I don't live there, and don't really have a particular ax to grind here but it looks like Miami is building a lot of flood control infrastructure pretty quickly.
It looks like a lot of those projects are split in funding between the state and federal government for initial build and the counties are issuing bonds to fund maintenance.
I live here. Miami is not building a lot of flood control infrastructure. Just a few diesel water pumps in tonier parts of town to keep the king tides at bay. The lifted truck/SUV is almost a requirement in the long term. After watching a row of cards flood out on our main street, Biscayne, you want something that drives high and dry.
Miami Beach is making a valiant attempt. That city has been working on massive climate change projects for some time. We’ll see if it pays off.
Miami is a basket case. The city commission held a vote to remove mangroves from the park because they were blocking the view. LOL. Just massive political incompetence.
I don't see why it couldn't be protected like Amsterdam which is ~6.5' below sea level. Miami for trade and finance purposes is the Amsterdam of the Caribbean and northern chunk of South America and Central America.
Yeah I didn't mean using the exact same approach. They'll probably have to do things like building artificial reefs, planting mangroves, raising buildings/roads, and maybe something like Tokyo's giant cisterns. In the end it may not work but it seems like it's worth trying for a few decades.
The roads in Florida are freaking fantastic and pristine almost everywhere. I moved to Seattle ~5 years ago and I still can't get over the fact that the roads are pot holed pieces of crap in a constant state of disrepair. We can't even get white divider lines painted reliably in the downtown core. I don't know where all the tax money goes.
However, the downside of those glorious Florida roads is that, well, you need them at all. Everything is sooooooo spread out and flat. I forget until I go back and visit just how far away everything is from everything else. Going to something "just up the road" is a 15-20 minute drive.
One imagines there are differences in the abilities of various governments to deliver projects. I’ve read that most of California’s projects go to a handful of contractors with poor records.
You know what Florida has besides taxes? User fees. You can take a brand-new highway here and it'll be a toll road, which means you're the one paying for it, not unrelated taxpayers around the state. You can even finance the construction with private-public partnerships tied to the specific project's success. And because people pay for this infrastructure, it discourages frivolous uses, like the induced demand of overbuilding in the exurbs.
That's just a regressive tax that disproportionately hurts lower-income folks the most.
I'm so tired of this "I got mine, so fuck you" attitude many people have. If you're wealthy, you probably got there via inheritance, luck, or on the backs and shoulders of the hard work of others. And yet "I won't do my part to pay for basic infrastructure where I live" is the attitude.
> You can even finance the construction with private-public partnerships tied to the specific project's success. And because people pay for this infrastructure, it discourages frivolous uses, like the induced demand of overbuilding in the exurbs.
This is a tangent, but I want to note the irony of listing this as a "pro": when the topic of public transport comes up on HN, a standard observation is that exactly this model failed and left local governments saddled with expensive, debt-laden streetcars and subways. The end result: we spent 50 years tearing up useful pieces of civic infrastructure because the root financing was fundamentally unsound.
Private financing schemes have an uncanny ability to sniff out the government's ability and willingness to catch the falling knife.
Sounds like that will work for something things but not for others.
Public libraries and schools would not benefit from this as more affluent areas can support better education. This is already the case in many places in the US. Local property taxes support school funding.
> People want quality public infra, but don't want to pay taxes. Sounds like a losing battle to me.
A lot of people don't really want quality public infra. If they can pay for their own needs themselves, in their gated communities etc., they would rather do that than pay taxes. The people described in this article are wealthy. They want quality private infra.
> If they can pay for their own needs themselves, in their gated communities etc.
That kind of sounds like California. Crime is so rampant that when I was searching for apartments, these large complexes resemble castles. Heavily fortified and there is a courtyard inside where children can play and families can hang out.
Not sure where in CA you were looking, but I very rarely see anything like that in SF or the bay area (outside of weird enclaves like Atherton, but I wouldn't go there if you paid me). Courtyards, sure, but I think you're imagining a weird, nefarious spin to them when there isn't any.
Those courtyard-style apartments don't exist because of crime. They exist because it's nice to have a courtyard.
Most apartments in the Bay Area have no outdoor space other than a balcony or a small piece of land on the ground floor about the size of the balconies above. Many don't even have that.
It could be interesting to look at tax burden including HOA fees. With enough HNW residents, gated communities can support good private infrastructure.
It's not mutually exclusive. Tax money is being wasted left and right, people don't want to pay even more taxes to account for the incompetence that's happening.
The American Society of Civil Engineers rates Florida's infrastructure as a C. Compare that to California at a C-, New York at C, and America as a whole at C-.
The Mid-Atlantic. In my lifetime we've had one tornado that leveled the downtown of a small town - which the state took care of. Meanwhile Florida has had multiple "once in a lifetime" super hurricanes and numerous small hurricanes hit it. All these rich people want to move there - they don't it like here where the winters get bitter cold? Great! Let them pay for it. I'm sick and tired of their politics and I'm sick and tired of thousands and thousands of dollars of my tax money going to pay for their folly.
Because you're sick of their politics they shouldn't get federal help? Geez. That seems pretty extreme.
Forest fires in California, freezes in Texas, hurricanes in Florida, even hurricanes (Sandy) in the North East. Natural disasters happen in both (typically) democrat and republican states.
Are you sick and tired of the government allowing us to eat fast food, smoke cigarettes, and drink alcohol too? After all a large percentage of your tax dollars are going towards medicare and health.
You may recall several states from the South - all whom have received federal disaster aid - delayed the disaster aid funding for Super Storm Sandy. I wasn’t impacted by Sandy but I’ll never forget nor forgive what they did. To Hell with these people!
> Like Florida, Texas has warm weather and no state income tax. In fact, the majority of the top 10 states high-earners moved to are in the Sunbelt. And two others on the list—Tennessee and Nevada—also don’t have a state income tax. Both trends indicate that these high-earning migrants were looking for a more affordable cost of living.
Only 4 out of 10 had no income tax, and there is no information on why people moved to these locations, so it is not clear if income tax was or was not a factor.
> But the pandemic accelerated migration patterns that were already underway in the 2010s. The rise of remote work unshackled employees from the office, enabling them to move away from big cities to more affordable midsize cities. As of March 2022, nearly 5 million Americans have relocated owing to remote work, according to an Upwork survey.
There is no information here on whether the high income people who moved to florida are working remotely in the sense of having an existing normal, full time job that they kept when they moved to Florida, so it is not clear whether or not remote work actually is relevant or not.
In the case of florida it's quite possible that a lot of the people with household incomes of 200k+ moving there are actually wealthy retirees making substantial incomes off of investments rather than "remote workers" in the normal sense.
Make $10M/year living in income in NYC and one owes nearly $1M/year to the state. California is roughly the same ballpark and they chase RSUs received in California even if you leave. It's possible to pay millions in state taxes as far less than a billionaire.
I'm pretty sure this is mostly a COVID accelerated thing where we got a few years worth of moving all at once. Wealthier banking folks from NYC realized they can soft-retire a bit early with working remote and save some money on their last couple years taxes while establishing better domicile arguments pre-retirement. I'm curious if we'll see a slowdown in the trend in the next couple years (if indeed we did just see X years of migration moved up thanks to COVID).
This kind of competition is good. It is a luxury for Americans to be able to see competition between massive states that resemble economies of many small nations.
Not only wealthy Americans, but Florida has been seeing regular middle class influx as well, out of all, from California. IMO, from what I can tell, Florida has better policies that will be conducive to higher quality of life and ease of business in the future. It is improving at a rapid rate.
As someone who lives in California, we have some homework to do across many areas. I'd want California to improve and become more competitive, especially in terms of regulations, crime and QoL. It is such a beautiful state. One can quote current statistics of this or that, but it is the rate of improvement/degeneration that's important. Instead, we spend too much time defending what's not working.
I think it's disorienting, maybe straight harmful, to view this through the lens of consumption and competition. The choice of where to live is not primarily a market-based one for most people during most of their lives, it's setting the priorities wrong.
A government should be oriented towards the needs of the people who live under and depend on it. Many people have effectively no choice to make in what state they live in, and their needs and preferences matter more than those of someone who doesn't even live there but might move there. The "competition for citizens" model doesn't really account for that in any way I can respect.
How the hell is competition between states harmful? Id argue that doing anything but having states compete for betterment of the society is harmful, if not straight out totalitarian.
You cannot eliminate incentives from top-down. In a free society where interstate commerce is protected by the constitution, posing limits on incentives would be pretty much the death of this republic.
What resource are they competing for? Souls? Tax dollars? You don't win points by having a high population, so why do states want one? There's no shareholders here.
It's easy to imagine scenarios where the economic desires of high-wealth outsiders who could move to a state are directly opposed to the needs of low-wealth people currently living there. A competition-based model would find it easy to make the wrong choice.
Right and how do the people who have lived in those places the whole time feel about it? A very common complaint in those cities is that local interests are deprioritized to make a more favorable environment for the rich.
There's probably some amount of unavoidable tension between these things but viewing gov policy mainly as a means to compete for wealth holders does not seem likely to lead to balanced outcomes.
More than anything else, I've been surprised by the number of cryptocurrency acquaintances I know who have uprooted and moved to Florida. They've all cited taxes and cheap housing as primary motivators when asked initially, but there's also a significant network effect: they mention it as being an area where the tech community is actually friendly to them.
I don't particularly like cryptocurrencies, but I found that thought-provoking.
But yes: plenty of states have been embarrassingly open to financial fraud in the form of cryptocurrency in the name of innovation, and Florida stands out even in that regard. One can't help but wonder whether Florida's political leadership has made the savvy (and cynical) decision to pump reactionary economic sentiment, as a leader for their own reactionary political sentiments.
YMMV, but a very large percentage of people I know who have claimed that SF/NYC isn't "friendly" enough to tech have, upon further elucidation, zero emotional intelligence around gentrification and almost universally think of Uber and WeWork as success stories.
This is to say, in case it's not clear, that being "friendly" just isn't enough for them; they want everyone around them to acknowledge just how great and special tech is. If you're not kissing their ass, you're not being friendly.
The people I know who moved to Florida are a little better than that: many are NYC natives, and are well aware of what gentrification looks like in that context.
I do think they have a somewhat myopic view of their own work, however.
I think the thought is closer to "NYC is pretty close to ideal right now, and I don't need a combination Starbucks and Lululemon in my neighborhood." Which, of course, it actually isn't! But nobody really wants to return to 1970s or 1980s New York.
Compared to NYC, LA, and the Bay Area (the other places they'd generally like to live). Miami and the other "high life" parts of Florida are not cheap on an absolute scale, but they are cheap relative to their weight class.
Everything is relative. We moved from Austin to Orlando last year for family reasons and our new house of roughly equivalent size/amenities was significantly less than our Austin house. And now we wouldn’t be able to afford our old Austin house.
Not saying it’s not bad here — it’s just less worse than some places.
There is plenty of cheap housing in florida if you don't need waterfront, and depending on where you are coming from, possibly huge savings on state income tax, that may very well make your mortgage payments with the savings, or at a minimum offset it quite a bit.
I have no data, but it certainly seems like many of the crypto-partisan VCs have moved to Miami, which is probably the real network effect at play. (Cf. Wyoming has also bent over backward to welcome cryptocurrency folks, without the same fanfare.)
Florida is the destination for financial newsletter publishers. Any old shtick will do - bear markets, bonds, bull markets, commodities, etc. Just buy a house and scrape other sites for content that you sell to noobs and rubes looking to be as "rich" as you.
A few years ago a bunch of the more libertarian among them sold out fearing an inevitable civil war after a recent election and they took their asses and assets to Puerto Rico where they could keep their citizenship and passports but dodge even more tax liability. Funny enough it was just in time for Hurricane Maria to hose the island. Now they live in their gated enclaves and wander out long enough to sample the excellent local food before going back inside so they don't have to deal with the people they can't converse with since they don't understand Spanish.
As a geoscientist I am disappointed that some geological processes take so long. The inundation of Florida should be turned up to 11. Let the rats surf some driftwood while they search for a new dry spot to shit on.
I was wondering why there are so many big crypto conferences in Miami[1][2][3]! I'd bet Miami is the center-of-gravity for crypto enthusiasts for the same reason Art Basel is in Miami. (I assume because of all the money floating around, not all made 100% above-the-board)
Maybe. But it depends on the time window. For example, it would seem to be unwise to build a multi-million dollar house just a few feet above sea level given the dire projections of sea level rise. However Obama’s new house is just that. So if you are only looking at a time horizon of 60 years, Florida is in a pretty good spot.
Its a misnomer to believe that “Florida is only a few feet above sea level”. Immediate costal/beach areas of course are, but most of Florida is well above sea level. Most of the people moving to Florida are not wealthy, but middle class folk, and are not buying in the coastal areas. They buy far enough inland that sea level rise if it happens at all to a danger level will have zero affect on anything but future beach quality. Might make the distance to the beach a mile or two shorter.
The rich who are buying coastal properties aren’t buying with 2100 in mind, they are buying with 2022 in mind.
On the time scales most people think in, it's probably not a big consideration for them personally.
The money they save on housing in the meantime perhaps can buy their descendants property in less climate-change-threatened places.
Building long term habitations in low lying coastal areas (absent massive engineering to prevent flooding like the Netherlands has done) seems dubious though.
Doubtful, especially if you are referring to sea level rise, since those fanciful predictions have already started to drop. And most of Florida is actually far enough above sea level that only costal areas might be affected.
Also, it’s pretty wildly understood that areas closer to the equator will tend to have less climate variation than northern and more southern climates.
That leaves the “old hurricanes will get worse” bullet point…except so far…they haven’t.
> "The elevation of the area averages at around 6 ft (1.8 m)[39] above sea level in most neighborhoods, especially near the coast." ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami ) Wikipedia goes on to note that the highest elevation in Miami is ~42 feet above sea level. Doesn't sound like the next few counties north (along the coast) are in much better shape.
Meanwhile, the Fortune article seems to say that the 'smartest' and wealthiest of the migrants are flocking to that part of Florida...
Wealthy people are probaly going to be the least likely to be affected by climate change. From wikipedia:
> Real estate prices in Miami already reflect the increase in prices for real estate at a higher elevation within the city compared to real estate at a lower elevation
It's usually the existing poorer population that already owns property next to low lying areas next to the water that will get caught holding the bag when asset prices drop.
Besides FL migrants are typically older people retiring, not making longer-term plans.
Just an anecdote but where I live we've had a huge influx of ex-Floridians moving in. They are all over this town. I was thinking there was an exodus going on.
There's even a name for all the people that move to Florida from northern states and realize they don't care for it: Halfbacks (halfway back to New York, MA, anywhere NE).
Meanwhile, part of me is thinking I should go to Ohio, Maine or Pennsylvania to escape the water wars that will kick off in a few decades in the South, unless we build desalination plants on the Gulf Coast.
I can tell you the natives are absolutely panicking. Family and social groups are being disrupted because property and rental prices have outpaced income by large margins. There wasn't much in Miami prior to COVID except tourism and service industry jobs. These are some of the lowest paying vocations in this country. The city and county are facing an affordability crisis.
And contrary to popular belief Miami is losing population because of the affordability crisis. For every cryptobro that moves here, a family of 4 migrates to Orlando or further north.
It's not all bad, though. New faces are highly receptive to making new friends and follow through. Traditional LatAm families are very insular and skeptical to newcomers. Local politicians are dynastic and blatantly corrupt. They don't have the same name recognition with new, younger voters so some are finding it harder to skate on winning by a few dozen votes. The Downtown/Brickell area is opening more new schools. Ironic the schoolboard is downtown but there were no neighborhood schools except a few highly selective magnet schools. All these new condos and apartments downtown have families scrambling to enroll nearby and finding out none were planned. So glad that is being fixed.
Same, I moved to Miami in 2019 from Puerto Rico because I wanted to keep speaking Spanish and I had a circle of friends to help me out.
Since then housing prices have been absolutely bananas, I was fortunate to buy a house relatively cheap in Oct 2021 but now the same houses are going for $100k+ more what I paid. If you want to buy anything that is 2 bedroom you better be prepared to pay +300k starting price and probably 20% down + HOA fee and increasing interest rates are going for %5+. Yet houses are flying off the market, mostly due to institutional investors putting 100% down in cash so you can't compete or have a total of one weekend to make an offer.
So far this year alone 3 people I know have moved out of Miami all due to housing affordibility. One moved to Tampa (which used to be pricier than Miami), another to South Carolina, and another to Ft Lauderdale.
My wife wants us to stay here to raise kids but whenever she talks about buying a new house I get queesy thinking how expensive it's going to be to get a large enough place. I love the Hollywood / Ft Luaderdale area but it's only a matter of time that prices catch up.
Why should they panic? Economic opportunity is being brought in and it is a pro-building area so truly getting priced out as one would in San Francisco or Hong Kong is highly improbable.
Also, migration seems so popular in the tech community until it is into one's own.
Not OP but also a lifelong Miami resident: building takes time and rents/food prices/restaurant prices are going up extremely fast. A place I used to rent at 1400/month in 2021 is now renting for 2000.
Rents have risen over 30%, salaries have gone up 3-7%. Do you see how that large gap can be problematic?
> Economic opportunity is being brought in and it is a pro-building area
Money, jobs, and workers are being imported. This does very little for the local employment market because companies that move here also want to move their workforce as well. A lot of new construction is luxury apartments. Not something that a waitress or tour operator will be able to afford.
Miami Says It Can Adapt to Rising Seas. Not Everyone Is Convinced.
Officials have a new plan to manage rising water. Succeed or fail, it will very likely become a case study for other cities facing climate threats.
I realize the U.S is all about taking care of the wealthy, but maybe these people aren't wealthy - just rich. In which case hey you can always allow a few of the rich to lose their shirts as long as the class as a whole is protected.
blaming taxes is a dodge. it’s about quality of life and ideological climate . then remote work freed people to relocate .
The florida leadership sent a strong signal during and since covid that they will protect civil liberties. people are expecting the next “crisis” to add more restrictions
it’s a defensive measure to preserve your way of life
> The florida leadership sent a strong signal during and since covid that they will protect civil liberties. people are expecting the next “crisis” to add more restrictions
That’s one way to look at it. Another way is that they put religious dogma over civil liberties and personal freedom over community.
So cities that shut down communal activities like bars, football, restaurants and concerts, effectively forbidding people from interacting with each, prioritized community? That's such an odd take.
Either way, the influx of people moving to Florida would seem to indicate that a lot of people either agree with their decision or don't really care.
Specifically at a time when markets were at all-time highs, and everyone had a ton of gains they didn't want to pay taxes on. We'll see what the migration patterns look like during a downturn after everyone else has been priced out because not enough has been built to support the new demand.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 55.8 ms ] threadPeople want quality public infra, but don't want to pay taxes. Sounds like a losing battle to me.
What usually happens is taxes are shoved into other areas of your life (property, sales).
Yeah, but Florida doesn't, really.
Miami is a basket case. The city commission held a vote to remove mangroves from the park because they were blocking the view. LOL. Just massive political incompetence.
However, the downside of those glorious Florida roads is that, well, you need them at all. Everything is sooooooo spread out and flat. I forget until I go back and visit just how far away everything is from everything else. Going to something "just up the road" is a 15-20 minute drive.
I'm so tired of this "I got mine, so fuck you" attitude many people have. If you're wealthy, you probably got there via inheritance, luck, or on the backs and shoulders of the hard work of others. And yet "I won't do my part to pay for basic infrastructure where I live" is the attitude.
> A regressive tax is a tax applied uniformly, taking a larger percentage of income from low-income earners than from high-income earners.
This is a tangent, but I want to note the irony of listing this as a "pro": when the topic of public transport comes up on HN, a standard observation is that exactly this model failed and left local governments saddled with expensive, debt-laden streetcars and subways. The end result: we spent 50 years tearing up useful pieces of civic infrastructure because the root financing was fundamentally unsound.
Private financing schemes have an uncanny ability to sniff out the government's ability and willingness to catch the falling knife.
Note: I'm linking this not to claim that the conspiracy is real, only because it has useful references.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
Public libraries and schools would not benefit from this as more affluent areas can support better education. This is already the case in many places in the US. Local property taxes support school funding.
A lot of people don't really want quality public infra. If they can pay for their own needs themselves, in their gated communities etc., they would rather do that than pay taxes. The people described in this article are wealthy. They want quality private infra.
That kind of sounds like California. Crime is so rampant that when I was searching for apartments, these large complexes resemble castles. Heavily fortified and there is a courtyard inside where children can play and families can hang out.
When I was searching for a place, basically every single apartment complex felt like a castle.
Not being nefarious, have no interest in it. You’re more than welcome to check for yourself.
Most apartments in the Bay Area have no outdoor space other than a balcony or a small piece of land on the ground floor about the size of the balconies above. Many don't even have that.
https://infrastructurereportcard.org/state-by-state-infrastr...
They seem to be a lobby group for more infrastructure investment, but they don't see Florida as worse than other states.
Forest fires in California, freezes in Texas, hurricanes in Florida, even hurricanes (Sandy) in the North East. Natural disasters happen in both (typically) democrat and republican states.
Are you sick and tired of the government allowing us to eat fast food, smoke cigarettes, and drink alcohol too? After all a large percentage of your tax dollars are going towards medicare and health.
Only 4 out of 10 had no income tax, and there is no information on why people moved to these locations, so it is not clear if income tax was or was not a factor.
> But the pandemic accelerated migration patterns that were already underway in the 2010s. The rise of remote work unshackled employees from the office, enabling them to move away from big cities to more affordable midsize cities. As of March 2022, nearly 5 million Americans have relocated owing to remote work, according to an Upwork survey.
There is no information here on whether the high income people who moved to florida are working remotely in the sense of having an existing normal, full time job that they kept when they moved to Florida, so it is not clear whether or not remote work actually is relevant or not.
In the case of florida it's quite possible that a lot of the people with household incomes of 200k+ moving there are actually wealthy retirees making substantial incomes off of investments rather than "remote workers" in the normal sense.
understatement in the extreme?
Make $10M/year living in income in NYC and one owes nearly $1M/year to the state. California is roughly the same ballpark and they chase RSUs received in California even if you leave. It's possible to pay millions in state taxes as far less than a billionaire.
Not only wealthy Americans, but Florida has been seeing regular middle class influx as well, out of all, from California. IMO, from what I can tell, Florida has better policies that will be conducive to higher quality of life and ease of business in the future. It is improving at a rapid rate.
As someone who lives in California, we have some homework to do across many areas. I'd want California to improve and become more competitive, especially in terms of regulations, crime and QoL. It is such a beautiful state. One can quote current statistics of this or that, but it is the rate of improvement/degeneration that's important. Instead, we spend too much time defending what's not working.
More stats here that doesn't just gloss over with undertones of "rich moving to florida": https://www.floridadaily.com/people-from-new-york-california...
A government should be oriented towards the needs of the people who live under and depend on it. Many people have effectively no choice to make in what state they live in, and their needs and preferences matter more than those of someone who doesn't even live there but might move there. The "competition for citizens" model doesn't really account for that in any way I can respect.
You cannot eliminate incentives from top-down. In a free society where interstate commerce is protected by the constitution, posing limits on incentives would be pretty much the death of this republic.
It's easy to imagine scenarios where the economic desires of high-wealth outsiders who could move to a state are directly opposed to the needs of low-wealth people currently living there. A competition-based model would find it easy to make the wrong choice.
Can you cite such examples?
Melbourne, Switzerland, Singapore, HK and 20th century examples of SF, NYC, London were all attractive hyper capitalistic cities.
There's probably some amount of unavoidable tension between these things but viewing gov policy mainly as a means to compete for wealth holders does not seem likely to lead to balanced outcomes.
I don't particularly like cryptocurrencies, but I found that thought-provoking.
But yes: plenty of states have been embarrassingly open to financial fraud in the form of cryptocurrency in the name of innovation, and Florida stands out even in that regard. One can't help but wonder whether Florida's political leadership has made the savvy (and cynical) decision to pump reactionary economic sentiment, as a leader for their own reactionary political sentiments.
This is to say, in case it's not clear, that being "friendly" just isn't enough for them; they want everyone around them to acknowledge just how great and special tech is. If you're not kissing their ass, you're not being friendly.
I do think they have a somewhat myopic view of their own work, however.
Really? Compared to what? Is there some place there is cheap housing?
Not saying it’s not bad here — it’s just less worse than some places.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-05/odd-lots-...
A few years ago a bunch of the more libertarian among them sold out fearing an inevitable civil war after a recent election and they took their asses and assets to Puerto Rico where they could keep their citizenship and passports but dodge even more tax liability. Funny enough it was just in time for Hurricane Maria to hose the island. Now they live in their gated enclaves and wander out long enough to sample the excellent local food before going back inside so they don't have to deal with the people they can't converse with since they don't understand Spanish.
As a geoscientist I am disappointed that some geological processes take so long. The inundation of Florida should be turned up to 11. Let the rats surf some driftwood while they search for a new dry spot to shit on.
[1] https://b.tc/conference/
[2] https://www.btcmiami.com/
[3] https://cryptoworldcon.com/
The rich who are buying coastal properties aren’t buying with 2100 in mind, they are buying with 2022 in mind.
The money they save on housing in the meantime perhaps can buy their descendants property in less climate-change-threatened places.
Building long term habitations in low lying coastal areas (absent massive engineering to prevent flooding like the Netherlands has done) seems dubious though.
Also, it’s pretty wildly understood that areas closer to the equator will tend to have less climate variation than northern and more southern climates.
That leaves the “old hurricanes will get worse” bullet point…except so far…they haven’t.
Meanwhile, the Fortune article seems to say that the 'smartest' and wealthiest of the migrants are flocking to that part of Florida...
> Real estate prices in Miami already reflect the increase in prices for real estate at a higher elevation within the city compared to real estate at a lower elevation
It's usually the existing poorer population that already owns property next to low lying areas next to the water that will get caught holding the bag when asset prices drop.
Besides FL migrants are typically older people retiring, not making longer-term plans.
There's even a name for all the people that move to Florida from northern states and realize they don't care for it: Halfbacks (halfway back to New York, MA, anywhere NE).
I can tell you the natives are absolutely panicking. Family and social groups are being disrupted because property and rental prices have outpaced income by large margins. There wasn't much in Miami prior to COVID except tourism and service industry jobs. These are some of the lowest paying vocations in this country. The city and county are facing an affordability crisis.
And contrary to popular belief Miami is losing population because of the affordability crisis. For every cryptobro that moves here, a family of 4 migrates to Orlando or further north.
It's not all bad, though. New faces are highly receptive to making new friends and follow through. Traditional LatAm families are very insular and skeptical to newcomers. Local politicians are dynastic and blatantly corrupt. They don't have the same name recognition with new, younger voters so some are finding it harder to skate on winning by a few dozen votes. The Downtown/Brickell area is opening more new schools. Ironic the schoolboard is downtown but there were no neighborhood schools except a few highly selective magnet schools. All these new condos and apartments downtown have families scrambling to enroll nearby and finding out none were planned. So glad that is being fixed.
Since then housing prices have been absolutely bananas, I was fortunate to buy a house relatively cheap in Oct 2021 but now the same houses are going for $100k+ more what I paid. If you want to buy anything that is 2 bedroom you better be prepared to pay +300k starting price and probably 20% down + HOA fee and increasing interest rates are going for %5+. Yet houses are flying off the market, mostly due to institutional investors putting 100% down in cash so you can't compete or have a total of one weekend to make an offer.
So far this year alone 3 people I know have moved out of Miami all due to housing affordibility. One moved to Tampa (which used to be pricier than Miami), another to South Carolina, and another to Ft Lauderdale.
My wife wants us to stay here to raise kids but whenever she talks about buying a new house I get queesy thinking how expensive it's going to be to get a large enough place. I love the Hollywood / Ft Luaderdale area but it's only a matter of time that prices catch up.
Also, migration seems so popular in the tech community until it is into one's own.
> Economic opportunity is being brought in and it is a pro-building area
Money, jobs, and workers are being imported. This does very little for the local employment market because companies that move here also want to move their workforce as well. A lot of new construction is luxury apartments. Not something that a waitress or tour operator will be able to afford.
Miami Says It Can Adapt to Rising Seas. Not Everyone Is Convinced.
Officials have a new plan to manage rising water. Succeed or fail, it will very likely become a case study for other cities facing climate threats.
I realize the U.S is all about taking care of the wealthy, but maybe these people aren't wealthy - just rich. In which case hey you can always allow a few of the rich to lose their shirts as long as the class as a whole is protected.
requisite Chris Rock video on difference between rich and wealth https://youtu.be/bZWeFtgEAEk?t=41
The florida leadership sent a strong signal during and since covid that they will protect civil liberties. people are expecting the next “crisis” to add more restrictions
it’s a defensive measure to preserve your way of life
That’s one way to look at it. Another way is that they put religious dogma over civil liberties and personal freedom over community.
Either way, the influx of people moving to Florida would seem to indicate that a lot of people either agree with their decision or don't really care.