Florida, Take It, Love It, Or Leave It
I have an on again, off again love affair with Florida, south Florida in particular. When I tell people I am thinking about leaving Florida, they often ask why, and now I am ready to explain.
For me it starts in 1974, when my family came down from New Jersey for a family vacation. At that time my grandmother stayed on Miami Beach. We ate at Wolfies, hung out at the pool at the Shelborne Hotel, not far from The Loews, National and Sagamore today, and it was a different world back then of New York Jews, a few Cubans and Puerto Ricans, some Canadians and seniors. We stayed at the Best Western in North Miami and drove all the way on I95 back to NJ.
In the year 1988, I traveled to South Florida again, on a short vacation right after college, to visit a good friend of mine who was attending the University of Miami. Back then we walked down Ocean Drive and all the Art Deco buildings were rotting away, and only seniors sat out on the patios with a few Orthodox. South Beach, was only called Miami Beach, and was pretty desolate and backwards at that time. I remember the beach being empty on a Saturday afternoon, having homeless on them, and only Penrods at the end of Miami Beach had a small crowd. The city of Miami Beach was so old fashioned, that when one girl went topless, the police came on the beach and arrested her. Over in the city of Miami, today’s Wynwood and downtown, it was dangerous at times, even during the day-light.
The world of Miami and South Florida was very different back then versus today. The one thing I always say about Florida in general is change is constant. Where people live, what place is growing fastest changes every couple years. I don’t remember NY/NJ being like this. South Florida changes so fast, and the change is just starting as urbanization is happening throughout South Florida. This opinion piece gets into why we are planning on leaving, and truthfully none of this is really changeable. South Florida is what it will always be, and things I mention that bother us are not going away, they are just beginning.
So my initial feelings about South Florida were always understanding it as a vacation spot, not as a place you would make your permanent home.
In 1996, when I took a business trip to Florida and stopped off in Deerfield Beach and Boca Raton, to see the beach, check out the new South Beach and look around The Grove and Coral Gables, I finally came to believe that there was something for me in Florida. I received an offer from a small consulting company in Himmarshee Village (next to the River Walk) in Fort Lauderdale and took the job, leaving my management job at the phone company in NJ and moved to Boca Raton. I was 32. I thought I was old at the time. Now I will be turning 60 this Feb and now have spent a good amount of my life in South Florida. Everything since then seems like a blur to me. For many years I never really cared about or payed too much attention to local politics or small details in Florida. That’s because when you are single and first living in Florida it’s all beautiful beaches, women and weather. You can’t beat that! The first couple years I lived here, I would move almost once a year, rented and did not have much of a reason to think about community or many of the issues we now face. I was a newbie, and newbies are not yet initiated to the hard truths.
In 2001 I bought a house in Sunny Isles Beach and lived there for 6 years. This is the beach in North Miami. I could walk to the beach, enjoy the hotels, food, lifestyle not far from Aventura, and life was pretty good for me. Though I went through Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma, and I actually had my lawn killed by salt water on the peninsula. I had a mango tree which was forced to go horizontal from the winds. Yet none of that bothered me, I just kept on trucking.
Then in 2007 I moved back to Boca Raton, got married, had my first son, and settled down into mid-Boca, approximately where Powerline meets Palmetto Park Rd. The reason for that specific place is the public schools are highly rated, so my kids could get a great education, we could walk to restaurants and stores, and we would have a great place to live.
Fast forward 17 years later, and the schools are still great. The weather of course is amazing in the winter, but as of late there have been changes to south Florida, our neighborhood, and life in general in South Florida is not what it used to be, at least for me and my family.
Reason #1 We Plan On Moving: Climate
Long before the pandemic, we read up and agreed on the facts about global warming. We even traveled to Alaska and watched as multi-ton ice blue shelves calved, or fell in front of us as the glaciers melted. Global warming has many components. It includes hottest years on record, sea level rise, dramatic changes in climate, and the big increase in hurricanes. 2005 and 2006 were big warning years, where the hurricanes broke all kinds of records, exceeding all letters of the alphabet and I rode out several cat 1, cat 2 hurricanes. In 2005 I had two direct hits where we went through the eye of the storm. Since then, it is only by luck, we have not had anything more than a cat 1 hit us.
But I am a numbers guy. If you look at the data, it’s a standard deviation, similar to playing craps at the casino. Each year is a roll of the dice. It comes down to a 17 to 1 odds we will be hit with a cat 3 or higher. For those of you not understanding this, the chance of the big one is every 17 years, and we are due. The big one can be either a Cat 3, Cat 4 or Cat 5. A Cat 5 is where you lose your home, everything you own, and have to start over if you have not left and have not lost your life or family members. Either way, when hurricanes do happen, we know to leave town. In a Cat 5, the roof is ripped off, and if you are near the beach you get 3 to 20 feet of flooding.
Newbies to south Florida often listen to me, scoff it off as anecdotal evidence. Yet even the hardiest anti-climate thinker deep down knows that any given year our society can turn into a living hell. They just don’t know how bad it will be, and say they can deal with it, but can they? A newbie has only been in Florida 10 years at most. They do not understand the power and level of destruction that is coming, will be coming here. It could be next year, it could be in 25, 50 or 100, but when the dice roll lands and you lose in the hurricane game, you lose big time. The real question is do you really have to play this game? It is a raw truth that many Floridans ignore. We are still 6 miles inland and only Zone C. Zone A and Zone B are evacuation zones. We are 15 ft above sea level. It should high enough, but will it be in a 20+ foot storm surge? Even Zone C needs to flee in a Cat 5. It is total destruction in the path. What most South Floridians don’t know is these Cat 3 — Cat 5 include tornados, possibly 100s of small tornados. It is just a reality we ignore, because we just sip our margaritas and listen to Jimmy Buffet instead.
Many of us long term Floridians know and have accepted the risks. If you are on floor 3 of a 10 story building, that is cement and a bunker, maybe you don’t care as much, even though, and I won’t cover it here but the insurance assessment on a building that high can be devastating, now that insurance companies have been promoted by the governor to put together assessments to cover the costs of structure upkeep, so no buildings collapse.
But then there is sea rise. It is also a reality. In Miami Beach every king tide they sandbag all the retail shops. In Fort Lauderdale beach at high tide, I’ve seen 1 foot of water in the streets. I’ve seen 8 inches of rain come down in 2 hours, and combine that with wind. Our answer is get out before all of these problems hit home. The time for us to leave is sooner than later.
Reason #2: We Plan on Moving: Politics
When I first moved to Florida I once again did not pay attention to politics like everything else. We were too consumed with hanging out at bars on South Beach and enjoying the weather. We had democratic governors and republican governors like Graham, Jeb Bush and Chris Christie. The parties were not that different then. I was a typical New Jersey democrat, but back in those years I did not really see that much of a difference between republican and democrat. If anything I was moving to the middle. I’ve become more center-minded on guns, marijuana, abortion, gay rights, and most things. I’ve adopted a slight libertarian thought that people should be able to do what they want with some education.
But Desantis came into office with a hard anti-woke, anti-immigrant, anti-women’s rights, anti-marijuana, and anti-gay agenda, which I feel is mostly made up to rile up political support at the price of hate and vitriol for those who can not defend themselves. They say the transexuals are a problem. Quite frankly most of don’t care about this, it has no impact on me personally, and as one Republican Gov of Utah stated about laws passed there “Never has so much time and energy been spent to hurt so few”.
I don’t like people who attack others for personal gain, even immigrants. I don’t like it and don’t have to agree with it. Honestly, South Florida does not have much of a connection to the rest of the US. It’s like we live on an Island here. And not much has impacted us politically, and we were free to do what a Florida Man wants to do, till Desantis. The hate and nastiness has set off a series of events that make Florida politically intolerable for those who actually care about people and their feelings. We don’t do hate well and I just don’t equate that with patriotism and exercising christian religious freedom? Let me emphasize I am a jew, and more christian value is not what I am looking for.
While I became more open-minded and believe in a lot of personal freedom, Governor Desantis began an anti-minorities agenda, supporting banning books in schools, calling for anti-trans, anti-gay agendas, attacking Disney for supporting a gay lifestyle, implementing more Christian agenda items, switching out all public college leaders for his conservative leaning friends with a conservative litmus test, saying laws needed to be passed to restrict freedoms, of course in the name of freedom. So, when 90% of our neighbors put up pro-Trump and pro-Desantis posters in the first Trump election, we found out we don’t belong here in Boca Raton, at least in this neighborhood, and our opinion is not acceptable to our neighbors. So we avoid talking with them. Instead of fighting with people here, we keep our mouths shut and slowly make our plans to leave.
I don’t use politics in my business, nor care about what anybody’s politics is in general. I don’t hate anybody, nor want to exclude anybody for what they think or believe. I run startup business networking events, I will talk about one later in this article, and I try to keep politics out of the fray. I don’t want to argue with you or try to put you down for what you believe, and that is how business should be.
Reason #3: We Plan on Moving: Lack of Community & Rapid Growth
When I grew up in Parsippany NJ in northern New Jersey in the 70s, there was a community of people that became our second families. I hung out with the kids on the block, and we went to the woods, went to their homes, we hung out in the parks, rode our bikes around town and created relationships. I grew up in a crowded world, with traffic jams, pollution, and other negatives of New Jersey living as well. I am not planning on going back there, but I don’t want Florida to be the new New Jersey minus the community. While I have made some strides and have a personal community I have created in the startup world in Boca Raton, my family has not made the same types of community relationships. In fact, our neighborhood in the last couple of years became the center of a religioius group that moved in and we are not part of that religious group, so there are no new kids for my kids to play with, nor people that want to spend more time with me.
But while this is just my block, I feel that community and building relationships in South Florida at least is difficult at best. We have a ton of flimflam artists, con-men and people who are not what they appear to be. Many people here are short-timers, till they move onto the next destination. It has always been transient. The pandemic was one of those rare periods where few moved out of Florida, but thousands moved in. It was a ramp up of people, a crush of cars that came during the pandemic, that really got us thinking, wow, it is getting crowded. And those who don’t like the politics moved away. When you go to get a cup of coffee and see 5 plates of cars that are out of state, so jammed up you can’t get into the plaza, you have to always imagine that there are another 25 visitors who did not drive, so the rest of the florida plates may be newbies. We have seen a million people move to Florida at least since the beginning of the pandemic and it caused the housing prices to rocket to levels unseen in the past. So now we have a cost of living problem in Florida. Not just have home prices soared, but rents have also soared upwards. But it really makes little sense when you compare that growth to the number of jobs that are physically available in South Florida. My family runs our business out of our house, but if my two sons remain here, one day they will look for work, and it will be difficult at best.
Conclusion
So outside of the main reasons we have begun (albeit slowly) the process of looking to move from Florida, there are a dozen small additional reasons. There are also many, many great reasons to stay in Florida. I could list them all here. I have this thing called Homestead, which keeps my taxes low. We have no state income tax. We have beaches. We have no snow. There are lots of amazing things, but we are evaluating the long-term, and there is a price to pay for living in paradise. Our kids are still in high school so moving has been tricky.
If you are just considering moving to Florida, then I applaud you, and there are so many good things about it. Just go in with your eyes wide open to the realities. If these items don’t bother you, you will be just fine. At least in the early years I did not pay attention to them, so there you go!
We have already started the long process of moving on. I am sorry to say good bye Florida, and good luck, but that day will be here soon. For those of you who are new here, well it is nice and beautiful, especially in January! I envy you because you don’t have all the negatives firmly in your mind. And you don’t have to listen to my gripes. That will come later on. You can just live here and love it.
If you click the link below, you can sign up and register for FREE for our next StartupPOP Networking with a pitch event in Boca Raton. If you are an investor (who isn’t these days), this will be a great event to attend. If you want to pitch or sponsor, we have some fees. Please contact us. We will have Zero Cheating speaking/pitching as well as Geosteja, an Anti-Aging Bed Company and one Blockchain Infrastructure company pitching as well. There will be 3–5 companies pitching and the networking is always great, especially if you are new to town. So, please click the link and register, and let your friends know about it!
Have a great new years and good luck to everybody who loves South Florida. Let’s fight to keep it great!
Dan
