Apparently the grass isn’t greener in Florida.
Thousands of Florida immigrants who moved to the Sunshine State during the pandemic are packing up and moving elsewhere, frustrated by unrelenting heat, hurricane damage and dangerous wildlife. .
More than 700,000 people, including 90,000 from New York, will move to Florida in 2022, drawn by the promise of sunny skies, no income taxes and a lower cost of living, according to Census data. It was Quoted from NBC News.
But nearly half a million people gave up on Florida and left in 2022, according to NBC News, which interviewed several disillusioned transplants who decided to return north.
One of them was Louis Rotkowitz, a New Yorker who had been in the state for two years.
“Like all good New Yorkers, this is where you want to be,” the doctor told NBC News by phone while driving to his new home in Charlotte, North Carolina. “That’s a complete misunderstanding.”
Rotkowitz said he and his wife decided to buy a home in the West Palm Beach area and pursue a more relaxed and affordable lifestyle there.
He took a job as an emergency physician, and his wife became a teacher.
However, Mr. Rotkowitz soon realized that they had made a mistake.
“The pay was good, but we were barely living. We had zero quality of life,” he told the media.
The doctor said traffic was a nightmare, his homeowners association dues doubled and he felt unsafe after the state passed a law allowing people to own guns without a license.
“Everyone is walking around with guns out there,” he told NBC News. “I consider myself a conservative person, but if you want to own a gun, you have to get a license. There’s some process.”
Jodi Cummins, who moved to the Palm Beach area from Connecticut in 2021, had a similar story.
“It wasn’t the utopia I had imagined,” Cummings told the magazine. “I thought Florida would be a more easygoing lifestyle, the pace would be a little quieter, and I thought it would be warmer.
“I didn’t expect it to be literally 100 degrees at night. It was incredibly difficult to make friends, it was expensive, it was very expensive,” she said, adding that as a personal chef there is no income tax. He added that he thought he could make more money.
Homeowner’s insurance premiums in Florida rose 42% last year to an average of $6,000 a year, and auto insurance is more than 50% more expensive than the national average, NBC News reported, citing the Insurance Information Institute. That’s what it means.
Florida is also one of the most expensive states to buy a home, with prices up 60% since 2020 to an average of $388,500, according to Zillow.
After six months, Cummins decided he could endure the high costs of car insurance, rent and food, as well as the traffic and scorching temperatures.
“I quickly became disillusioned with Florida,” she told NBC News. “I felt confused and guilty because I wanted to leave and then after I moved there I realized this wasn’t what I thought it would be.”
Meanwhile, after living in Florida for a year, Barb Carter decided to sell her Orlando-area home for a $40,000 loss and return to Kansas, leaving her children and grandchildren behind.
Among the reasons she cited were an armadillo infestation that caused $9,000 in damage and Hurricane Ian, which destroyed the roof of a 62-year-old’s car.n.d. birthday, and a surgeon could not be found to remove the tumor from her liver.
“So many people ask, ‘Why are you going back to Kansas?’ I tell them all the same thing, you have to take off your goggles on vacation,” Carter told the outlet. .
“To me, that was very false advertising. Once I lived there, I thought, this isn’t the only thing you guys take seriously,” she said.
Veronica Blasky, who immigrated from Connecticut, said she and her husband were forced out of Florida because of rising costs less than three years after they decided to move to the Sunshine State.
At the beginning of the pandemic, he was offered a better-paying job as a manager at a landscaping company, and she was looking forward to the weather and a more comfortable lifestyle.
But in early 2023, the couple hit a “bulldozer” of expenses, Blaskey said.
Her homeowner’s insurance company threatened to terminate her insurance if she did not replace the roof, at a cost ranging from $16,000 to $30,000.
She also expected her home insurance premiums to double, faced an increase in property taxes and saw her homeowners association dues jump from $326 to $480 a month, according to the report. .
Her husband worked a side job on the weekends to help cover the rising costs.
“My little part-time job that paid me $600 or $700 a month ended up paying for car insurance or homeowner’s insurance and I forgot about groceries,” said Blasky, who worked in retail. he told NBC News.
“There are all these hidden things that people don’t know about. Make sure you save some extra money somewhere because you’ll definitely need it,” she added.
When her husband’s former boss in Connecticut asked if she was interested in returning, the couple jumped at the chance to put Florida in the rearview mirror.
