South Florida has long been branded as a place of opportunity. But for many members of Generation Z who were born and raised here, the future they imagined is no longer in South Florida — it’s elsewhere.
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“I think everyone between 20 and early 20s has a great urge to just kind of get out of the house, move and live on their own,” said 25‑year‑old Jared Infantolino.
Jared grew up in Miami, went to school in his hometown and assumed adulthood would unfold in the city that raised him.
“I wanted to get out and live on my own. The problem is, I was talking to one of my other friends at the time and very quickly realized I can’t — we can’t — live on our own here,” he said.
Jared is one of more than 340,000 Miami‑Dade County residents between the ages of 20 and 29. Some are part of a growing trend: being raised in Miami‑Dade and then leaving in search of a more attainable future.
A survey of Miami residents ages 18 to 34 found that more than 51% believe they will likely leave the area.
The reasons vary.
For Jared, it comes down to the cost of living.
He works as an EMT and spent part of this year in Tallahassee, where he earned $18 to $20 an hour. There, he paid $800 a month for a studio apartment and still had money left over.
In Miami, he said, that’s impossible.
“Rent for a studio is $1,200 or $1,300 a month, and we barely scratch the surface with $3,000 a month,” Jared said. “For me, it’s that I want to go do things, but I can’t even afford to live. I need to get out of here and find somewhere I can afford to live.”
He is now hoping to change career paths and has enrolled in the military, where housing is covered and he hopes to save money.
“I love living down here, and I want to stay down here. But the problem is, I can’t afford to. And I know a lot of people feel the same,” he said.
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One of those people is 24‑year‑old Alejandro Malo. He moved to Baltimore to attend law school. For him, transit and traffic were major motivators.
“I used to have a job in Homestead, and I lived in Miami, in Sweetwater,” he said. “I would take the bus up and down, and it would be two hours and 30 minutes. I would get home at 10 p.m. only to wake up at 6 a.m. and do the same bus trip to go back to work. It was really bad.”
Now, Alejandro lives across the street from campus and pays less for public transportation, which gets him where he needs to go in under 10 minutes. He says it eases the financial strain he felt after college, when he earned about $14 an hour working at a Miami law office.
It was during that time, he said, that he realized Gen Z workers often have to “jump” rather than climb the ladder.
“That is when you have to leave your place of employment to go to another place of employment that pays a higher rate,” he said.
“So if you’re in Miami and you’re stuck in a position that you don’t want to be in, you don’t climb up — you have to find another job. And if there is no other job because the economy is not there for you, then you’re not going to climb out of that.”
Alejandro believes Miami wasn’t designed for young people, but for businesses and residents ages 50 to 59 — the county’s largest age group, with more than 400,000 people.
“And so the older people come. They come from good money, they made their money elsewhere and they go to Florida,” he said.
The trend of younger generations leaving South Florida could have consequences. Losing educated and skilled workers may affect not only the region’s talent pool, but also the number of people who can afford to live here.
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