African Americans are thriving there — moving to the state, buying homes, and building businesses.
African Americans are thriving there — moving to the state, buying homes, and building businesses.
T he NAACP recently issued a travel advisory for the State of Florida, claiming that “Florida is openly hostile toward African Americans.” People should avoid travel to Florida, the advisory said, because of the state’s “regressive” education and social policies that the NAACP considers objectionable.
Fact-checkers at the Washington Examiner countered that “Florida is, overall, a safe and prosperous place for black Americans based on a wide range of metrics.”
Indeed, far from being “openly hostile,” as the advisory claims, Florida facilitates better living standards for African-American households than do more “progressive” states such as California, New York, Illinois, and New Jersey.
To start, African Americans have a considerably better chance of owning their own home in Florida. In 2021, 49.2 percent of African Americans owned their own home there, according to the American Community Survey. This is better than the national rate of 44.0 percent. In African-American homeownership, Florida ranks eighth-best among the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
In particular, Florida has done much better than California, where African-American homeownership dropped from 51 percent in 2004 to only 35.5 percent in 2021, according to the State of California Housing Finance Agency.
New York’s black homeownership rate is even lower than California’s, at 34.1 percent. New Jersey’s, at 41.7 percent, and Illinois’s, at 41.2 percent, are also well below Florida’s.
Homeownership provides an important opportunity for low- and middle-income households, for whom home equity is the main source of wealth. Homeownership reduces wealth inequality.
In addition, Florida is a good place to get a job. According to the Economic Policy Institute, Florida’s black unemployment rate was 3.4 percent in the first quarter of 2023, the third-best in the nation, behind only South Dakota and Alabama. More politically progressive states had higher unemployment rates. New Jersey’s black unemployment rate was 6.8 percent — double that of Florida. The black unemployment rates in California and New York were even higher, at 7.7 percent and 8.0 percent respectively. The black unemployment rate in Illinois was more than triple that of Florida, at 10.5 percent. The unemployment rate in the nation’s capital (the District of Columbia) was almost as high, at 9.6 percent.
Further, Florida is home to more black-owned businesses than any other state, according to Pew Research.
Recognizing the importance of black entrepreneurship, three black tourism organizations criticized the travel advisory in a joint statement. These groups — the Future of Black Tourism, Blacks in Travel & Tourism, and the Black Travel Alliance — asked in their statement, “Who does the Florida Travel Advisory really hurt? . . . Where is the consideration that the travel advisory can become damaging to small Black travel and tourism businesses and underserved communities in Florida that rely heavily on tourism?” They added that “small Black businesses and marginalized communities certainly should not be the sacrificial lamb.”
But nothing is more surprising to Florida’s critics than that the Sunshine State is rated as having the best education system in the nation by US News and World Report in its “2023 Best States” evaluation.
But the best test of a state’s attractiveness is whether more households are moving in than moving out (net domestic migration). Often people move to improve their lives. Life in Florida, as described above, offers better opportunities than progressive states do.
By contrast, many more people are moving away from California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey than are moving in.
Florida’s population gains have been astonishing. In 2000, Florida had 3 million fewer people than New York. By 2022, Florida’s population was 2.6 million more than New York’s. A principal factor has been its success in attracting net domestic migration. Florida has led the nation, with 3 million net domestic migrants since 2000, according to Census Bureau population estimates. The trend has accelerated in the past two years, as Florida added 560,000 net domestic migrants. This is more over a two-year period than any state has seen since at least 2000. It is also more people than live in the city of Atlanta.
In fact, more African Americans are moving to Florida from elsewhere in the nation than are moving away. According to a Brookings Institution analysis of American Community Survey data, Florida attracted more new black residents from elsewhere in the United States than all but four other states from 2010 to 2015 and from 2015 to 2020, for a combined total of 60,000. Only Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Nevada gained more black residents.
There has been a huge African-American exodus out of the more progressive states. A net 392,000 African Americans left New York for other states between 2010 and 2020, while Illinois lost a net 185,000, California 132,000, and New Jersey 100,000.
In sum, things are better in Florida for African Americans than in more progressive states on important measures of prosperity and opportunity. Black homeownership is materially greater in Florida and black unemployment is considerably lower, while blacks own more businesses and education is better. The footsteps of African Americans moving to Florida are drowning out the naysayers.
John Fund is the national political reporter for National Review. Wendell Cox is a senior fellow at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity and a principal at the consulting firm Demographia.