Two stories broke within 24 hours of each other this week, and neither one is really about real estate on its face — but together, they say more about Florida’s rising cost of living than any single statistic could. One is about a billionaire quietly buying homes for his household staff. The other is about a hedge fund founder pledging $3 billion to bring a major university’s new campus to Miami. Read separately, they’re just wealthy-people news. Read together, they’re a pretty clear picture of a state getting more expensive at the top while it becomes harder to actually live in for everyone else — and it’s exactly the kind of dynamic that’s been quietly pushing more retirees to look seriously at South Carolina instead.
When a Billionaire Has to Buy Housing for His Staff
Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison quietly bought eight homes in Palm Meadows Estates, a gated community in Boynton Beach about 30 minutes from his main Florida residence, spending nearly $10 million on properties that ran roughly $1 million apiece. The purpose, according to reporting on the purchases, was housing for tutors, aides, and other household staff — keeping a large support team close to his primary home rather than scattered across the region.
The reason given was convenience and privacy, not cost, and it’s worth being fair to that framing rather than reading more into it than was actually said. But it’s hard to look at a billionaire needing to purchase an entire cluster of $1 million homes just to keep his staff within reasonable driving distance without also thinking about the households who work those jobs and don’t have a Fortune 500 fortune buying their housing for them. Palm Beach County’s home prices have made it genuinely difficult for people in service and support roles to live anywhere near the homes and employers they work for, and Ellison’s approach — buying housing outright rather than assuming staff could simply find something nearby — is a telling response to that reality.
Florida’s Rising Cost of Living, By the Numbers
The Ellison story is one data point, but the broader trend is well documented. Florida’s population growth fell below 1% last year, the lowest rate since the Great Recession, as the pandemic-era rush of people moving to the state slowed to a trickle. Deaths have outpaced births in Florida every year since 2020, with that gap projected to widen to roughly 50,000 annually by 2035. Pinellas County alone lost about 12,000 residents between July 2024 and July 2025 — the second-highest population loss of any county in the entire country, trailing only Los Angeles.
The reasons behind the numbers are exactly what you’d expect. A United Way analysis found that nearly half of households in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties can’t afford basic living expenses, and reporting on the slowdown points squarely at skyrocketing home insurance premiums and high housing costs colliding with wages that simply haven’t kept pace. A statewide Housing Cost Index built from C2ER Cost of Living Index data put Florida at 101.1 — essentially dead-on the national average — compared to South Carolina’s 79.8, roughly 20% below it. Insurance tells a similarly stark story: standard homeowners coverage along the Grand Strand typically runs $2,500 to $4,500 a year, compared to $6,000 to $7,100 for equivalent coverage in Florida.
None of this means Florida is suddenly undesirable — plenty of people still want to be there, or these numbers wouldn’t be this high to begin with. It means the cost of being there has climbed to a point where a genuinely large number of households, not just the ones making headlines, are doing the math and deciding it doesn’t work anymore. Some Florida counties are still growing at a healthy clip — a handful posted growth above 3% last year — but they tend to be inland, further from the coast, and considerably less expensive than the beachfront communities most retirees picture when they think about a Florida retirement in the first place. The counties losing residents fastest are overwhelmingly the ones with the highest cost of living, which is a pretty direct signal about what’s actually driving people out.
More Billions Pouring In at the Top
Here’s the part that makes this more than a simple “people are leaving” story: at the exact same time the middle is getting squeezed, staggering amounts of new capital are pouring into Florida at the very top of the market. Citadel founder Ken Griffin just pledged $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon University — the largest single gift in the history of American higher education — with $2 billion of it going toward an entirely new 35-acre CMU campus in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, expected to enroll roughly 3,500 students by 2028.
The gift is split three ways: $2 billion for the new Miami campus, and $1 billion split between Carnegie Mellon’s existing Pittsburgh campus and its School of Computer Science, which will be renamed in Griffin’s honor as part of the deal. Griffin is also joining the university’s board of trustees, and the Miami campus itself is being built around what the university is calling “grand challenge” areas — human health, national security, energy resilience, and advanced manufacturing — rather than conventional academic departments, with construction beginning next year and students expected as early as 2028.
Griffin, who relocated his own hedge fund from Chicago to Miami, is part of a broader pattern of ultra-wealthy individuals and institutions treating South Florida the way they once treated New York — as a place worth building permanent, generational infrastructure rather than just owning a vacation property in. That kind of investment is genuinely good for the region’s long-term prospects, but it also does something specific to cost of living: it adds enormous new demand for housing, services, and land from people with essentially unlimited budgets, in the same market that’s already squeezing out households making ordinary incomes. Florida’s rising cost of living isn’t a temporary blip waiting to correct itself — it’s being actively reinforced by billions of dollars in new investment from people for whom the current prices are simply not a consideration.
Why This Sends More People Looking at South Carolina
Put those two stories together and the pattern is clear: Florida is bifurcating into a market that works extremely well for people with Ellison- or Griffin-level resources and increasingly poorly for everyone else, including a lot of retirees living on Social Security and a fixed nest egg rather than a hedge fund. Our comparison of the Grand Strand against Florida goes deeper into exactly how the numbers stack up, but the short version tracks with everything above: lower housing costs, dramatically lower insurance premiums, and a tax structure that exempts Social Security income entirely, all without giving up coastal living or a genuine retirement community.
We’ve started hearing this directly from more prospective buyers over the past year — people who assumed Florida was the default retirement answer and are now running the numbers seriously for the first time, often after a renewal notice on their homeowners insurance forced the conversation. It’s a genuinely different mindset than the one that drove the pandemic-era rush south: less “let’s chase the sun” and more “let’s find somewhere the math still works,” and South Carolina’s coast tends to hold up well under that kind of scrutiny precisely because it was never trying to be the next Miami in the first place.
Browsing what’s currently available across Myrtle Beach is a reasonable way to see what that same budget buys along a different stretch of coastline.
Let’s Talk Through the Comparison
A billionaire buying staff housing and a $3 billion university campus are extreme examples, but they’re both symptoms of the same underlying shift, and it’s one that’s sending real, ordinary households looking elsewhere for a coastal retirement that still makes financial sense rather than one that requires a nine-figure net worth to comfortably absorb. If you’ve been assuming Florida was your only coastal option, reach out to our team and we’ll walk through exactly how the Grand Strand compares for your specific numbers — no hedge fund required.