For the second year in a row, Florida has had the highest influx of newcomers of any state in the nation -cresting over 249,000 new inhabitants in 2022 alone. Many of these people moving south were looking for better weather and a break from state income tax, behavior that was exacerbated by the COVID pandemic. Generally, it seems that workers have migrated south while keeping their remote salary, increasing their buying power substantially and bringing lots of money into the Florida economy.
Individuals were not the only ones heading south for the winter however, as many large companies and investors also made the move and have relocated specifically down to Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties, bringing with them billions in income and assets – $7.4 billion to Miami-Dade and $7.2 billion to Palm Beach to be exact. Most of these new Floridians come from New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago and bring with them a huge change in the function of local economies. Kelly Smallridge, CEO of the Business Development Board of Palm Beach County, is worried about the longevity of this migration, quoted saying this is “the greatest transformation of Palm Beach’s economy” that she’s seen in the last 35 years in a recent interview.
For Smallridge and other locals, this shift is seen as a risk because as more and more people migrate south for indeterminate amounts of time, the money they bring with them can leave just as fast as it arrived. There has been a huge spike in demand for housing, causing single family homes in Palm Beach to jump 74%, and 69% in Miami-Dade in the last four years. Smallridge elaborates, “It’s not just affordability, it is availability”, because while the new workers can help diversify the local economies greatly, they do create more competition for things like housing, and generally have higher paying, remote jobs. But this trend has continued. So much so, that many leading thinkers in investment (like Ken Griffin of Citadel who moved the investment house from Chicago to Miami) are ready to call Miami and the surrounding South Florida area “the future of America” and its economy. As New York, the current financial center of the US, faces another year of negative net migration, it is easy to see why this consensus has become so prevalent. In the past few years, Florida supplanted the Empire State as the third most populous in the nation – in the coming years we will see if this change is here to stay.
Again, we wish you our very best for a Happy & Safe Holiday season. The LMA Newsletter will resume on January 8.
Lisa
Newsletter of 12-4-23
