Up until I moved to Florida in 2003, I always considered myself "from Boston"; it's still my response when queried here because SoFla is populated almost entirely by transplants.
Up until the late 90s, Boston had everything I could possibly want: diverse job opportunities; an educated, informed and politically active population from which to draw friends; an obscenely beautiful streetscape that is scaled to the pedestrian rather than the car; history and culture of a world-class magnitude; a constant influx of students from the 60+ area colleges and universities to keep things fresh; an easy and instant familiarity with all parts of the city and of the (overall) excellent transit to reach them. After my various adventures in NYC or Paris, I never doubted the wisdom of "going home" to Boston.
But the weather is dreadful: when it's not oppressively hot and humid, it's cold and (usually) wet; aside from about six weeks in autumn, the weather sucks. My career offered lots of options for lateral moves but nothing by way of promotion or upward mobility; increasing pressures due to gentrification wrecked Boston's once pulsing gay nightlife and housing prices became absurdly unaffordable. My then-partner and I tried living in the SE corner of municipal Boston only to find it the marriage of the worst aspects of city and suburb with none of the pleasures or benefits.
Four years spent in Connecticut burned me out forever on cold weather: weeks and weeks of ice and snow without an intervening thaw (and a dog to walk) left me eventually to insist we find a warmer spot. Besides, CT is just different enough from MA culturally to make me feel alienated and homesick (even if I knew the "going home" to Boston wasn't really in the cards).
I wanted to live in Miami Beach, but my then-partner couldn't bear living in a place where not everyone spoke English as fluently as he claimed to speak it himself
, so we compromised our way to Ft Lauderdale, where I've lived since 2003.
On the positive side: as Mem said, one of the loveliest beaches in the world is right there, and every time I go I feel like a new man, completely refreshed; The air quality here is uniformly excellent due to our being at the tip of a peninsula between two major bodies of water (The Atlantic and the Gulf) I have easy access to three world-class international airports within 40 miles which can get me quickly and conveniently anywhere in the world that I'd care to go; aside from last winter (which was a record-breaking frost
), we experience exceptionally mild and pleasant, dry winters; the part of Broward County where I live contains the highest concentration per capita of LGBT households in the country, perhaps the world (Ft Lauderdale, Wilton Manors and Oakland Park taken together rank with San Francisco); the nightlife is so plentiful and diverse as to be retro for 2010.
On the negative side: the summers, while no worse than other parts of the country, are extreme: the night air descends like a wet blanket, and it's frequently more oppressive at midnight than at 4:00 in the afternoon;
Hurricanes; the infrastructure was built for 1/2 to 2/3 the current population, so the roads are choked with traffic at any time of the day or night, and everything runs north-south: the east/west roads are fewer in number and even more subject to delays and back-ups; likewise, FPL (Florida Power & Light, the local energy monopoly) sees fit to keep the power grid at minimal efficiency and we suffer frequent brown- and black-outs; rapid transit is non-existent and public transit (buses) are completely unreliable: only the stops "downtown" have shelters, few have benches, fewer still have any shade: a simple three-mile trip can involve two or three transfers, none of which offer reduced-fare tickets; bicycling can involve risking one's life as there are few if any dedicated bike lanes, and SoFla motorists are erratic, unpredictable and distracted easily.
SoFla is a brilliant place to spend money but a terrible place to earn any: I've never worked anywhere else where employees are trusted or appreciated less nor more closely monitored, either through blood tests or "nanny-cam" CCTV; wages are notoriously low and references are rarely verified; due to the inherent transient nature of the population, there's a built-in distrust (contempt, even) that is all-pervasive here, whether for employment or housing: even more so than in Boston, FtL is a city of enclaves segregated by income, sexual orientation and race; there's a lazy and opportunistic get-rich-quick attitude here which bedevils and belittles hard work.
Though I've never lived anywhere where it's so easy to meet people socially, I've never lived anywhere where it's so difficult to form lasting bonds of loyal friends upon whom one can trust in a crunch: this may come from the above-mentioned pervasive distrust, where motives are suspect and opportunism abounds, as well as the cultural tribalism within the existing enclaves, or it could come from the fact that illicit drugs are ubiquitous (though the extent of their abuse remains largely opaque, closeted and subject to denial); aside from all that, there are so many distractions that stand in the way of even the most casual of social commitments that many (if not most) people come off as flakes.
Rental housing here ranges from illegally substandard to opulent, and it's all much more expensive than one might think, considering the depressed wages and the ominously large market in availability; for the first time in decades, I have made the choice of living with completely platonic housemates/roommates, which cuts way back on privacy but is the only way that I can live here: some have worked out better than others, both from a reliability standpoint and with occasional and extremely petty "refrigerator wars", unwelcome pet drama, etc.
; black mold (due to the insane humidity) is also a real issue, is all-too common in housing of all types and price ranges.
Everything down here is considered disposable, transient and temporary, with little or no pride in living here: consequently, political action is poorly organized and, with just a few exceptions, ineffective; there's a strong feeling that the underlying power-structure is based on a status quo that was established long before the influx of LGBT arrivals over the last 10-15 years; there's an apathy here that runs so deep that it feels like a type of contempt, which hardly results in political progressivism.
With all those negatives, it's obvious that I have a strong sense of ambiguity about living here. I miss odd things like subways and proximity to mountains (or any other type of topographical diversity): Florida is monotonously flat, and any one place down here looks essentially like every other place down here. Wide surface roads lined with strip malls and gas stations take you to neighborhoods of nearly-identical, small, single-story houses, so inland afternoon drives are especially unrewarding and a drive along the beach is really just a tour of some of the ugliest trends in hi-rise luxury apartment building architecture over the last 50 or so years.
I feel anchored here for three reasons:
1) I haven't the resources nor energy to seek out alternatives;
2) After seven years living in a place where temps below 60 degrees are a rarity, my body has become thoroughly acclimated: as is said down here, "the blood thins";
3) The concentration of LGBTs here offer opportunities for lifestyle and social contacts unparalleled elsewhere in the continental US.
Happy sometimes, sure, but I can't regret moving someplace I'd wanted to live for so long, even if it turned out to necessitate changes in my life and in my expectations I'd never dreamed of before the move.
