The Journal. - Is Florida Just for Rich People Now?

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

Florida, once an affordable haven, is rapidly transforming into a state for the wealthy. As a result, living costs are rising and population growth is slowing overall. WSJ’s Arian Campo-Flores reports on the affordability crisis and speaks with Republican Senator Rick Scott about what the state can do to create better-paying jobs and housing. Ryan Knutson hosts.Further Listening: - The Florida Cops Who Act as ICE Agents - California Billionaires Are Freaking Out Over a New Tax ProposalSign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For generations, people have been moving to Florida, the Sunshine State. It's been a magnet for people for decades. That's our colleague Arion Campo Flores, who lives in Miami. Obviously, a lot of retirees have, you know, dreamed of having a little, you know, bungalow on the beach and spending their golden years, you know, fishing and hanging out near the water. It's not just retirees. though. Florida has drawn people from all walks of life. And a big reason is that the state has historically been very affordable. It has drawn people in other age groups, people who are blue-collar workers, who were, you know, nurses, who were teachers, cops and firefighters.

You know, they could find a place to maybe start a new chapter in their lives and live in a new development. As a result, Florida's population only seemed to move in one direction. direction, up. But in the past few years, something has changed. That population growth has slowed dramatically. And the only people who seem to be moving to Florida these days are rich. That appeal that it has long had and that accessibility that it has long had for people around the country who are more maybe middle income or even lower income has really faded. It seems like that Florida dream is still alive. But only if you have enough money.

Yeah, that's a good way to put it. I think Florida really illustrates national trends. It's sort of like you see it in an extreme version here. You know, greater population of millionaires, greater influx of wealthy people, a greater array of services aimed at the rich,

and yet a real significant squeeze of working class and middle class households. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Wednesday, May 27. Coming up on the show, the affordability crisis in Florida. This episode is brought to you by IG Private Wealth. When your financial life gets more complex, having a clear plan matters. IG advisors build personalized, integrated financial plans that connect your investments, tax strategies, retirement income, and estate planning into one

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Register today at bikeforbrainhealth.ca. The population of Florida has grown steadily for years. And during the pandemic, it drew even more people, especially wealthier ones. The state was a big draw for people from around the country, wanted to work remotely and be in a place that had fewer restrictions. And so that really supercharged that influence. of people, many of whom were increasingly higher income. Florida is also one of the few states that doesn't have an income tax,

which is appealing to those looking to get away from higher tax states. You have wealthy people who have arrived, and then you have Uber wealthy people who have arrived. We've seen billionaires making news with buying these, like, you know, vast estates and compounds. Why is it so expensive to go out, Miami? Well, a new report shows that our city just, took the spot for the highest concentration of millionaires in the United States. Ken Griffin's big announcement today, he's moving his hedge fund Citadel to South Florida.

Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly bought a mansion in Florida with his wife, Priscilla. The property is part of a gated community on a small island in Miami that's commonly referred to as billionaire bunker. So there's been an influx of all these wealthier people that have moved to the state. Has that brought any benefits? On the stimulative side, it is generating demand for high-end construction. It's generating jobs. It's generating service sector employment because there's a lot of restaurants and services

that cater to the wealthy. It's also boosted the tax coffers because even though there's no state income tax, there are property taxes. So there are positive economic benefits. to this influx of wealth. But this influx of wealthy people to Florida has also had an unintended consequence. It's made this state more expensive,

and that's driving out lower and middle-income residents. So the homes get pricier, neighborhoods get gentrified, and so it squeezes people who are on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. And, you know, Florida is not a place that is known, for generating, you know, an abundance of really high-paying jobs.

And so if those wages are not keeping up with higher rents and higher housing prices, it's forcing a lot of people to leave. This is a dumb question, but why? I'm not sure I fully understand why wealthy people moving somewhere would result in costs going up for everybody. Well, because they can push up prices for, you know, the existing inventory of homes. I mean, I witnessed it myself in where I live. The home prices started to really climb because you had a lot of people who could afford to bid up those homes coming in.

And in my neighborhood, the prices went up 50%, 60%, because there was just so much demand from people who are coming from states. where they are probably earning more, and then they were moving into this market, which did have lower-price homes, and then they started bidding up the prices. As more affluent people flock to Florida, the state's economy is starting to tailor itself to that. Look at Miami, for example.

So there are numerous examples of new services or new restaurants or new venues that have cropped up that cater to a really wealthy, demographic. And so, you know, one example is luxury storage spaces. And these run, you know, three to five million dollars. There are these really large spaces in a very kind of secure environment with like security guards and gates to get in. And they're designed for very wealthy people to display their prize possessions. They're, you know, their fancy cars, their wine collection, They're fine art.

You know, it's like a 7,000 square foot storage unit that, you know, has all the bells and whistles. And then you have increasingly private clubs that have opened up, social clubs that are, again, aimed at wealthy people who want to kind of hobnob with other wealthy people. And so you just see more and more of these kinds of things that are really aimed at the high end, the highest end of the market, but are becoming more common. But aren't these wealthy people that are moving there? are they creating jobs? I mean, a lot of them are business owners. Well, so there's a few unique dynamics to it. So some of these really extremely wealthy people

who have moved to Miami have really just moved themselves to Miami, but their main operations and their main places of employment where they're actually, you know, where their workers are, remain in other states. And so even though they themselves are coming. In many cases, it doesn't involve like a wholesale relocation of a company with hundreds,

even thousands of jobs that pay six figures. That is rare. Meanwhile, Floridians are contending with another problem. Home and flood insurance premiums are skyrocketing because there's been so many powerful storms over the past few years. For some people, we're talking double, triple, over a course of, you know, a number of years. And that really changes the economic picture. I mean, a lot of people have been getting priced out of Florida solely on the insurance piece of this. All of these forces have put a dark cloud over the sunshine state.

Now, fewer people are moving there, and a lot of people are leaving, which is a problem for a place that is for years relied on growth. This is a state that has longed. depended on continued growth, continued real estate development to power its economy. You drive around the state and you see that. There's just construction throughout and new strip malls and new commercial sectors. And so it's a state that's really predicated on growth.

Its economy is predicated on growth. And so if fewer people are coming and more people are leaving, that becomes a problem because there are so many sectors that really depend on that. A few weeks ago, Arion wrote an article that summed up these trends, and a lot of readers responded in the comments. Many shared kind of their own concerns or their own experiences in the state, how, you know, they themselves had felt like they were getting priced out of the state. And so it drew a lot of comments, more than a thousand comments.

And one of the people weighing in on Ariane's reporting was a bit more high profile. Florida Senator Rick Scott. He tweeted the story and said that this raised concerns for him about the direction that Florida was heading in. And that it illustrated how the state had gotten off track. And he said that it was these trends that were outlined in the story were bad for business and bad for Floridians. And so given the senator's interest, we thought, well, maybe we should, you know, reach out. to Senator Scott and engage him on this and see what he has to say about these affordability issues. That's after the break.

You're just people. And people are either productive or dead weight. It's my first day of work and I need to make a big impression. Were you just checking me out? No. It's too bad. I see at least 15 ladies I need to talk to you before my beta block wears off. My coworkers don't take me seriously.

It's not a human. It's just a piece of meat. Someone bring a gurney. Morning. How you doing? Nice to see you. A few weeks ago, our colleague Arion flew up to D.C. to sit down with Republican Senator Rick Scott.

Scott also previously served as the state's governor from 2011 to 2019. So we met at his office in Washington, D.C., just across the street from the Capitol. And, you know, he gave us plenty of his time. We sat down in his office, which is adorned with. with lots of flags and lots of memorabilia from Florida. Senator, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with us. Really appreciate it. I wanted to start off by going through some reader comments.

And proceeded to talk about some of these issues that the article had raised, and I ran by him some of the comments that our readers had. What are the implications of having an economy that is increasingly skewed toward the wealthy? I think that is happening. Okay, if you look at Naples, if you look at Palm Beach, even some of the areas in Miami, the higher end's doing fine. Rich people are doing fine, right? And the poor are having, and Bill Class are having a hard time.

So, this can't go on, right? What stood out to you the most about what he said in the interview? Well, you know, I, funny enough, the very first story that I did for the Wall Street Journal was about him when he had. just been elected governor. You know, his whole thing as governor was that he was going to be the jobs governor. And so more than 15 years later, you know, he still had this like lapel pin that says jobs on it. And that was kind of the lens through which he was looking at it. You know, I think a main point that he was making is that the state needs to create the types of jobs that are going to allow people to afford to stay in Florida. We should be,

the driver of jobs for the country. People want to be in Florida. I mean, when you just fly into Florida, you're happy, right? So what do you have to do? You've got to recruit companies. You've got to make the best place to do business. You've got to have the best education system. You've got to have the best most secure neighborhoods. And so, and you've got to play to your strength. So all those things have to happen. As more low and middle income Floridians struggle to make ends meet, Scott says the solution is to create more jobs in the state. He talked about trying to make the state, you know, more attractive to employers that will hire people with good-paying jobs. And he gave examples of, you know, some employers that are already here like Lockheed Martin, like Embraere.

Those are companies that are involved in the aerospace industry in a part of the state, you know, known as the space coast. the private space sector is something that's growing, and Florida has been pretty successful in capturing a decent share of that market. And so he talked about wanting to, you know, create more of that. How much is that something that he can actually do, though, as a U.S. Senator? Well, he acknowledged that they are somewhat limited

at the federal level in terms of what they can do. He did talk about trying to help to the extent possible on the housing front to try to create more affordable housing, to create policies that would incentivize that. But a lot of this does, you know, depend on what happens at the state and the local level. Creating more affordable housing is something that most states are trying to figure out,

not just Florida. And federal lawmakers have been discussing a new bill that aims to boost the supply of affordable housing across the country. The bill, called the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, include some big ideas to make homes more affordable. It would be a significant overhaul of federal housing policy, and it creates incentives to create a larger supply of new construction

and more affordable construction. It also seeks to restrict the involvement of institutional investors and buying up single-family homes, which has been a factor in regular folks being able to afford those homes. The bill has bipartisan support, but Scott was one of just a handful of senators who voted against it. In a statement, the senator said the bill was, quote, a haphazard attempt to put a federal government-sized bandage over a problem that was caused by the federal government. Scott proposed a different bill to help first-time buyers save for a down payment, but it hasn't advanced.

Scott says that one way to bring about change in Florida is to simply make more people aware, the affordability problem. One thing I've hoped by having a conversation like your article and promoting your article is to have people focus on it. We have elections this year. And so I hope that everybody's running will really focus, because this is what's really important to people. I hope they'll focus on how do you get more jobs?

How do you make sure education system is the best? How do you keep people safe? How do you drive down the cost of living? Because that's what people care about. Right. What does it say about America that Florida, which was sort of once this like, you know, the dream of Florida, affordable retirement, that it was a state that had a low cost of living, that it's no longer that,

that it's becoming something much more expensive. Yeah, I mean, I think it illustrates trends that we're seeing nationally. It's sort of, you know, a real illustration of this K-shaped economy that has been getting a lot of attention, particularly over the past few years. where you have the very affluent who are really, you know, driving the economy in a lot of ways. And they're doing well. And they have the ability to weather any of these sort of, you know, financial and economic headwinds that the country is dealing with and to keep on spending. But then you have the lower end of that K, of that economy, that is really struggling and is having to cut back and is getting squeezed financially.

is having to be very careful with their household budgets. And so they're not participating in this economy. It's sort of hard to get your head around, but over time, you come to realize that the estate is increasingly a place that caters to and draws more of a wealthy population. And that changes is, you know, the identity of the state.

That's all for today. Wednesday, May 27th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon.

Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.