“Prices in Florida are still going up, which is really shocking because home prices in many parts of the country, particularly out west and along the coasts, are coming down,” said Ken H. Johnson, a real estate economist at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. “Not only are we short of housing units, but we’re seeing extraordinary population growth. Put those two things together, and you get unaffordable housing.”

The pandemic spurred nearly 1 million people to move to Florida from 2020 to 2022, transforming the state’s economy and rocking its already hot housing market. Florida’s population grew by nearly 2 percent last year alone, faster than that of any other state and five times the rate of national growth, Census Bureau data shows. Much of that growth, economists said, has been propelled by an influx of white-collar professionals who’ve decided that if they can work from anywhere, they’d like to log on from the beach.

[Hey, there are beaches in California and New Jersey, too. People instead decided that if they can work from anywhere, they’d prefer to live in places with low taxes, sane government, and more personal liberty. The pandemic wasn’t just a coincidence or a secondary factor in this migration; people moved to Florida and other states with fewer restrictions, not to states with more restrictions and nanny-state bureaucrats. If weather was the big factor, why did California suffer a net loss of population during the pandemic? — Ed]