Why pay more than $3,000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment in New York City, where the taxes are high and the coronavirus restrictions are strict, when you can pay the same amount to live near the beach in a state with fewer rules and no income tax? That’s what many New Yorkers asked themselves this past year, and the answer was so obvious that tens of thousands of Big Apple residents packed their bags and left for Florida.
Now, New Yorkers have been packing their bags for Boca Raton since the Army Corps of Engineers filled in the swamp, but the recent emigration has been bonkers.
New data show more than 33,000 New York residents traded their Empire State driver’s licenses for Florida licenses between September 2020 and March 2021. That’s a 32% increase from the same time period the year before, in 2019, when 25,370 New Yorkers applied for new driver’s licenses in the Sunshine State.
Several factors contributed to this exodus. Wealthy New Yorkers were sick of paying the state’s ridiculously high taxes, and the state government’s plans to hike personal income taxes even more for those earning more than $1 million led the city’s financial tycoons to leave in droves. Some of New York’s biggest firms are even thinking about relocating to Florida, according to Miami Mayor Francis Suarez.
Coronavirus restrictions were another big part of the decision. Parents working remotely needed to be able to send their children back to in-person school full-time, and New York made that impossible. Young adults who moved to New York City looking for glamour and adventure realized they wouldn’t be getting either in a city that shut itself down for more than a year. Some of these residents might return, but many will not. They’ve realized the benefits aren’t worth the costly price tag.
Overall, the exodus cost New York a congressional seat. The Census Bureau announced last month that the state would continue its eight-decade streak of declining representation in Washington and lose yet another representative after the 2022 election. If New York had counted 89 more residents among its population, it would have held on to its House seat. But those 89 residents are probably at a cafe in Miami Gardens right now.
“It’s not the waiting room of heaven,” said Yan Hernandez, a New York City resident who traded her pad on Park Avenue for a residence in West Palm Beach. “It is heaven.”
Compared to New York, yeah.
