December 11, 2023
Around Florida
Making Progress
As Florida focuses on growing its economy, experts say one of the most productive places to expand is in manufacturing. The sector pays about 117% of average annual wages in Florida, creates both blue and white-collar jobs and has one of the highest multiplier effects for return on investment. Every $1 in manufactured goods produces $3.60 across all other sectors.
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Published on 10/17/2023
Towering Uncertainty
Sonja Przulj loves her two-bedroom, two-bath condominium in Miami, located on the 21st floor of the 27-story Palm Bay Yacht Club, with spectacular views of Biscayne Bay, downtown Miami and South Beach. She paid $285,000 for the corner unit in September 2021 after renting in the building for years.
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Published on 10/17/2023
Out with the Old
Coming in 2027: The St. Regis Residences, Sunny Isles Beach, Miami, a two-tower luxury condominium on Collins Avenue. Under development by Fortune International Group and Chateau Group, the project will rise just 5.4 miles from the Surfside site where Champlain Towers collapsed.
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Published on 10/12/2023
The Butterfly Effect
With more than 10 million specimens of butterflies and moths from around the world, the Florida Museum of Natural History's McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity at the University of Florida is the most active lepidoptera research center in the world. It is arguably also among the fastest growing collections, adding about 200,000 specimens per year.
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Published on 9/13/2023
Open Season
For Paul Cross — a scalloping boat captain and the director of operations at the Plantation on Crystal River Resort — scallop season is like an Easter egg hunt, except he's swimming 6 feet under the surface of the Gulf of Mexico and looking for bay scallops instead of hardboiled eggs.
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Published on 8/21/2023
Key Milestone
Two hundred years ago this month, the Florida Territorial Legislature created Monroe County — which contains all but one of the Florida Keys — as Florida's sixth county. Five years later, Key West was incorporated as a city and became the county seat. The Florida Keys include 1,700 islands stretching over 220 miles. The Calusa and Tequesta tribes were the original inhabitants of the islands.
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Published on 7/19/2023
Florida's Future
We asked 13 experts in their respective fields to look into their crystal balls. Here are their thoughts on the decade ahead.
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Published on 7/18/2023
Rail Renaissance
In 2018, Brightline — the nation's first privately financed passenger rail service in nearly four decades — debuted service between Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. The Miami company opened stations in Aventura and Boca Raton last year and this summer will launch hourly departures between Miami and Orlando.
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Published on 6/15/2023
Breaking Bad
Spring break in Florida dates to 1936, when the Colgate University swimming team traveled from New York to practice in Fort Lauderdale's Casino Pool, the state's first Olympic-size pool. Other teams thought that was a good idea, too, and by 1938, more than 300 swimmers were training in Fort Lauderdale each spring. Word spread to more than just the swimmers, and by the 1950s more than 15,000 college students spent the break in Florida.
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Published on 4/18/2023
Grapefruit Dreams
In baseball, spring training is the most optimistic time of the year, when even the unlikely seems likely. It's when bad teams think they're good, and good teams think they're great. It's when fans, warmed by the Florida sun and drowsed by $8 beers, dream that this could be the year their team finally wins a championship.
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Published on 3/15/2023
Century-old French flavor company Monin finds its North American home in Clearwater
Olivier Monin was only a few years into his tenure heading his family's syrup and flavoring business when he sought a place to build its North American headquarters. Founded in 1912 in Bourges, France, the company had survived world wars, changing tastes and the challenges of international business, but was on the rocks when Olivier, its third-generation leader, took over.
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Published on 3/1/2023
On the Front Lines
In 2014, Michael Obod and his business partner, Yurii Lavrenov, were running a laser tag equipment company in Ukraine, when Russia invaded Crimea. Amid the crisis, a teacher at Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute, where Obod had studied, asked him to reserve some small production units to provide simulated combat/virtual reality training systems for the nation's soldiers.
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Published on 3/1/2023
Ripple Effect
Looking for a way to enhance reliability, both during regular operations to keep small problems from becoming big ones and also during emergencies when quickly finding sources of outages is important, FPL began working with Israeli company Percepto in 2018 on using drones to monitor infrastructure and on a nationwide FAA waiver to allow the utility to fly Percepto drones for surveillance and inspection at FPL sites.
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Published on 3/1/2023
Cellphone CSI
Cellebrite, an Israel-based digital intelligence company, works with law enforcement agencies to uncover data from cellphones and other digital devices — a practice now considered as routine as dusting for fingerprints in a crime scene.
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Published on 3/1/2023
Icelandic Influence
When the owners of the Iceland-based digital marketing agency Sahara were looking to expand into the United States a few years ago, Orlando quickly rose to the top of the list of possible locations.
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Published on 3/1/2023
Pulling Rank
While it's no surprise that Miami tops the list of the best U.S. cities for foreign businesses in the inaugural Investing in America ranking from the Financial Times and Nikkei, it may be surprising to learn that Jacksonville ranked No. 8, three spots higher than Tampa but a few notches below Orlando at No. 2.
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Published on 3/1/2023
Red Carpet for Foreign Companies
“Pursuing foreign direct investment is a very important strategy in our efforts to attract new industries and diversify our economy here in Northwest Florida. If you're just concentrating on U.S. companies, you are competing against every other city and county economic development agency. And while that competition is fine, and we will always continue to do that, when you open it up to a worldview perspective, it really allows us to attract additional foreign capital investment that creates good, high-paying jobs.”
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Published on 3/1/2023
A Piece of Uruguay in Florida
There are nearly 4,400 miles and 114 years separating the riverside wine estate that Jerónimo Cantón's family founded in Uruguay at the turn of the 20th century and the restaurant and gourmet food company he now manages in South Florida, but time and distance have a way of collapsing inside the doors of Narbona.
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Published on 3/1/2023
It takes a community
Maynard Evans High School wasn't always a troubled school. When it first opened in the 1950s in Pine Hills — then a bedroom community of Orlando for workers at Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin) — it was considered one of the best in Orange County. But by the mid-2000s, crime and poverty had risen in Pine Hills, and Evans was a shell of its former self. The school building was riddled with peeling paint, creeping mildew and other signs of decay. It had some of the worst dropout, suspension and graduation rates in Central Florida.
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Published on 3/1/2023
White Hot
In 2020, the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) unveiled a new strawberry with a distinct white color that ripens to a pale pink blush. The cross-bred berry was the work of Vance Whitaker, a professor of horticultural sciences and a strawberry breeder. Last year, the berry hit the U.S. and European markets in a big way, garnering huge social media attention with posts generating more than 50 million views.
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Published on 2/1/2023
Statewide outlook for Florida in 2023
Economist Jerry Parrish expects a U.S. recession in 2023 but says that doesn't necessarily mean Florida will join in. If Florida does, he says, it will be shorter than the national recession and not as deep.
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Published on 1/31/2023
Florida's hospital construction trend rises to meet population growth
In 2024, Jupiter Medical Center and UF Health hope to open a “neighborhood hospital” with an ER, inpatient beds, operating rooms and other services in Avenir, a new residential development in northwest Palm Beach County — another sign of a boomlet in hospital construction in Florida.
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Published on 12/28/2022
National Economic Headwinds for Florida
The Florida Chamber Foundation has been charting Florida's rise in the global economy in its ambitious 2030 Blueprint, which aims to position the state – now the equivalent of the world's 16th largest economy, ahead of Saudi Arabia and behind the Netherlands – at 10th.
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Published on 12/27/2022
Lessons learned from Hurricane Ian and the work that still needs to be done
Florida marked the 30th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew in August, noting how far the state had come in hardening against and recovering from epic storms. Then came Hurricane Ian, which made clear more work needs to be done.
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Published on 12/23/2022
Knowing the Odds: Florida's history offers lessons about timing and intensity of storms
The bottom line: While you should be prepared, you don't always need to be afraid.
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Published on 5/10/2022
