I think the elephant in the room needs mention:
I think a large part of the appeal of people who have live in, say, the northeast all their lives is that it’s WARM down there, all year long. No bundling up. No shoveling snow. No ice to trip on. You can go swimming year round, and the water’s warm, not freezing even in the summer like it is in Maine.
Of course, the flip side is the humidity (and the need for air conditioning), there’s no frost to kill off the bugs (giving you things like palmetto bugs – cockroaches that fly!), the possibility of hurricanes and, lately, increased flooding due directly and indirectly yo global warming. Oh, yeah – and alligators.
Dave Barry, a transplant from New York and Pennsylvania, moved down there to work for the Miami paper. A few years ago he wrote a paean to his adopted state – Florida – Best. State. Ever.: A Florida Man Defends his Homeland (2016). Among other things, he defends the crime, crowding, etc. as Engagingly Weird
Seems that keeping hydrated was not the only effect of drinking the Kool-Aid.
For a species originating in the East African Rift we’ve done quite a good job of filling up ecosystems where we make a better living but we’re otherwise miserable, and made a virtue of that.
Strange place. Not my cup of tea. Wish them luck and safety following the Hurricane, however.
“We collected the duffel bag and made a scuttling run deep into the 'Glades down Tamiami Trail. Where it all ended up - well, I wouldn’t be able to find any of it again even if I wanted to. The license plate, the .22s, the last M-16, Roach’s magnum, all gone forever unless the alligators find them and decide to arm themselves…Florida’s just filled with interesting geographical features that are plenty useful for young people engaged in monkey business.”
- Becker, in The South Florida Book of the Dead
Does Florida still have that reputation among young people? I know that it did 20-30 years ago but now it just seems like a haven for retired couples. And AFAIK, only south Florida had that reputation.
Yeah, “spring break in Fort Lauderdale” was definitely a “thing” when I was in college.
As far as us college students knew, there was southern Florida (going up as far as, say, Lauderdale), and nothing else. Well, Orlando was gaining some fame - Disney World had been built a few years earlier - but really, northerners’ perception of Florida basically was those two areas and nothing else.
I never went to Lauderdale in college - wasn’t in that crowd - but there was definitely a perception of going there to Par-Tay!
Inland Florida is the worst place on the planet. Coastal Florida is nice.
I was trying to look up historical tracks of hurricanes in Florida. I’m not sure there is any stretch of coastline that has avoided a pretty destructive hurricane over the past 100 years. And it seems the tip sees them much more frequently. My sister lives up in the panhandle, and I think they have had 3 close calls over just the past 10 years.
I really really REALLY like the Gulf coast, but I couldn’t handle owning property with that sort of a risk. AND the politics. That makes me think twice about spending my vacation $ there.
Yep. Definitely stay away. It’s terrible here. Stick to the coasts like the rest of the tourists.
Yes! We are dreadfully unhappy. 
There’s a fascinating story how “spring break in Ft. Lauderdale” became a thing. In December of 1960, MGM released a young-adult-themed movie titled “Where the Boys Are.” The plot involved college students from up north vacationing in Ft. Lauderdale for spring break, their loves and hijinks. (Connie Francis had a hit single with the title song.) The writers chose Ft. Lauderdale at random for the location, and filming took place there. The movie was a huge hit with the target 18-to-24 audience, and the following spring, 50,000 kids invaded the sleepy town of Fort Lauderdale, much to the surprise and enduring chagrin of the town’s resident population.
I’ve seen the movie a couple of times. It’s definitely a relic of its time but it had a great cast of hot young actors (George Hamilton, Paula Prentiss, Jim Hutton and the always lovely Yvette Mimieux, among others) and had an impact that no one could ever have anticipated. I heard this story years ago on NPR, and there are many accounts to back it up.
Quoted from The Atlantic: (see below - this is not my personal view).
“In its natural state, most of Florida was such a soggy mush of low-lying marshes that mapmakers couldn’t decide whether to draw it as land or water. The Spaniards who arrived in the 16th century told their king the peninsula was “liable to overflow, and of no use,” and white people mostly stayed away until the U.S. Army chased the Seminole Indians into the Everglades in the 19th century. The soldiers forced to slog through its mosquito-infested bogs described it as a “hideous,” “diabolical,” “repulsive,” “pestilential,” “God-abandoned” hellhole.
The story of Florida in the 20th century is about dreamers and schemers trying to get rid of all that water and drain the swamp. Eventually, they mostly succeeded, transforming a remote wilderness into a sprawling megalopolis, replacing millions of acres of wetlands with strip malls and golf courses and sprawling subdivisions, building the Palmetto and Sawgrass Expressways where palmettos and sawgrass used to be. But their war on nature had brutal environmental costs. They wiped out half the Everglades and discombobulated the other half. They destroyed mangrove swamps and other natural flood protections.”
You can watch the first Marx Brothers movie The Cocoanuts as a pseudo-documentary about the booming Florida real estate marketing in the 1920s. There was a reason why they made fun of the rubes buying property there.
If you’ve never gone to a Disney theme park on LSD or mushrooms, then:
a) You’re in no position to judge, and
b) I’m not sure I even want to know you.
I recall seeing a reprint of a 1920s newspaper advertisement for SW Florida farmland. The tag line was
with a picture of an earnest looking fellow in rural clothing surveying his vast spread of flat easily cultivated land. Along with the teaser “plenty of sun, plenty of rain.”
They weren’t lying about anything they said. And for sure by 1920 the easily available good Midwestern farmland of their father’s & grandfathers’ era was over; the still unoccupied portion of the West was mostly arid, mountainous, or both. (And still is a century later in 2022.)
What they left unsaid was the info about too many alligators, too little drainage, too many hurricanes, and far too many mosquitos. At least the giant pythons hadn’t been introduced yet, so omitting them was an honest oversight. 
Florida is a big state. What cities did you go to for work? Vacation in Jacksonville–nope. Boca Raton or Captiva? You bet. What time of year did you go? July? Hot and muggy, hurricanes, thunderstorms. January? Can’t beat it.
I hate Florida for it’s climate (both weather and political). Hotter than snot and it seems to rain at some point every day. Took the kids a few times to see Mickey Rat (first couple times in August- eww!). Disney is nice except for the overpriced tickets and the way overpriced food. I enjoyed Cape Canaveral and Busch Gardens was pleasant. Other than tourist attractions, I can’t think of any reason to enter the state. Beaches are okay, but Michigan beaches on Lake Michigan are better. Salt-free and shark-free and you don’t have to sweat your ass off to walk to the beach. On top of all that, we don’t get hurricanes.
You visited Florida in August and are complaining about the weather? Pretty sure Michigan ain’t all that great in January.