#Florida records quantify number of defections from NY

Florida might as well be known as the sixth borough.

New data from the Sunshine State’s Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles offers the latest glimpse of just how many New Yorkers fled south during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At least 33,565 New Yorkers exchanged their NY drivers licenses for Florida credentials between September 2020 and March 2021.

That’s a 32% increase from the same period the prior year, when 25,370 New York driver’s licenses were traded for Florida ones.

Florida officials said a major cause of migration was parents looking to get their kids back in full-time, in-person school.

The most popular three Florida counties for New York transplants for the calendar years 2019, 2020, and 2021 through April were — no surprise — the southeastern counties of Palm Beach (14,045), Broward (8,422), and Miami-Dade (8,033).

In total, for the 2019-April 2021 period, 104,960 New Yorkers made the switch — far and away leading every other state. Runner-up New Jersey came in second with 53,901. Trailing the Garden State were Georgia (48,143), Illinois (46,042), California (43,801).

Florida has experienced a COVID-19-driven population boom, which the state’s Office of Economic & Demographic Research expects to continue in the near term, “supported by an apparent shift in lifestyle preferences away from the more dense urban areas found elsewhere,” according to a March report.