Drive south on Overseas Highway toward mile marker 20 this time of year and you will pass two very different kinds of investment within about a quarter mile of each other. On one side, a resort that didn't exist in its current form five years ago, freshly renovated to the tune of $14 million and just named a 2026 Best Park by the Florida and Alabama RV Park and Campground Association. On the other, a sun-bleached yellow building that has survived several ownership changes and more than a century of use as a railroad depot, a schoolhouse, and a bar before anyone thought to call it a landmark.
Guess which one the neighborhood actually treats as its living room.
The Fourteen Million Dollar Neighbor
The property now known as Sugarloaf Key RV Resort & Cottages sits off Johnson Road near mile marker 19.75, and its recent history moves fast by Keys standards. It operated for years as Lazy Lakes RV Resort before Blue Water Development bought it in 2021 and put more than $14 million into a full redevelopment, including new roadways and a new tiki structure. It reopened to the public in October 2023 as Sun Outdoors Sugarloaf Key, built around a seven-acre saltwater lagoon where guests kayak and paddleboard past mangrove shorelines.
The growth since then has been fast, too. The resort now runs 65 full-hookup RV sites plus 35 vacation rentals split between two-bedroom cottages, studio bungalows, and a pair of Airstream rentals, a lineup that has expanded by half again since the 2023 opening. In April, the Florida and Alabama RV Park and Campground Association handed the property its Best Park Award at the association's annual convention in Orlando.
This summer the resort also launched something new: a themed weekend series called Local Loafers, running through the resort's Oasis Tiki Bar and Airstream Snack Shack. June opened with a Casino Night weekend, July brought Christmas in July, and August closed the run with Halfway to Mardi Gras. It is genuinely fun programming, and it is aimed almost entirely at the people staying on the property that weekend. That is the point of a resort calendar. It exists to give paying guests a reason to stay an extra night, not to give the family down the road a reason to walk over on a random Tuesday.
The Yellow Building That Outlasted Everyone
A few hundred yards south, at 19991 Overseas Highway, sits Mangrove Mama's, and its story runs in the opposite direction. The buildings started around 1909 as a stop along Henry Flagler's Overseas Railway. One structure served as the station agent's house and later a one-room schoolhouse. A man locals remember only as Eddie ran the place as a bar and fish shack for sailors before he died and the property sat empty. In 1979, Gary and Nancy Bell bought it and reopened it, and because their boat named Mangrove Mama was always docked out front, the whole operation picked up her name.
The current owners, Aaron Hervey and John Cameron, are high school friends from Stowe, Ohio who became business partners here in 2019. Cameron had actually discovered the place as a regular after he and his wife bought a home in the Lower Keys, which is its own small proof of how the restaurant works: people move here, find it, and keep coming back until eventually some of them buy it. Hervey now runs the kitchen, Cameron the finances, and neither has tried to smooth over the old-Florida kitsch that a corporate renovation would probably strip out. The old schoolhouse room is still the air-conditioned bar. An old pontoon boat still doubles as the stage. Live music runs nightly from 6 to 9, and according to Cameron, the same regulars show up night after night for karaoke and the Shrimp St. Jacques.
That detail matters more than it sounds like it should. A resort books entertainment to fill rooms for a weekend. A restaurant that books music seven nights a week, year after year, for a crowd that returns on a Tuesday for no occasion at all, is describing something closer to a habit than an event.
Same Half Mile, Different Guest Lists
There is a third player in this stretch worth naming, because it sharpens the point rather than muddying it. The Sugarloaf Key/Key West KOA Resort, also at mile marker 20, runs its own marina, pool, and a fenced dog park, and it sits directly across the highway from Mangrove Mama's. It is a well-run, popular property, and it serves the same basic function as the newer Sun Outdoors resort down the road: give traveling guests a comfortable, activity-filled base for a few nights in the Lower Keys.
None of that is a knock on either resort. Tourism dollars support the tax base and the businesses that residents also rely on. But it does mean that two of the three biggest capital investments visible from mile marker 20 right now are built for people who will be gone in a week, while the third, the one that has changed hands the most times and spent the least on itself, is the one built for people who live three miles up the road and plan to be back on Friday.
What Else Moved This Summer
Not everything at MM 20 stayed put this year. In July 2025, Monroe County Fire Rescue moved Station 10 personnel out of the existing Sugarloaf Key station after the building became unsuitable for occupancy, into a temporary spot within the community. Then, starting July 29, 2026, the county shifted actual emergency response duties further out, with crews now responding from Station 9 in Big Coppitt Key and Station 11 in Cudjoe Key while planning and construction continue on a rebuilt Station 10. Crews assigned to Sugarloaf still handle daily training, fire inspections, and pre-incident planning on the key itself, and the county has said it is watching response times closely during the transition. The Monroe County newsflash page has the latest on the timeline as construction moves forward.
It is a quiet, unglamorous shift, and it will not show up in any resort brochure. But it is the kind of change that actually alters daily life on the key in a way a new tiki bar never will.
The Actual Shape of Change Here
Put those three threads together and a pattern shows up. The money moving through Sugarloaf Key right now is landing almost entirely on the visitor side, in resort acreage and themed weekends built to be photographed and shared. The infrastructure residents actually depend on, from fire coverage to the one restaurant where the regulars know each other by name, is either quietly in flux or quietly holding steady with almost no capital behind it at all. If you live here, that is worth noticing precisely because it is easy not to. The new sign is the one you see from the highway. The old yellow building and the fire truck routing are the ones that decide what your week actually feels like.
None of this changes what makes Sugarloaf Key worth living on, the lagoon, the mangroves, the sense that MM 20 still runs on its own clock. It just means the next time someone tells you the neighborhood is changing fast, it is worth asking which half of it they mean.
If you are thinking about what any of this means for property here on Sugarloaf Key or elsewhere in the Lower Keys, Anneliese Dietrick has spent more than thirty years on these islands and knows which changes are cosmetic and which ones actually matter. Let's Connect.
