What Miami Is Doing Right

Miami — If politicians are right about what people want, Miami should be a ghost town.

It has become fashionable on the left and the right to talk about the need to preserve jobs, protect Americans from foreign markets, and prefer stability over dynamism. This tendency manifests itself as proposals for tariffs, industrial policy, and stronger unionization. The primary economic narrative coming from leaders in both parties is one of victimhood. You’re a sucker, the politicians say, and someone else — the billionaires, the Chinese, Big Sandwich — is making out at your expense.

Americans just can’t handle “rough-and-tumble capitalism,” to borrow a term from New York Times journalist David Leonhardt’s recent book. They need government, organized labor, and big business to protect them from rapid changes with regulation, sectoral bargaining, and corporate social responsibility.

Yet somehow, Miami seems to be doing all right.

I had the pleasure of moderating a panel on Friday at the Miami Economic Forum, an event put on by the Economic Club of Miami. The club’s chairman is frequent National Review Capital Matters contributor Jon Hartley, and the executive director is NRI alum Francisco Gonzalez. The entire event exuded optimism.

One thing you can’t help but notice is that people here love to talk about Miami. The transplants love to talk about how much more they enjoy Miami than where they came from. And the lifers love to talk about how much the city has grown.

That growth involved an incredible amount of change. Miami barely existed 100 years ago. Today, it has the third-most skyscrapers of any city in the U.S. — behind only New York and Chicago, and ahead of Los Angeles, Houston, Philadelphia, and numerous other cities with much larger populations.

Also striking is the diversity of people you see. Not just skin color, though that is certainly the case. The area breaks our (utterly bonkers) racial-classification system: The Census Bureau puts Miami-Dade County at 79.4 percent “White alone” and 69.1 percent “Hispanic or Latino.” Fifty-four percent are foreign-born.

Walking around downtown, you see people of all ages. You see residents, vacationers, and people traveling for work. You see families of every shape and size. You hear Spanish spoken just as much as English, with other foreign languages interspersed. You smell countless foreign cuisines.

Like so many other Florida cities, it’s a magnet for tourists. But it’s also a magnet for high-tech and finance from around the world. It’s growing as a transportation hub: The Port of Miami is expanding, Miami International Airport was the eighth-busiest cargo airport in the world in 2022, and Miami is the southern terminus of Brightline, the only privately owned and operated intercity passenger train in the U.S. (and people actually ride it).

Miami’s unemployment rate is about 1.5 percent. In 2022, the Miami–Fort Lauderdale–West Palm Beach metropolitan area had a larger GDP than Austria‘s.

There are still problems. Traffic is a major one, and Miami is one of the most congested cities in the world. Housing is becoming unaffordable, likely contributing to a slight population decline in recent years. The Miami Herald has reported on several scandals involving the mayor, Francis Suarez (who denies wrongdoing and has not been charged with any crimes).

But keep in mind that corruption isn’t exactly unusual in big-city politics, and problems of traffic and housing costs arise because Miami is a place that people want to live in. Perhaps the most impressive numbers are on crime. While Washington, D.C., is currently struggling with soaring crime rates, Miami is probably the safest it has ever been.

Miami had 31 homicides in 2023, the lowest number on record, with data going back to 1947. That was a 38 percent reduction from 2022’s 52 killings. (During the 1980s, Miami would have over 200 homicides in a year, despite having about 100,000 fewer residents than now.) The city also saw a 34 percent decrease in shootings and a 10 percent decrease in robberies from 2022 to 2023.

The city’s homicide-arrest rate is above the national average. The police department plans to hire 100 new officers this year. “More cops equal less crime and especially if those police officers are assigned in a smart manner,” assistant police chief Armando Aguilar told Miami’s ABC affiliate.

Of course, it helps that it’s 75 degrees outside in February. But Miami is a happening place in part because it’s the largest economic engine in a state that has implemented the supposedly outdated conservative agenda of low regulation and low taxes (or, in the case of individual income, no taxes) better than just about anywhere else. And it has city leaders who insist on law and order, with the results to back up their talk.

Is Miami succeeding despite having small government and being a living embodiment of globalization and creative destruction? That’s what the prevailing narrative from the economic grievance-peddlers would have you believe. It seems more likely Miami is thriving because of those characteristics. And politicians should know that there are plenty of Americans, in Miami and elsewhere, who aren’t crying out for protection from the market.