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Florida Keys
Changes in Latitude
Monroe County, home to the Florida Keys, is the only county in Florida that has steadily lost population over the past five years. Is it part of the Keys' ebb and flow or something more ominous?
Waxing, waning
This isn't the first time the Keys' population has ebbed. In 1918, the end of World War I dried up federal military aviation contracts, and a September hurricane lashed the island. During the 1920s, Key West's population dropped by 5,000, or about 25%. Historian Maureen Ogle, who chronicled those years in "Key West: History of an Island of Dreams," sees the current population decline and real estate market conditions as portents not only for the Keys, but other U.S. coastal regions. "You can't help but wonder if this is the canary in the mineshaft," she says.
But Brian Schmitt, broker for Coldwell Banker Schmitt, the real-estate company his father launched in 1955, views the current trends as part of an organic cycle. While history hasn't recorded anything like the recent years' run-up in real estate prices, he says, "overall it's been an up and down market since 1955." Schmitt vividly recalls various hurricanes; tanks running up and down the Overseas Highway during the Cuban Missile Crisis; the Navy's devastating pullout of Key West in the 1970s. The real estate market rebounded after each crisis.
While the market has flattened, with a 2% annual increase in 2006 rather than the 3%-a-month appreciation seen for the three years prior, Schmitt says he hasn't seen any panic selling. "After all the traumas of the past, we've never seen the market go significantly backward," he says. "The Keys have always been a little out of step with the rest of the state," Schmitt says of the population decline. "That's probably part of the appeal."
