California wealth sparks multi-billion-dollar Florida Gulf Coast boom

For decades, the standard play for wealthy out-of-state transplants was to head straight for the high-octane flash of Florida’s East Coast. But as California’s housing affordability challenges, homelessness and proposals for higher taxes have pushed some families to a state of constant “high alert,” a secondary corporate and residential gold rush is quietly emerging along the Gulf Coast.

Driven by an I-75 corridor stretching from Tampa to Marco Island, Hollywood elites and high-net-worth families are trading the challenges of major West Coast cities for what transplants describe as a “smaller, safer Beverly Hills,” helping fuel a multibillion-dollar real estate boom in historically quiet retirement havens.

“This is actually very, very common, especially the younger that the family is. I think that the older the demographic gets, they are coming specifically for one reason, and that’s either retirement or to be close to family. But when you have a younger family… or someone that just graduated college, they are looking for lots of different life transitions to happen, wherever that is. So they are not just looking for where they’re familiar with vacationing and what that kind of lifestyle is, they want to know what it’s like to live there,” Compass agent and Naples native Madeline Tracy told Fox News Digital.

Her clients, longtime Los Angeles actors Philip Levens and Carolyn Stotesbery, recently purchased a home in Naples after spending more than two decades in California.

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“I flew into Tampa, St. Pete, Sarasota, went all the way down the coast and I kept saying, ‘No, this isn’t where I would want to live.’ And I was actually getting a little depressed thinking, OK, well, maybe this side of Florida isn’t what we need,” Levens recalled. “I remember I drove to downtown Naples, and then I took a right there that goes to the dead ends of the beach. I got out of the car… I called my wife and I said, ‘This is where we’re going to live.’”

Following I-75 from California to Florida, more young people and families are planting new roots along the Gulf Coast. (Getty Images)

“He was FaceTiming me from the beach,” Stotesbery said, “and he just had a sparkle in his eye, and showed me the beach and the city, and loved the architecture and the colors, and it just really called to us.”

“Tampa down to Naples is a unique corridor because it gives you, in that two-and-a-half-hour geographical drive that you would have… you have both culture, you have the arts there, but you’re able to settle in a more quaint community that isn’t as urbanized as it may be on the East Coast,” Ed Jahn, Kolter Urban senior vice president, told Fox News Digital.

The Gulf Coast migration could…