Florida has no state income tax.
There, that’s the good news—and about the only good news—when it comes to taxes in the Sunshine State. So if you’re thinking of moving to Florida to reduce your tax burden, you might think again. There are plenty of reasons for being here, but lowering your taxes probably should not be one of them.
Even supposedly tax-hostile state governments need revenue, so they get it in other ways.
There’s the sales tax, which in Florida state-wide is 6 percent—pretty much in the middle range of other states. But local counties can impose a surtax on top of that, and many do. Broward doesn’t have a surtax, but Miami-Dade adds one percent, for a total of seven. In the Keys, you’ll pay 7.5 percent. Groceries and prescription drugs are exempt, but if you live on carry-out, you’ll be paying the 9 percent tax on prepared food.
The gasoline tax in Florida ranks among the top tier nationwide, and is a combination of taxes levied by both the state and counties. The local rate varies from one county to another. In Miami-Dade, the total of state and local gas taxes is 33.5 cents per gallon; in Broward, it’s a little higher at 35.5 cents per gallon.
But the biggest shock newcomers may face is the property tax on their homes. Florida property taxes are very high, and Miami-Dade rates are a bit higher than Broward. And it varies further depending on which municipality you live in. In my case, the tax on my home in Florida is more than 50 percent higher than what I was paying in Washington, DC, even though the value of the Florida home is only a bit more than half what my DC home was worth.
The whole subject gets pretty complicated, but here’s an attempt at a basic thumbnail explanation.
When you ask the realtor about taxes on a home you’ve fallen in love with, the listing sheet will show the amount that the current owner is paying. The trouble is that number may not be anywhere close to the tax you will eventually be charged. Your tax will be based on what you paid for the property, not what the current tax appraisal is. If what you paid is significantly higher, then expect your taxes to be higher as well.
First a little background: The current owner’s tax is a function of what he paid when he bought the place, which sets the basis for everything that follows. Back in 1995 when the real estate bubble was expanding and prices had started zooming upwards, the “Save Our Homes” amendment to the Florida constitution capped annual increases in the property appraisal—i.e., the appraised value on which the tax rate (or “millage”) is applied–at no more than 3 percent annually to protect homeowners from huge tax bills based on the inflated value of their properties. This applied only to those properties which enjoyed the “homestead exemption” (about which more below), but for them even if a home’s market value had increased from, say, $100K in 1995 to $400K in 2005 at the top of the boom, the appraised value for tax purposes would have been no more than about $135-140K.
Then, of course, disaster struck, and the Florida housing market collapsed. Cash-strapped municipalities dependent on property taxes saw revenues plummet as real estate values dropped across the board. While they couldn’t raise the appraisals, they could—and often did–raise the tax rates (millage) to make up for lost revenue. End of digression.
The good thing is that for the first tax year, you get the benefit of the previous owner’s assessment. Taxes are billed retroactively, so you will get the bill for 2012 sometime this fall. It’s in the following year that the sales price supersedes the previous tax appraisal and your bill will likely jump. Both Miami-Dade and Broward counties have a handy on-line tool for estimating property taxes. I’d suggest that you use them to avoid any nasty surprises.
Also in the year after you purchase property, you can apply for your homestead exemption. There are a number of qualifying conditions to be eligible, most importantly that the property must be your primary residence. However, if you’re eligible, it’s definitely a good thing to have because in addition to reducing your tax bill, it will apply the 3 percent cap to future appraisal increases.
Oh, and then there are all the user fees for things like vehicle registration and permit fees for any conceivable thing you want to do at your property, which are often considerably higher than other places in the country. State and local governments can get away with jacking up these rates more easily because they don’t call them taxes. But that’s what they are.
So, factoring in all these things, I doubt if I’m better off tax-wise as a Floridian than as a Washingtonian. But that wasn’t why I made the move.
Cautionary note: This post engages in broad generalizations, to which there are, of course, numerous exceptions. Well, I guess that covers that.
When I first arrived in South Florida, I was struck by the nasty things that people who live in Fort Lauderdale and Broward County had to say about Miami. I would sometimes get disparaging remarks about Broward from Miami residents, but not as often and not as vehement–in fact, they often seemed just a little defensive.
I once asked a realtor who was showing us around Fort Lauderdale if he also worked in Miami-Dade, and his response was something like “Good God, no!” with appropriately emotive body language and facial expressions. He then went on at considerable length about why we wouldn’t want to live in Miami. Other people I talked to would say things like: “Oh, I never go to Miami” or “I hate Miami” or “It’s like a foreign country there.”
I have come to conclude that the last remark is at the core of the divide. For a least a couple of decades, Miami-Dade has been majority Hispanic with a large Haitian community as well as great numbers of immigrants from elsewhere. As late as 2000, Broward was—but no longer is—majority non-Hispanic white (to use Census Bureau terminology) or as we used to say in Texas: “Anglo.” As Miami became more Hispanic from the ‘60s on, many Anglo residents left for Broward.
According to the 2010 census, about two-thirds of Miami-Dade residents are of Hispanic or Latino origin. Slightly over half of the population is foreign-born (not all Latino, of course). Only about one-sixth of the population is Anglo/white, which is slightly less than the black population. More than 70 percent speak a language other than English at home.
In Broward, only about a quarter of the population is Hispanic, and about 30 percent are foreign-born. A little over one-third of the population speak a foreign language at home. In ten years since the 2000 census, however, the Anglo/white population slipped from 58 to 43 percent, and blacks are a little over a quarter of the population. So it appears that something like the demographic changes that transformed Miami-Dade are now happening in Broward, and some Anglo residents who don’t feel comfortable with that are moving further north to Tea Party country.
But for now, the neighboring counties do feel rather different. To me, Miami seems much more urban and cosmopolitan—a great big ethnic and cultural stew. There are times in parts of Miami and Miami Beach when I get flashbacks of Rio—or Brooklyn. It seems more chaotic and less planned. There is a bit more history there (though neither place really goes back very far), and because Miami’s growth spurt happened sooner, there are more neighborhoods gone to seed, though some have come back in spectacular fashion.
Fort Lauderdale seems newer and tidier and, to me, more suburban and white bread—kind of like Charlotte, NC but with a beach and more gays. Indeed, without the gay community (material for at least another post or two), I think the place would seem pretty dull. Las Olas is nice, but I find it a bit Disneyfied. (To be fair, Mary Brickell Village in Miami is sort of the same thing.) And Broward is probably a bit safer—and a lot smugger.
Miami and Miami-Dade have a well-deserved reputation for political corruption, while Broward has had a somewhat better image. But that may have been illusionary, as recent revelations of corruption in the county have emerged. Miami might have been the cocaine hub of the ‘80s, but Broward is the epicenter of prescription drug fraud and distribution for the US today.
The traffic is terrible no matter where you go.
In the end, you wind up in the place that most closely fits your personality regardless of what people tell you. When I first was considering moving to South Florida, I asked several people where I should go if I had a heart attack. One lady (African-American and a Miami resident, as it happened) told me: “Well, if it was me, I’d drag my ass across the Broward County line and call 911.”
I took note, but wound up in Miami anyway.
Senator Marco Rubio’s endorsement of Mitt Romney, however lacking in fervor, has fueled speculation about his being tapped for the VP slot to a fever pitch. And why not? He’s Latino, from swing-state Florida, isn’t totally ignorant and can speak in complete sentences, and has all the right views to appeal to the Republican Taliban. And by golly, he’s just so damn cute!
Best of all, he seems to be able to re-mold himself to the prevailing views in the GOP, and at 40 is young enough that he doesn’t have much embarrassing history of previous conflicting positions trailing behind him to provide fodder for opponents.
The basic bio of this Tea Party wunderkind is good old Horatio Alger stuff. Born in Miami to Cuban immigrant parents, he played football in high school and college before graduating from the University of Miami, where he also graduated with honors from law school. He interned with Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, was elected city commissioner in West Miami, and then won a special election in 2000 to the Florida state house of representatives. From there, his rise has been meteoric. He was elected Speaker of the House in 2006, and in 2009 entered the race for Republican candidate for the US Senate against incumbent governor Charlie Crist. And won. He then rode the Tea Party wave to win the general election, trouncing both Crist (running as an independent) and Democrat Kendrick Meek.
Rubio has all the credentials demanded of a GOP politician these days:
- He is vehemently and religiously (Catholic, then Mormon, then Catholic again) anti-abortion and co-sponsored the Blunt amendment in the Senate to allow employers to deny insurance coverage for contraception on religious or moral grounds.
- While in the state legislature, he carried water for the NRA, including the now-notorious “Stand Your Ground” law, which he continues to defend.
- He doesn’t believe in global climate change, signed the Koch brothers’ “No Climate Tax” pledge, and supports off-shore oil and gas drilling off of Florida. His latest League of Conservation Voters score is 9 percent—about as low as they get. The Kochs’ foundation has been a major campaign contributor.
- And, of course, he’s for cutting taxes and smaller government. In August, he voted against the resolution to increase the federal debt limit which allowed the federal government to remain open and avoid default.
Speaking at the Reagan library last August, Rubio waxed eloquent about a mythic time, dear to the hearts of conservatives, when the family took care of the sick and people saved for their own retirement, before the government took over those responsibilities and “weakened our people”—i.e., the good old days before Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Never mind that he’s far too young to have any memory of the reality of those days, but this is indeed where we’re heading if the Republican agenda triumphs.
Rubio has managed to avoid major scandal and controversy so far. A recent New Yorker piece focused on a spat between Rubio and Univision that erupted over the Spanish-language network’s resurrection of the arrest and conviction of Rubio’s brother-in-law 20 years ago on drug trafficking charges. Rubio’s allies and the right-wing media machine took this and spun it as an attempt by Univision to “blackmail” Rubio. It’s a long and complicated story, but it’s pretty hard to see any “blackmail” in this. Read it and judge for yourself.
Then there was the awkward business about Rubio’s presenting himself as the son of Cuban refugees from the Castro regime, when in fact his parents left the island in 1956, well before Castro took over. He apparently was still representing himself as a refugee from communism when the New York Times Magazine did a long story on the Crist-Rubio race in January 2010.
There have been allegations of misuse of campaign funds, and the story about the near-foreclosure for non-payment on Rubio’s house that he shared with now fellow US Representative David Rivera in Tallahassee during their state legislature days. But in foreclosure-ridden Florida, that story barely caused a ripple.
Indeed, none of this has really stuck. So Rubio’s chances of getting the nod for the VP nomination probably depend a lot on whether he’s seen as being able to bite into the Democrats’ presumed appeal to Latino voters, which has been helped by the Republicans’ harsh anti-immigration rhetoric and laws passed by GOP-led states like Arizona. Cuban immigrants have, of course, received different—and greatly preferential—treatment by the US government compared to those from other Latin American countries.
The New Yorker piece looks into this question, which basically is: Can a Cuban-American Republican like Rubio attract the support of other Latino voters just because he has a Spanish surname when his party is seen as so broadly hostile? But the truth is that the GOP doesn’t have a lot of attractive Latino alternatives.
And he is so damn cute!
Here’s a fun fact: The average elevation of the City of Miami is 6 feet above sea level.
Fort Lauderdale is a teensy bit higher at 9 feet, but not so much in the areas with the canals, yachts, and fancy houses.
Miami Beach’s average elevation is just 4 feet. According to the city’s official website: “All properties within the City of Miami Beach are located within the Special “Flood Hazard Area”. ,,, There is a 26% chance of being flooded over the life of a thirty (30) year mortgage.”
Given that, the prospect of a rise in sea level resulting from global climate change should give South Floridians something to think about. There is virtually full consensus among climate scientists that sea levels are rising because of melting of polar ice caps and expansion due to higher ocean temperatures. The only debate is over how much and how fast. Recent studies suggest that the rise may be faster and sooner, and that we will be seeing significant effects within a few decades, not centuries.
You don’t really need to know exactly how much it will be. Even a one-foot rise would have an impact on some of the area’s priciest real estate. Check out this fascinating interactive map, which shows areas threatened by a rise in sea level between 1 and 10 feet. You can zoom in on the map and pan around to adjacent areas in Broward as well as Miami-Dade. If your house is near the water, the effect may be pretty sobering.
The potential effect isn’t just limited to flooding and increasing destruction from hurricane storm surges. Rising sea levels also threaten fresh water aquifers with contamination from salt water.
You might think that Florida’s elected officials would be leading the effort to reduce greenhouse gases that accelerate warming and rise in sea level. But you would be wrong—at least as regards the Republicans.
Governor Rick Scott denies human influence on climate change. He (and several area congress members, including Senator Marco Rubio, and Rep. David Rivera) signed the “No Climate Tax” pledge promulgated by the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity.
Marco Rubio has said that he doesn’t accept the scientific evidence for climate change, and has voted against cap-and-trade to lower greenhouse gas emissions.
Rep. Allen West: “If we could just get President Obama and former Vice-President Al Gore to apologize to God reference “man-made global warming/climate change” perhaps we would not all be freezing, even in South Florida!”
Mario Diaz-Balart pretends to be all agnostic and reasonable about climate change, but pulls out every possible bullshit argument against the science whenever he speaks on the subject. Watch this hilarious video where he sounds like the SNL character Nicholas Fehn uttering one non-sequitur after another.
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is a little wobbly on the issue. She actually said in 2009 that “global warming is real and man-made.” But when it comes to voting, she goes with her Republican colleagues. For example, she joined all of the South Florida Republican congressional delegation in voting to bar the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases and has opposed “cap and trade.”
The South Florida Democratic delegation (Frederica Wilson, Ted Deutsch, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and Alcee Hastings) seem to get it, and have voted the opposite way on these issues. But of course, they are in the minority now.
The League of Conservation Voters’ latest ratings score the local Republican congress members between 9 and 20 percent. The Democrats’ scores range from 80 to 100 percent.
I suppose the head-in-the-sand posture by elected officials reflects the take-the-money-and-run mentality that has characterized so much of this state’s development—but it will be a tragic legacy if the science is right. (Sorry about the mixed metaphor.)
Meanwhile, if you live in Hialeah or Lauderhill and have always wanted waterfront property, just be patient. You may get your wish!
Postscript: Check out this post at Eye on Miami.
They say every vote counts—or at least it should. Perhaps in no place is that more literally true than in Florida, where a switch of a few hundred votes in the official count for the 2000 election would have given us President Al Gore instead of George W. Bush.
So why have the Governor and legislature of Florida made it more difficult to register and to vote by imposing onerous new restrictions on organizations that have conducted voter registration drives and limited early voting periods in addition to requiring photo i.d. at the polls? The answer is that, whenever possible, politicians—in this case the Republicans who rule the state government—prefer to choose their voters rather than have the voters choose them.
This morning’s New York Times carries a front page story on how the new law has caused a steep drop in new voter registrations in the state. The Times’ analysis showed a drop off of 39 percent in Miami-Dade compared with the last presidential election year. According to the Times, The League of Women Voters has halted its registration efforts in Florida, as has Rock the Vote, which works to register first-time young voters.
The new Florida restrictions are among the most stringent of a wave of similar measures in other Republican-dominated states. Their proponents claim that the rules are necessary to prevent voter fraud, though they are hard-pressed to come up with specific examples of such fraud. The more obvious reason is to limit voting by the poor, the young, and minorities, who are more likely to vote Democrat.
True, it’s not too hard to register to vote if you have easy Internet access or a driver’s license. Information about voter registration is on the Florida Division of Elections website, and you can register at the DMV when you get your Florida license.
The problem is if you are poor and don’t have a car or driver’s license or ready access on line to get the information you need. That’s where those voter drive tables in shopping malls, transit stations, and schools and colleges really helped. But in Florida, they have all but disappeared.
The history of this country has always been toward expanding the voter franchise, but the Republican party now seems to want to go in the other direction—back to the days when only the “right” people voted. It’s a shame. Really.
If you buy a home in South Florida, the mortgage lender will require homeowners insurance, but here’s the catch: Private insurance companies have all but ceased writing new policies. And what you can get is crazy expensive!
Most likely you will have just one option—the state-run Citizen’s Property Insurance Corporation, which was set up in 2002 after private insurers started abandoning Florida in the wake of the catastrophic losses from Hurricane Andrew in 1992. The insurers’ retreat became a stampede after the bad 2004 hurricane season. Citizen’s was originally intended to be the insurer of last resort, but now is virtually the only one writing new policies on South Florida properties.
Because Citizen’s is state-run, it is also a political football. The current Republican-dominated state government hates it on ideological grounds because it’s a government program and would love to eliminate it. But that would leave prospective home buyers unable to purchase properties, because there is no one else willing to insure them. In Florida’s foreclosure-ridden real estate market, that would be an even worse disaster, crippling any chance for recovery.
So instead, the governor and legislature just diddle with Citizen’s to eat away at coverage and arbitrarily increase rates. Such proposals have even included one a couple of years ago to eliminate policies for coastal wind damage (i.e., hurricanes), which of course was the reason Citizen’s had to be created in the first place. There seems to be no real plan or effort to find a solution for the situation. Rates just jumped drastically and without explanation this year, even though Florida has had six years of respite from damaging hurricanes which, presumably, would have allowed Citizen’s to build up reserves. The cost to the home owner goes up regardless—good year or bad.
Now because Citizen’s has such an enormous share of home insurance, the state government is looking for ways to “depopulate” its policies by passing them off to other companies. This is called the “take-out” program—and we’re not talking pizza here. Several companies (none of them big national insurers that you’ve ever heard of) have been authorized to take over selected homeowners’ policies. You can opt out and stay with Citizen’s if you choose, but you have to do so in writing. It looks like the same thing as the “slamming” that phone companies did in the 90s.
You might have better luck if your home was built in the last 10 years or so, after the adoption of post-Andrew building codes pioneered by Miami-Dade County. And, you may be able to get rate discounts by retrofitting “wind mitigation” measures such as hurricane-impact windows or roof improvements if your home is older.
But you will pay through the nose in any case. (BTW, realtors tend to downplay insurance costs, probably fearing they’ll scare away buyers.) The rates are based on hurricane risk, and Miami-Dade and Monroe (which includes the Keys) counties are at the top of the scale, with Broward close behind. Other factors such as proximity to water also come into play, so if you really want waterfront, just remember that will jack up your insurance costs.
My own experience is probably fairly typical. My house was originally built in 1938 and added onto in the ‘80s. It’s a solidly built house that has withstood decades of storms, and I love its vintage style, but of course it does not meet current code requirements. When I bought, my insurance broker told me that Citizen’s was my only option, so I sucked it up and paid the breathtakingly expensive premium. I then—at great expense–replaced all the windows and doors with hurricane-impact rated products. This got me a substantial discount on my premium—close to 25 percent—and I thought things were looking up. Then I got my bill for the renewal and was astonished to see that the rates had been increased to almost what they were before I did the “mitigation.” So I was pretty much back to square one, costwise. Then I opened my mail one day to find that my policy was being transferred to another company I had never heard of. I called my broker and asked his advice, and he said I would probably be better off sticking with Citizen’s, so that’s what I did. Who knows if that’s right or not, but as Simon and Garfunkel once sang: “Any way you look at it, you lose.”
Oh, and then there’s the flood insurance, but that’s a topic for another post.
This post would have been way down my list of topics, were it not for the tragic shooting of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Florida. The case has provoked nationwide outrage when the local police let the alleged shooter go without charges, but it has also pointed a spotlight at certain aspects of Florida gun laws, namely:
- Almost anyone can get a gun in Florida without a permit, and
- Someone can legally shoot you if they just FEEL threatened with bodily harm, even if you are unarmed.
When the story first broke, I was stunned that the local police were refusing to investigate the case as a homicide. My second reaction was incredulity that a neighborhood watch volunteer would be walking around ARMED. Apparently, nobody else finds this odd—at least I haven’t seen this remarked upon in all the commentary about the case.
According to info supplied by the NRA (which, presumably, should know), if you’re over 18 and not a convicted felon you can legally purchase and possess a handgun without any permit or license required. (Drug addicts, alcoholics, mental incompetents, and vagrants are also excluded, but really…who would admit to belonging in one of those categories and how would anyone know otherwise?) True, you do need a permit to carry a handgun outside of your home or business, but if you’re over 21, it looks pretty easy to get one.
On the second point, in 2005 Florida passed the so-called “Stand Your Ground Law”, which says that “a person is justified in the use of deadly force and does not have a duty to retreat if…he or she reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the imminent commission of a forcible felony.”
The problem, of course, is that feeling threatened is a very subjective test. And the fact that the shootee is unarmed probably makes no difference.
According to the Orlando Sentinel, in the five months after the law was passed, “there were at least 13 shootings in Central Florida where self-defense was claimed. Out of six men killed and four more wounded in the cases, only one was armed.” The article goes on to note that that local police basically stopped investigating cases where self-defense was claimed and left it up to discretion of state authorities to pursue the cases.
The Tampa Bay Times reported that since 2005 the SYG law has been invoked in at least 130 cases, 70 percent of which involved fatalities. In most cases, the shooter, stabber, etc. did not stand trial.
Which, basically, seems to be what happened in the Trayvon Martin case until the outrage moved federal authorities to get involved.
Now the authors of the SYG law, former state senator Durell Peaden (from Crestview in the Florida Panhandle) and state Rep. Dennis Baxley (from Ocala in north-central Florida)—both Republicans—are insisting that it isn’t a license to kill and doesn’t need to be changed or repealed. I find it interesting that the pro-gun politicians usually seem to come from low-crime (and overwhelmingly white) small towns or suburbs. I guess they are, uh, “feeling threatened.”
The NRA, which pushed heavily for the SYG law’s passage, remains unabashed, and continues to press other states to pass similar statutes. After all, guns don’t kill people, blah, blah, blah. And Senator Marco Rubio, a cheer leader for the effort to pass SYG as a state legislator back in 2005 (and who may well be Mitt Romney’s VP running mate) continues to defend it.
Just remember, if you piss someone off or look suspicious to them, they may be packing and just might shoot you and get away with it by claiming self-defense.
If you live in Florida, you need a car. It’s technically possible to get around by public transportation in South Florida, but it’s not something that most people with unimpaired vision and a bank account would want to attempt.
So you will need to place yourself at the mercy of the Florida Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles office. Actually, it’s not as awful as that might sound, but there are some peculiarities that you might not expect.
For starters, you can’t just decide to waste a day in DMV hell and show up at the nearest office. You will need an appointment. In theory, that sounds like a good time-saving idea, but it might take quite a while to get one. In my case, it took an entire month between the time I went on line to make an appointment and the first available time slot. (The wait times reportedly vary from one office to another.) They tell you furthermore not to arrive more than 15 minutes before your appointment time. (Slight clarification: I understand there are some offices that accept walk-ins, but it’s not at all easy to find out which ones those are.)
On the appointed day, I gathered up the documentation specified in the somewhat-confusing official website and the somewhat less confusing unofficial one and headed out to the North Dade Justice Center. After Mortal Kombat in the parking lot to grab a vacant spot, I spent another 10 minutes or so to go through the metal detector, presented my papers, did the eye test, and within 30 minutes was out of there with my new Florida driver’s license. And I had registered to vote to boot. So, not bad.
But I wasn’t quite done yet. In other places I have lived, you would get your tags at the same location you get your driver’s license—at the DMV. In Florida, however, you have to go elsewhere—to a licensed private agency of the tax collector’s office, where you apply for the car title and tags. (There’s probably a story there about how this system came about, but I don’t know what it is.)
And you have to pay in cash. Fortunately, there is a handy ATM right there in the agency, so you can contribute a few golden crumbs to whoever owns the machine. And then, voilà, you’re a Florida driver.
However, I kept having a nagging feeling that something was missing. Then I realized that there had been no vehicle inspection. So I went back on line and discovered that inspections had been discontinued in Florida in 2000. So no mechanical inspection, no emissions test, no nothing. Apparently you can drive around in any smoke-belching piece of crap you like, although I did see something that said in certain counties, including Miami-Dade, you can report a seriously polluting car—just not sure to whom
Of course, you will need to have auto insurance. But be prepared to see your rates go up. When I called my insurance carrier of 40+ years (USAA) to switch my coverage from DC to Florida, I fully expected my rates to go down. After all, in DC I had been parking on the street in a none-too-posh inner city neighborhood at the center of a large metropolitan area, and in Florida I was in a nice safe suburban neighborhood and had a locked garage to put my car in. But instead, my rate quote was about 40 percent higher. I asked the agent why that was the case, and he told me: hurricanes and fraud. Oh.
I love living in South Florida. Really. Every morning I wake up, look outside, and think: “Man, this is wonderful!”
But there are serpents even in paradise, and I’m not talking about Burmese pythons. And—alas—this isn’t quite paradise. Besides, every place has its own peculiar ways of doing things, and in many respects Florida’s are more peculiar than most. I bought a home in Miami-Dade in January 2011, and I’ve been learning all kinds of things–good and bad–ever since.
I moved here from Washington, DC, where I’d lived for nearly forty years. I used to write another blog which I started when I first moved to my DC inner city neighborhood—a place riven with tensions between long-time residents and “gentrifying” newcomers. That effort got me a certain notoriety, some wonderful friends, and a few enemies.
This blog is an effort to put down in pixels what I’m finding out as I go along. Writing about it helps me try to make sense of things (not that things necessarily make sense). If others read it, please excuse any rookie mistakes and feel free to correct factual errors. I hope it may also prove useful to someone else.
TrumpWorld for Beginners 