CAPE CORAL, Fla. (AP)- When Eric Feichthaler became mayor three years ago, this town was booming. The city issued 800 permits that month to build single-family homes and traffic at the local moving company was mostly inbound.
Those days are over. Last month, the city issued just nine permits for single-family homes. Callers to Royal Palm Movers are more likely to ask about outbound trucks. Even more likely, they are asking for a job.
But don't blame Feichthaler for the city's downturn - it's not his fault. Blame Florida. The Sunshine State is losing some of its luster.
Stanley Smith, who heads the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida, said no single factor led to the decrease in people moving to Florida. He blamed hurricanes, taxes, insurance and housing prices, but said it still wouldn't mean the state's population would shrink. The state grew by an estimated 193,735 last year, including births and foreign immigrants. That's still a sizable number, just not as sizable as years past.
"Florida isn't going to be losing population, but the increase will be smaller than it was in these boom years," he said.
This has happened before. At the turn of the 20th century, the state was among the smallest east of the Mississippi River, with barely a half-million residents. Today, it is the nation's fourth-largest, with about 18.1 million people.
In the decades in between, growth rates ranged from 20 percent to 80 percent. A 2005 report by Smith forecasts a decline in people moving to the state through 2030, but overall the population is still expected to increase by more than 10 percent in each of the next two decades.