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New York City has forever been changed by the coronavirus pandemic, but Palm Beach has also been transformed by the influx of New Yorkers fleeing south.
Palm Beach, Florida, has been a popular destination for New Yorkers looking to escape the danger of COVID-19 in the spring and the civil unrest of the summer.
Many of those moving to Florida are young families no longer interested in the complications of living in New York City at such a perilous time.
Bloomberg acquired a letter from a Sotheby’s realtor to clients, claiming the median age is ‘dropping faster than SpaghettiOs from a toddler’s highchair.’
The Wetenhall family are some of the many people who have left New York for Palm Beach
Sarah Wetenhall is redesigning her Colony Hotel in Palm Beach to accommodate New Yorkers
The changes taking place in Palm Beach are echoing the changes the Hamptons saw in the 1980s as finance workers began to shape the region into what it looks like today.
Sarah Wetenhall, president of the Colony Hotel, and Andrew Wetenhall, a finance worker, are native New Yorkers who moved to Palm Beach in March.
During the coronavirus pandemic, Sarah Wetenhall even redesigned parts of the Colony Hotel to make it more friendly to the influx of families moving to the area, adding de Gournay wallpaper and making some of the furniture stain-proof.
Another New Yorker who recently moved from New York to Palm Beach is Anna Raytcheva, who used to work at Citigroup before starting her own hedge fund.
Hedge fund owner Anna Raytcheva also moved from NYC to Palm Beach recently
‘Without the pandemic, it wouldn’t have been as easy to make the move,’ Raytcheva told Bloomberg. ‘I’m able to focus without much distraction, but have the flexibility to take advantage of the nice weather.’
Palm Beach Day Academy, a co-ed private school for Pre-K to ninth grade students, has added 65 new students from the northeast United States over the past several months.
Additionally, the demand for nannies and housekeepers has grown with the influx of young families from New York.
The Wellington Agency, a domestic staffing agency with outposts in both New York and Palm Beach, is training new hires over Zoom before they begin working with wealthy clients for the first time.
There are no signs that New Yorkers are going to stop planting their roots in Palm Beach anytime soon, either.
The Palm Beach Day Academy has seen at least 65 new students from the NE United States
The South Florida Business Journal reports a New York investing group purchased an apartment complex on the island for $47 million.
Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs may be looking to move their asset management division to Palm Beach, though not everyone is a believer in the rumor.
‘This whole idea that financial services, like hedge funds, are going to be this huge jobs creator is ridiculous,’ developer Jeff Greene told The Palm Beach Post.
‘I think some will come down here, they will try it out, move a few people and see if more people come, but I think the idea that every hedge fund is leaving New York City and moving to Palm Beach is just silly.’
What isn’t silly is the departure of New Yorkers from the most populous city in 2020.
Mount Sinai, a well known hospital system in New York, has a medical facility in Palm Beach
The same is true of Sant Ambroeus, once known for catering to the Hamptons crowd
According to change of address requests obtained by the New York Post in November, over 300,000 people are estimated to have left the city since the onset of the pandemic.
There were 295,103 change of address requests from March to October by city residents to the US Postal Service.
Since one request covers one household, the number of residents who actually fled the city is likely significantly higher than 295,000 people.
There were 244,895 requests from March to July alone, when there were just over 101,000 requests over the same time period in 2019.
Over 13,000 of the change of address requests listed a forwarding address in either Palm Beach, Broward, or Miami-Dade County.
Many of these people likely left the city because of COVID-19, as New York City was the epicenter of the virus during its early days in the United States.
The latest statistics show over 364,000 have been infected by the coronavirus in NYC and 24,526 people have died as a result of COVID-19 in the city.
Those moving to Palm Beach to escape the coronavirus may not have as much luck as they’d hope: the county has seen 72,706 COVID-19 cases and 1,768 deaths.
Crime is another reason people are fleeing the city. While the rate of crime is slightly down from a year ago according to NYPD statistics, the murder rate in the city is up by 39.7 percent.
Palm Beach, which is much less populated than New York City, saw 87 murders in 2019, while New York City has seen 426 in 2020 with a few weeks remaining for the year.
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