It's a beautiful place and city is wonderful. Unfortunately, developers are slowly making it as crowded as other average Florida cities and it's beginning to lose the charm that brings people here to visit. A major highway connecting Orlando and other large towns now runs right into the city, and the parks that you could go walk and only have to share with occasional passersby are now flooded with people and getting more crowded every month. My wife and I went and sat on our car recently and 5 people came up and urinated by a big tree right in front of the walkway within the 15 minutes we were there. Never had that before all this new traffic came in. Developers are cutting down huge oaks and palms, clearing all the beautiful serene wooded areas to build more and more subdivisions, so of course it's looking less and less attractive to live here. I was born and raised in this area, and even though I've seen changes, it's been slowly up until the past 4 years. Now it's growing less attractive at a mad pace just like most everywhere else in FL. Someone has decided to not keep it "Some place special" anymore, and it breaks my heart. Greed trumps beauty of our beautiful heritage, it shouldn't be that way. I think most of the people that established and kept Mt. Dora special, have gotten older and retired or died and a new generation now is empowered that thinks about simply commerce and tax money instead of considering the whole picture, tax money comes from people coming here because they love the small town feel and lack of busy big city traffic(another awful side effect of new roads into a small town, takes twice as long to get thru town now, backs up for blocks every day. Didn't have that problem just 24 months ago). So, by trying to maximize how many people you cram into the city at once, you do increase commerce, but you reduce the amount of people that want to come here because it becomes no different than the city they live in or any other average Florida busy downtown . It's sad, but it's simple logic and concern for Mt.Dora's best qualities that is becoming a rare commodity. I'm missing it already and all I see is more land being so-called, "developed". How ironic, because it took these mighty oaks and beautiful healthy eco systems decades and even centuries to develop, yet I see contractors that could care less about our town push those trees to the ground, raze the woods, homes of our wildlife gone in days, and engineered water shed landscaping created to start building more houses and businesses. It should be more accurately called "undeveloping". But hey, it's only our trees, environment, and animals, right? It's so much better to make loads of money, move on after we put houses there so more people can move in and create more need, right? Makes me sick.