Number Crunch

Actually, Not a Ton of People Are Moving to Florida

It turns out it’s mostly tech moguls who have the stomach for the Sunshine State

Image: Save As/Medium

1.38%, or 297,851 people: That’s how much Florida’s population is expected to have grown annually by April, according to the state’s November 2020 Demographic Estimating Conference, per The Wall Street Journal. The state is expected to have added close to 298,000 residents since April 2020.

When the pandemic created a sudden shift to remote work, it appeared that it was resulting in an exodus of white-collar professionals from expensive cities like San Francisco and New York City to locales with lower costs of living and better weather (and, in some cases, less stringent shutdowns), like Austin and Miami.

“It’s something we like to call the Mass Techxodus.”

However, reports of the “mass techxodus” to Miami notwithstanding, larger trends indicate that nearly as many people have been leaving the state of Florida as people moving in, with hurricanes, heat, and rising home prices driving those departures. The Journal…