The long-time commercial realtor touts his real estate experience – while criticizing current development practice.
By Noah Bookstein
Original Air Date: May 27, 2026
Host: John Harshman wants to be your next Sarasota City Commissioner. Noah Bookstein brings you a profile of the long-time commercial realtor who has been endorsed by the Sarasota Republican Party.
Noah Bookstein: John Harshman first came to Sarasota as a hitchhiker in the ‘70s.
John Harshman
John Harshman: I hitchhiked into Sarasota in 1974 on the Ides of March. I grew up in Dayton, Ohio, went to a little college in northwest Georgia, and hitchhiked here to visit my sister and future brother-in-law, who were then attending New College. Like I said, I had $20 and immediately fell in love with Sarasota.
NB: 52 years later, that hitchhiker is running for city commission. After putting himself through college here, he built a commercial real estate brokerage called Harshman and Company, and served on several advisory boards. Then, in November, he retired—briefly.
JH: I thought that I was going to do all the things that you do when you’re retired. However, this came up, and I watched the workings of the city commission and felt that my history in the city as well as my business background would be a great asset.
NB: Harshman did a 45-day listening tour before he ran for the commission, when he had conversations with neighborhood leaders, business owners, environmental advocates and arts organizations.
JH: The community didn’t feel like they were being listened to, and when they were being listened to, they weren’t being heard. This was from the commission as well as staff, and this was across the board from neighborhoods to business—environmental to arts. It was amazing to hear this—that they really felt like that the Commission did not set the example that they were going to not just listen but hear the community and to direct staff to go in the direction that the community wanted and not in the direction that staff wanted to go.
NB: His campaign platform is built around what he calls “clean and safe,” and he thinks the city is falling short.
JH: Downtown is not as clean and safe as it should be, and neither are the neighborhoods. Unfortunately, that has been an effort by the city that has been placed on the back burner, and we can fix that. It’s not rocket science; we just need to focus on it.
NB: Perhaps the hottest issue of the day is development and how the city manages it. Harshman is known as a real estate business leader. In his real estate career, he worked with developers, but he is careful to say he isn’t a developer himself.
JH: I’ve never developed anything. I have built a house that we live in. But I have worked with developers, and I’ve also worked with people selling their properties to developers, so I’ve seen both sides of that table. The developers that we have today in Sarasota are significantly different than the ones that I saw when I was first coming up. I used to tell people that I knew more broke developers than I did successful developers, because they were mom-and-pops, and they people thought that you just buy land and build a building. Well, there was a real rude awakening because it’s a very, very difficult process. The developers we have in town now are very smart, multi-generational development companies. They have an army of lawyers, they’re very patient, they’re extremely well funded. They know all the questions that they need to have answered before they even contract to buy the property, so you don’t see the failed developments that we saw years ago. It’s important that we have commissioners that understand that development process because we’re dealing with a whole different level of developers today than we ever were. Additionally, from a development standpoint, we need to get in the code and make the changes to the code so that we don’t have projects like the Obsidian being presented and processed through staff.
Rendering of the Obsidian, which would be the tallest tower in downtown Sarasota if approved as currently proposed.
NB: Harshman wants selected officials and people in the neighborhoods to have more involvement in the approval process for developments.
JH: Even if you are processing through the administrative approval and you do dot the I’s and cross the T’s with your code and you’re not trying to ask for any hardships or exemptions, you still should have to have obligatory neighborhood meetings.
NB: Harshman also wants to see the creation of two parks zones—one for parks with amenities like tennis courts and one for parks that are primarily nature preserves. A park stone would prevent what he calls clever legal maneuvers by future developers.
JH: Whenever you have an inconsistent zoning with the use like that, you make opportunities for somebody who’s clever to look at that and figure out, “Oh, I can put this in there and I can legally do this. Sell me the land,” and we don’t want that to be able to happen.
NB: On affordable housing. Harshman does not approve of the site on First Street and doesn’t think the city should act like a developer in solving this issue.
JH: The city has made a huge mistake with the First Street properties in my mind, in that they got into this trying to be a developer. The lots are too narrow. They’re 100 feet deep when you really need to have 125 feet in order to make any kind of an efficient garage. Any time you build over five stories, the cost of construction just goes through the roof. The sites were not good, but even more devastating, I think, than that to the community is that it took staff away from doing what they were supposed to be doing and what they were hired to do. The staff—and this was driven by the previous city manager—the staff then tried to be developers. They were trying to put the square peg in the round hole, trying to make a project work that wasn’t going to work. Then they took their eye off the ball of what they were hired for. There is a role for the city in affordable housing, and one of the tools that they have laid out was the density bonus, so we’re going to get some affordable units from that.
NB: On parking, Harshman says the city reached for higher fees before looking inward.
JH: They were expanding those hours to 8 a.m. in the morning and also charging on Sunday. What that was going to mean is: They were going to have to redo all the signage, so there’s an expense there; they were going to have to add hours either to current employees or hire new employees in order to enforce those added times; and it just didn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. I think whenever the city is looking at increasing charges to the citizenry, they first need to look at that particular department and see, first, are there areas in that department that they can streamline and they can make a little more efficient? In business, we always do that. You can’t always raise your prices on something. Sometimes you have to look within and say, “Can I deliver this a little bit more cost-effective?” I would not change the hours. If you need to tweak the parking charge—think it’s a $1.50 an hour—if you need to raise it up a little bit, the people that are used to paying for parking—at that point, I don’t think that an extra quarter is—nobody likes to pay for parking—I don’t like to pay for parking—but when I go visit a community, I pay whatever it is, and it’s never as cheap as it is here, but I think that would be a more logical approach. Then, once we have gotten those new elevators in, we need to back down the parking charge again because the whole impetus for this was so that we could get new elevators and not so that we have this long-term burden on the community to pay for parking.
NB: About the structure of city government itself, Harshman says he can live with the weak mayor system.
JH: Based on the history, the city doesn’t want anything different. They’re comfortable with the city manager commission form of government, and until the community changes and decides to do something otherwise, then we will have that form of government, and it’s within the boundaries of that government that we need to work and be successful.
NB: After 52 years, the man who arrived with $20 in his pocket and a hitchhiker’s optimism says his motivation is uncomplicated and that he loves the environment and culture in this place.
JH: I love Sarasota Bay. I’m out there on my kayak on Sarasota Bay. I love the natural aspect of Sarasota. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Everglades, so I go down occasionally. I love our arts—the fact that we have Ringling Museum is just a huge benefit.
NB: The election is August 18. Two at large seats are on the ballot. For WSLR News, Noah Bookstein.
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