Chapter Three: Huamn Activity

To give us a general idea of what the populations are like in Florida.

As the picture above shows, Florida has a pretty broad range of populations throughout it's borderlines. One of the more populated regions as I learned is around Miami, with less population in northern Florida. 

  

Early in the twentieth century, when Florida was sparsely populated, more people meant more jobs and more opportunities. And in a state with considerable land area and few people, every new resident lowers the cost of providing basic services to all. But as an area gets more populated, its infrastructure bumps up against its carrying capacity. Police forces, roads, and schools no longer satisfy the demands of a growing population. Farmland and forests are sacrificed to strip malls and housing developments. And eventually growth no longer lowers the average cost of services, but instead raises it. When this point is reached, population growth increases the tax burden on communities; the revenue brought in by new growth is outweighed by the costs it creates.³

Florida, the seventh-fastest growing state in the country, has reached this downside to growth. A mid-1999 survey of Florida voters found that more than 80 percent considered the state’s burgeoning population a problem and 40 percent said that Florida has become a less comfortable place to live over the past five years.⁴

But the population growth that has transformed Florida into a crowded mass of subdivisions, congested highways, and paved-over pastures has just begun. If current trends continue, the state’s population will increase by 5.5 million by 2025 and will have doubled by 2050, when its population could surpass 32 million – or twice the 15,982,378 counted in the 2000 census. (That does not include the close to one million “snowbirds” who reside in the state every winter.⁵ )

 References:

http://www.npg.org/specialreports/FL/fl_report.html

3] Alan Altschuler and Jose A. Gomez-Ibanez, Regulation for Revenue: A Political Economy of Land Use Exactions (Washington: Brookings Institute; Cambridge: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 1993), p. 77.
4] Stephen G. Reed, “Poll: Pace of Growth Affects Quality of Life,” Sarasota Herald-Tribune, October 14, 1999.
5] Kate Gurnett, “With Snowbirds Comes the Sprawl,” Times Union, February 25, 2001.