Drive down Mapp Road in Palm City on a Saturday morning and you will likely find a stroller traffic jam near the fountain, a few retirees at the chess tables, and someone's dog trying to steal a cornhole bag. None of that existed here as recently as 2022. The 20-acre stretch now known as Palm City Place & Patio was a vacant lot in the Old Palm City Community Redevelopment Area, the kind of overlooked parcel every county has a dozen of.
This month it is one of only four finalists statewide for the American Planning Association Florida chapter's 2026 Great Places in Florida People's Choice Award. Voting is open now through September 30, with the winner announced October 1. If that sounds like a small-town honor, look at who else made the final four: historic Harrison Avenue in downtown Panama City, Wellington Town Center in Palm Beach County, and the entire city of Bonita Springs. Palm City, a community without its own city hall or its own mayor, is standing shoulder to shoulder with an incorporated city and a downtown corridor with buildings dating to the early 1900s.
That is not luck. It is the second time in six years that a Martin County place has reached this stage, and the pattern behind both nominations tells you something real about how this county builds public space.
From Vacant Lot to Central Park
The turning point was a Martin County Commission vote approving a $1.7 million project to build the Patio at Palm City Place off Mapp Road. Jordan Pastorius, then the assistant community development manager overseeing the CRA, put the goal plainly at the time: the Palm City community had been missing a downtown, and this lot on Mapp Road was where the county intended to build one, with room for farmers markets, art shows, car shows, and food truck hookups already wired into the ground.
What often gets skipped in the retelling is that the Patio itself was the last piece, not the first. Over the two years before that $1.7 million vote, the county had already quietly added 1.5 miles of new sidewalks, 140 new parking spots, new street lighting, and roughly 10,000 plants along the same corridor. The showpiece patio and fountain came after the unglamorous groundwork, not instead of it. That sequencing, infrastructure before amenity, is the detail every other finalist this year skips in their own press materials, and it is the reason Palm City's project reads less like a park and more like a rebuilt Main Street.
What's Actually There Now
The finished space, as described in the APA's own finalist writeup, includes:
- A freshwater fishing pier
- Scenic walking trails through the green space
- Concrete ping pong tables and cornhole courts
- Picnic seating, chess and checkers tables
- A community pavilion
- A multicolored fountain that anchors the plaza
It is a modest list next to Bonita Springs' citywide nomination or a historic downtown corridor, and that is exactly the point the voting is testing. Great Places in Florida has, in past years, rewarded big, expensive, waterfront-adjacent projects, like Palm Coast's 20-acre Intracoastal park with its ADA kayak launch, or Wellington's Environmental Preserve inside the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Everglades Habitat. Palm City Place & Patio is neither waterfront nor preserve. It is a repurposed lot with a fountain and some picnic tables that residents actually use every week, which is a different kind of case to make to statewide voters.
This Isn't Palm City's First Trip to the Podium
Here is the part of the story that gets lost in the current vote-for-us push: Martin County has already won this exact statewide award once before. Historic Downtown Stuart took the Great Places in Florida People's Choice Award outright in 2020, beating out finalists from around the state in the process. That win predates the Palm City project by two years and has nothing to do with the current CRA push on Mapp Road, which means this county has now produced a statewide winner and a statewide finalist from two completely different corridors within the same six-year window.
The Palm City project came close to matching Stuart's outright win last year. In the 2025 cycle, Palm City Place & Patio was one of only three finalists statewide for the People's Choice vote and finished in second place. But the more telling recognition came separately, at the Florida Redevelopment Conference, where the county's Office of Community Development walked away with three statewide awards, including the Capital Projects/Infrastructure Award and the President's Award, described by the association as the most prestigious recognition for redevelopment excellence given anywhere in the state. A CRA project that started as a sketch on a vacant lot has now been judged by planning professionals to be the best redevelopment work done in Florida, not just the most popular with online voters.
The Difference Between This Vote and the Others
Public voting contests like this one live and die on turnout, and the other three 2026 finalists are running real campaigns. Panama City's city manager is on record calling Harrison Avenue the heart of the community's historic downtown and asking residents to vote. Wellington has set up a dedicated page at its own town website and is leaning on its history as a 2023 winner in this same program to make the case that it can do it again. Bonita Springs has announced a month-long communications push with e-blasts and press releases specifically built around this vote.
Martin County's approach so far has been simpler: a single announcement on the county's own homepage asking residents to help put Martin County in the spotlight. That is a lower-key campaign than what the competition is running, which makes the outcome genuinely uncertain and makes an individual vote carry more relative weight than it would in a contest already flooded with organized turnout efforts.
How to Vote, and Why Five Minutes Matters Here
Voting closes September 30, and APA Florida will announce the 2026 winner on October 1. The official ballot is hosted through APA Florida's voting form, and casting a vote takes less time than it does to read this far into the post. Martin County's own site has more background on the nomination and a direct link to vote, including the reminder that voting is open through the end of the month.
If you have already spent a weekend morning at the fishing pier or watched your kids at the cornhole courts, this is the part where that time turns into something the rest of the state gets to see. If you have not been out to Mapp Road yet, the fountain and pavilion are worth the short drive before the vote closes, if only so you know what you are voting for.
Martin County does not have a lot of moments where its everyday infrastructure gets compared favorably to a historic downtown in the Panhandle or an entire incorporated city on the other coast. This is one of them, and it runs out at the end of the month.
Kim Cuomo and the team at THE CUOMO TEAM live in these neighborhoods, not just market them, which is why stories like Palm City's second statewide nomination matter to us as much as they do to the neighbors who use that pier every weekend. If watching Palm City's transformation has you curious what it has done for property values along Mapp Road and the surrounding corridor, request your free market analysis and we will walk you through what the last few years of investment have actually meant for this part of Martin County.
