Politics
A 16th-century Spanish explorer claimed St. Augustine, now it’s a remote work hotspot
Lori Matthias and her husband had tired of Atlanta traffic when they moved to St. Augustine, Florida, in 2023. For Mike Waldron and his wife, moving from the Boston area in 2020 to a place that bills itself as “the nation’s oldest city” was motivated by a desire to be closer to their adult children.
They were among thousands of white-collar, remote workers who migrated to the St. Augustine area in recent years, transforming the touristy beach town into one of the top remote work hubs in the United States.
Matthias fell in love with St. Augustine’s small town feeling, trading the hour-long commute she had in Atlanta for bumping into friends and acquaintances while running errands.
“The whole pace here is slower and I’m attracted to that,” said Matthias, who does sales and marketing for a power tool company. “My commute is like 30 steps from my kitchen to my office. It’s just different. It’s just relaxed and friendly.”
Centuries before becoming a remote work hub, the St. Augustine area was claimed by the Spanish crown in the early 16th century after explorer Juan Ponce de Leon’s arrival. In modern times, it is best known for its Spanish architecture of terra cotta roofs and arched doorways, tourist-carrying trollies, a historic fort, an alligator farm, lighthouses and a shipwreck museum.
In St. Johns County, home to St. Augustine, the percentage of workers who did their jobs from home nearly tripled from 8.6% in 2018 to almost 24% in 2023, moving the northeast Florida county into the top ranks of U.S. counties with the largest share of people working remotely, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures.
Only counties with a heavy presence of tech, finance and government workers in metro Washington, Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte and Dallas, as well as two counties in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, had a larger share of their workforce working from home. But these were counties much more populous than the 335,000 residents in St. Johns County, which has grown by more than a fifth during this decade.
Scott Maynard, a vice president of economic development for the county’s chamber of commerce, attributes the initial influx of new residents to Florida’s lifting of COVID-19 restrictions in businesses and schools in the fall of 2020 while much of the country remained locked down.
“A lot of people were relocating here from the Northeast, the Midwest and California so that their children could get back to a face-to-face education,” Maynard said. “That brought in a tremendous number of people who had the ability to work remotely and wanted their children back in a face-to-face school situation.”
Public schools in St. Johns County are among the best in Florida, according to an annual report card by the state Department of Education.
The influx of new residents has brought growing pains, particularly when it comes to affordable housing since many of the new, remote workers moving into the area are wealthier than locals and able to outbid them on homes, officials said.
Many essential workers such as police officers, firefighters and teachers have been forced to commute from outside St. Johns County because of rising housing costs. The median home price grew from $405,000 in 2019 to almost $535,000 in 2023, according to Census Bureau figures, making the purchase of a home further out of reach for the county’s essential workers.
Essential workers would need to earn at least $180,000 annually to afford the median price of a home in St. Johns County, but a teacher has an average salary of around $48,000 and a law enforcement officer earns around $58,000 on average, according to an analysis by the local chamber of commerce.
“What happened was a lot of the people, especially coming in from up North, were able to sell their homes for such a high value and come here and just pay cash since this seemed affordable to them,” said Aliyah Meyer, an economic researcher at the chamber of commerce. “So it kind of inflated the market and put a bit of a constraint on the local residents.”
Waldron, a sales executive in the health care industry, was able to sell his Boston home at the height of the pandemic and purchase a three-bedroom, two-bath home in a gated community by a golf course outside St. Augustine where “things really worked out to be less expensive down here.”
The flexibility offered by fast wireless internet and the popularity of online meeting platforms since the start of the pandemic also helped.
“If I was still locked in an office, I would not have been able to move down here,” Waldron said.
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Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
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Legislation to allow guns on college campuses died in its first committee hearing after too few GOP lawmakers were in the room to keep it alive.
The Senate Criminal Justice Committee voted 4-3 against the legislation (SB 814), which would have enabled lawful gun owners to carry their weapons onto any college or university campus, including dormitories and resident halls.
Brevard County Republican Sen. Randy Fine said the change is needed after Jewish college students faced threats of “on-campus Muslim terror” following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
“A child going to a university — an 18-, a 19-, a 20-year-old — deserves to be able to walk through campus, deserves to be able to fight their way out of a building if people hold them there, deserves when a mob surrounds them and attacks them — it’s happened at my alma mater — that they can do something about it,” he said.
“You have the right to defend yourself, and that right doesn’t go away because you walked onto a college campus.”
Too many of Fine’s Senate colleagues thought the bill was too drastic a change. Republican Sen. Ileana Garcia joined Democratic Sens. Mack Bernard, Jason Pizzo and Carlos Guillermo Smith in voting “no.”
Republican Sens. Joe Gruters, Clay Yarborough and Jonathan Martin voted “yes.”
Republican Sens. Jennifer Bradley and Corey Simon were absent from the vote.
Tuesday’s vote marks the end for SB 814, which lost its House counterpart (HB 31) early this year when Republican sponsor Joel Rudman, a former Navarre Representative who resigned for an unsuccessful run at Congress, withdrew the proposal.
This is likely the last time Fine will run the bill in Tallahassee. He tendered his resignation, effective March 31, in November within hours of announcing his bid for Florida’s 6th Congressional District.
In January, Fine — who carries an endorsement from Donald Trump — trounced two underfunded Primary foes to clinch the GOP nomination.
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This report is developing and will be updated.
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Cities, universities and government entities could be banned from flying pride flags and other banners that express “political viewpoints’ under a bill sponsored by Sen. Randy Fine.
The Senate Community Affairs Committee supported the measure (SB 100) via a 5-3 party-line vote during the bill’s second committee stop, with Republicans in favor. The measure will now go to the Senate Rules Committee before it is ready for a floor vote.
Fine, a Palm Bay Republican, argued his bill wasn’t designed just to keep out Black Lives Matter flags and other more progressive groups from being hung at government buildings.
“A lot of folks in the place that I represent hang Make America Great Again 2024 flags at their homes. Many of them are teachers,” Fine said.
“How would we feel if the city of Palm Bay or the city of Ormond Beach flew the Make America Great Again flag from City Hall? How would we feel if a teacher hung that in their classroom? The idea is whether it’s political viewpoints that we agree with or we disagree with, let’s keep that stuff out of government buildings.”
But Democrats and left-leaning groups, including the ACLU of Florida and Equality Florida, spoke out against the bill. Some argued local governments have a right to display messages on flags.
“The flag ban bill is unnecessary, unclear, unconstitutional and dangerous,” said Jon Harris Maurer, public policy director for Equality Florida. “It does not help Floridians struggling with insurance and housing affordability. Instead, it is a made-up solution to a culture war for political purposes, but it will have real harms.”
Kara Gross, the legislative director for the ACLU of Florida, warned that the bill raises First Amendment issues.
“Could a middle school drawing of a rainbow flag displayed in a school hallway constitute a prohibited display under this bill?” Gross asked. “Would an elementary school teacher be prohibited from displaying a student school project with a picture of a Black Lives Matter? What about a flag outside a dorm room or fraternity?”
One of the few public speakers favoring the bill was Joe Labriola of Christian Family Coalition.
“It’s interesting that we have a lot of people from the LGBTQ persuasion here, who are very intense in flying that specific flag,” Labriola said. “That’s why this bill is so important because it would remove those LGBTQ or any politically oriented flags that are divisive that do not represent all viewpoints from schools as well as government buildings.”
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