For 10,000 years, people have relied on the natural resources of Tampa Bay, with its seagrass meadows, mangrove forests and diverse array of fauna.
But the relationship has changed drastically over the past 150 years as new economic drivers transformed the region. First came railroads and commercial shipping, in the 19th century. More recently, real estate development and the health care industry have drawn millions of people to the region, all against the backdrop of Florida’s largest open-water estuary.
The Tampa region’s population first ballooned after Florida became a state in 1845. By the late 1880s, the region became a key trade route, thanks to both the expansion of railroads and the discovery of phosphate east of Tampa. Cigar factories also provided jobs.
The broad, shallow bay was not a natural candidate for a busy port, but heavy dredging projects in the 20th century eventually turned Tampa into one of the busiest ports in the world.
“In order to live in Tampa Bay, there have been significant environmental transformations that had their own environmental costs,” said Evan Bennett, a history professor at Florida Atlantic University and the author of “Tampa Bay: The Story of an Estuary and Its People.”
Take real estate, he said. In the 1950s, developers started using a practice known as dredge and fill along most of the Tampa Bay coastline. It involved building up bulkheads, dredging up the bay bottom and placing the sediment behind the bulkheads to create more land to build on, he said.
“What that’s done is put a lot of people very, very close to the water and put them at significant risk,” he said.
Tampa Bay’s first major storm in recorded history came in 1848. Since then, only two major storms have hit Tampa Bay directly, most recently in 1921.
The bay’s history “is not a history of storms,” Mr. Bennett said. But that may be changing. Hurricane Helene left extensive damage across the region two weeks ago, even though it made landfall about 200 miles to the north.
“People sort of get lulled into a sense of confidence that they can build closer to the water” in Tampa because of the infrequency of big storms, Mr. Bennett said.
“Before two weeks ago,” he added, “I don’t think they could quite grasp what a big storm could mean.”
The four-county metro area that includes Tampa, St. Petersburg and Clearwater has grown steadily over the years, with much of the growth concentrated in the suburbs of Hillsborough County and neighboring Pasco County.
The area is home to 3.3 million residents, about 15 percent of the state’s overall population. About one in five residents are 65 or older. About 100,000 new residents move to the area from other states each year. And despite the glut of new construction, about one in 12 occupied housing units is a mobile home.
A number of factors have spurred the rapid growth, Mr. Bennett said, including the development of the University of South Florida’s medical campus in Tampa, more affordable living options than the Miami region and even other hurricanes.
Hurricane Andrew in South Florida “scared enough people” in 1992 that many moved to the Tampa Bay region, Mr. Bennett said, seeing it as safer.
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