BOYNTON BEACH, Florida — Moving to Florida was never part of Andrew Ford’s life plan. “I angered some deity, and ending up here was my punishment,” the 35-year-old says wryly.
In early 2022, Ford was living in Nashville, Tennessee. The year before, he’d released a low-budget indie horror film called The Reenactment. The movie did okay — it won best horror feature at the Atlanta Underground Film Festival — but months after its release, the film had yet to recover his investment in it, and his rent in Nashville was painfully high. It was time to look for a job.
He put in a bunch of applications. He was hoping to move to Atlanta, and got an opportunity to work for his favorite baseball team, the Atlanta Braves. There was just one catch: Ford was not going to be based in Atlanta, but at the team’s spring training facility, in North Port, Florida. In July, Ford packed up and headed south to the landlocked, rapidly growing city of roughly 75,000 people situated between Sarasota and Fort Myers.
He wasn’t thinking about it at the time, but Ford was joining in one of the most notable American migration trends since the start of the pandemic. To put it unscientifically, a lot of people have been moving to Florida.
Even in a state that grows by an average of 295,000 people per year, the numbers have been eye-popping. Between July 2021 and July 2022 alone, Florida’s population increased by more than 400,000, making it the fastest-growing state for the first time in 65 years — a striking statistic for a place that already has the third-largest population in the country. It was like adding another Miami (population, about 440,000) in just 12 months.
“Any growth in the neighborhood of 400,000 is very high for Florida,” says Stefan Rayer, director of the Population Program in the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida. The old cliché of snowbirds heading to Florida is still true: Retirees are driving the gains….
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