ORANGE DUBIOUS
Moving to Florida? You'll be running back in five years
WILL the last New Yorker leaving for Florida turn out the lights? As The Post reported, a record 61,728 New York State residents fled to the Sunshine State last year, a number likely to rise in 2022. Lower taxes! Schools without masks! No shoebox-sized apartments that cost more to rent than it took to build Hudson Yards!
But you’ll all be sorry. As Jason Mudrick, head of Madison Avenue’s Mudrick Capital Management, put it, “The main problem with moving to Florida is that you have to live in Florida.”
Financial news site Risk Market News, citing a few hedge funds’ plans to set up a “Wall Street South,” warns that these companies are nuts to set foot in a state “increasingly beset by tropical cyclones and flooding.”
The Yale School of the Environment, in a 2020 article, stated the “inescapable truth about life in South Florida: This low-lying region is set to be swallowed by the sea.”
Blown away
A successful Miami Beach real estate broker and consultant, Michael Bordenaro, divulged that nearly half of his clients who moved to Florida gave up on their place in the sun within five years. One reason: astronomically priced wind and flood insurance, among other surprises that can quickly wipe out any tax benefits you think you’re about to enjoy.
Chattering-class media slobs gush over South Florida after boozefueled junkets to overhyped festivals or after scoring free meals at whichever trendy Manhattan restaurant was the latest to open a satellite there. But real life in the land of palm trees, manatees and badly mixed mojitos is a different story.
Big Apple apartment dwellers worry that a new building will block their river or park views. In South Florida, a new high-rise can wipe out the entire ocean. It happened to a friend of mine who believed the vista he enjoyed from the tip of South Beach was safe — until a monstrous skyscraper somehow rose on a “protected” sliver of land.
As for supposedly ubiquitous sunshine — my friends spend much of their time plotting escapes from rainy summers when it’s “like living inside a wet sock” and from the six months under hurricane watch.
New York has Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall and the greatest collection of museums anywhere, within walking distance of each other. Florida’s scattered, B-list cultural resources include the Palm Beach Opera, no threat to our Met.
Cut-rate culture
Florida’s true cultural icon is Mickey Mouse. The state let Disney rule a precious chunk of Orlando in the manner of an imperial conqueror for a half-century. Gov. Ron DeSantis finally yanked the Mouse’s “special tax district” when Disney whined over a law forbidding “transgender education” for kindergarten to third-grade pupils.
But court challenges are planned. Disney could still win. This is Florida, after all — the Weird-But-True capital of America.
Only in Florida must you go north to go south. For the Blue State crowd downstate, where nary a southern accent is to be heard, life’s an Upper West Side or brownstone Brooklyn wine-and-cheese party. “Arrest Trump” is on many a tongue. In the state’s swampy, Red State midsection and panhandle, they’d happily tune in to a Confederacy Network if one were to spring up.
And, everywhere, the wild kingdom rules: A Palm Coast woman claimed she saw a baby dinosaur in her backyard last year and posted a video to “prove” it. A recent genius visitor to the Jacksonville Zoo had his wrist bloodied when he stuck his arm into the jaguar cage. A resident of central-state Odessa was confronted by an 8-foot alligator on his doorstep a few weeks ago.
The state’s 1.3 million gators, it should be noted, are only officially considered a “nuisance” if they’re at least 4-feet long. If you move to Florida, bring a tape measure — and check your brain at the airport.