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Forsaking Florida: When it Comes to Luring Retirees, Is the Sun Setting on the Sunshine State?

Newsweek, 9/25/09

Abstract:

With its beautiful beaches, low taxes, and great golf courses, Florida used to pull retirees in by the millions. Now real-estate prices have collapsed and unemployment has skyrocketed. Some retirees are returning to points north, and a new generation is not intent on repopulating the Sunshine State.

"Florida has definitely lost its edge," says William Haas, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, who has studied retiree migration in the U.S. He points to a slew of reasons, including the horrible hurricane season of 2004–2005 and rising property taxes and insurance rates, for why Florida is no longer such a draw, and he has the figures to prove it. In the peak year of 1980, 26.3 percent of all U.S. citizens 60 and older who moved went to Florida; in 2007, it was less than half that. The numbers of people who did move to the state barely replaced the number of older people who left. This year, Florida's population problem is getting worse. Between April 2008 and April 2009, the state actually lost population for the first time in more than 100 years (excluding periods during the world wars, when troops stationed there skewed the population figures), reports the University of Florida.

State boosters like Mark Wilson, president of the Florida's Chamber of Commerce, say that while many retirees may want to flock to Florida, they can't afford to partly because they can't sell their homes up North. It doesn't help, he says, that the state has gone from being the fifth least-expensive in the country (back in the 1980s) to the 14th most expensive. Folded into the costs of Florida living are rising home-insurance premiums. In some areas, rates doubled in the aftermath of the 2004–2005 hurricanes. Property taxes have been rising across the state, too, as local government enact increases to make up for their budgetary shortfalls.

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