Mark Lane: Mo people, mo problems and we’re No. 1! (2024)

Florida has long dominated the Census Bureau’s fast-growth Top-10 list but hasn’t made the No. 1 spot since 1957. That is, until last week when the agency released new population estimates that showed the Sunshine State beating out Idaho in percentage growth.

Mo people, mo problems, to paraphrase The Notorious B.I.G.

The new numbers show that Florida grew1.9% between 2021 and 2022 to reach 22,244,823 residents. By way of comparison, that’s more than twice the population of Sweden and a little more than the population of Syria. State population has grown by 706,597 people since the 2020 Census. Last year saw an average increase of 8,014 more people in Florida every week, more than 1,100 people per day.

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That increase comes entirely from planes, trains and automobiles because the rate of natural increase — births minus deaths — is negative in Florida. Last year, the state’s natural increase stood at minus 40,216, the largest natural decrease of any state. This is the Margaritaville Effect, Florida’s large population of retirees. The Census recorded 21% of the state population as over 65.

This means more than 40,000 people were needed to move to Florida just to get to zero population growth in 2022. It takes a lot of cars, U-Hauls and moving vans to move the needle. And my, the needle is moving into the orange zone.

It’s easy, too easy, to make fun of people who move to a place and expect the door to slam behind them. Few people feel more strongly about defending Florida’s natural places than people who live on land cleared from the last three rounds of clear-cutting. I came here as a child in the 1960s but can’t be too moralistic, either. That was a boom time with even faster population growth — 3.3% annual growth through a decade that saw truly epic environmental destruction, sprawl and bad planning. I was a kid. It wasn’t my fault.

Both the ’60s housing boom people and the COVID Era housing boom drew people here by the age-old Florida promise: sunshine, beaches and water nearby, low cost of living, natural beauty, a laid-back lifestyle. Cheap paradise! All things that feel threatened by population pressures. The things that draw people to Florida are threatened by the numbers drawn to Florida.

New arrivals love to head to the coasts — 76% of Floridians live in coastal areas. Coastal areas threatened by sea-level rise and increased hurricane action.

Even as we rebuild from the last storm season, new and bigger buildings are envisioned for the same places waiting for the next storm.

Meanwhile, the Legislature addressed a windstorm insurance crisis by lending a helping hand to insurance companies and forgetting about strapped homeowners who face another round of sticker shock this spring as well as the next round of hurricane survivors who will have less recourse should their insurer fail them. Trickle-down insurance reform that is unlikely to trickle down anytime soon.

This latest bump in growth (we’re No 1; we’re No. 1!) has incited a certain amount of blowback, as Florida population bursts always do. The New Smyrna Beach City Commission, for instance, is poised to impose a building moratorium. Something that’s anathema to most Florida localities that court new growth so they can pay for the last round of growth.

But a pause is simply the prudent thing to do so the city can study patterns of flooding from recent storms.

Look for like proposals to gain traction in other coastal cities. At least one hopes. Promises to build back better sound pretty hollow without a pause to look at what happened.

Florida’s precarious balance of natural disaster and natural paradise is part of our character. Our sales literature, prospectuses and public pronouncements naturally emphasize the paradise part, always setting us to be hit by reality. Way back in the 1920s land boom, Groucho Marx, playing a Sunshine State real estate huckster in the movie “The Cocoanuts,” drew the suckers near with the announcement, “Florida, folks, land of perpetual sunshine. Let’s get the auction started before we have a tornado.”

It didn’t slow down the crowd then; it doesn’t now.

Mark Lane is a News-Journal columnist. His email ismlanewrites@gmail.com.