Peter Thiel isn’t sold on Florida as California alternative
Entrepreneur Peter Thiel speaks on the last day of the Republican National Convention on Thursday, July 21, 2016, at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland.
Olivier Douliery/TNSPeter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and burgeoning Republican Party power player, said that even though many people are relocating from California to Florida, the latter state is in danger of “becoming like California” because of high real estate prices.
While speaking at conservative conservative conference last week, Thiel said, according to one dispatch from the event, “The temptation on our side is always going be to just say we’re not California… We don’t like tech, we don’t like California, we don’t like the woke stuff. All of that’s true but it’s not a way we get back to broad-based growth that’s not just some kind of real-estate racket.”
Thiel said that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is “probably the best in terms of offering a real alternative to California,” but dinged the trend line of housing and rent prices in the state.
“If we’re going to have a high-growth alternative, the test is, do the real estate prices come down?” he reportedly said. “And the fact that real estate in Florida has melted up over the last two or three years is not evidence that you’re succeeding in building a better model than California. I worry that’s evidence you’re becoming like California.”
A May report from U.S. News & World Report found that the Tampa and Miami areas saw the largest and third-largest year-over-year increases in home prices in the entire country. Phoenix came in second. A National Association of Realtors report from August found that Florida was home to seven of the top 10 U.S. metro areas where the price of single-family housing increased the most year-over-year.
Several Bay Area tech players have made headlines for relocating to Florida. In November 2020, tech icon Keith Rabois announced he was leaving San Francisco for Florida because “San Francisco is just so massively improperly run and managed that it’s impossible to stay here.”
In August, real estate startup Belong announced it was relocating to Miami because the city is “more pragmatic, and less ideological” than the Bay Area.
