disappear. It just stopped being a county seat and went back to being what it always was underneath: a place at the end of the road, where the work is real and the water is the boss.

What the Numbers Miss

The census counts people in April. The festival counts them in February. Neither count is wrong. The 343 housing units, the 234 vacant ones, the 203 seasonal ones—those are the same houses. They are empty in August and full in January. They are the reason the town has a post office and a gas station and a seafood festival at all.

The median age of 59.1 years is a warning and a promise. A warning because the young people leave. A promise because the old ones stay. The 0 percent unemployment rate is a warning and a promise too. There is no slack here. If you want a job, you take the one that exists. If you want a house, you wait for one to open up.

Everglades City is 352 people on a good day, 208 on a census day, and 50,000 for one weekend in February. All of those numbers are true. None of them tell the whole story. The whole story is the road Collier built, the railroad that came and went, the county seat that moved away, and the people who stayed anyway.