Arting a business in his town, credited a combination of the federal cap on state tax deductions, Covid-19, and leftward-moving politics in New York and San Francisco for making the Miami moment happen.
“Not only are you seeing more and more of your money going to government, you’re seeing more of your money going to a government that doesn’t want you,” he said. “So it’s like a double whammy.”
On Thursday, he went live on Twitter with the chief operating officer of SoftBank to announce the Japanese conglomerate had committed $100 million to investing in Miami tech companies or tech companies willing to move to the city.
Mr. Suarez is not above gimmicky stunts.
“Proud to say Miami is the first municipal government to host Satoshi’s White Paper on government site,” he tweeted on Wednesday, referring to the shadowy creator of Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that has been on a run.
Anyone in tech who flies to Miami can also ask to stay in a special discounted hotel suite with a body-scanning mattress made by a start-up called Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep’s founders also just moved to Miami.
Two Docks
If there is a symbol for the shift in Miami culture, it’s Mr. Oringer’s house.
The house — 20,000 square feet, with two docks (water scooter and yacht) — once belonged to the baseball star Alex Rodriguez. But as of last fall, for $42 million, it belonged to Mr. Oringer, the founder of Shutterstock. He is now figuring out how to remodel the property’s batting cage to be something more useful.
The house has become the co-working space for several of the new companies that Mr. Oringer has invested in through Pareto Holdings, a fund that he and Edward Lando created to invest in Miami start-ups. Its tagline: “Building world-changing companies in the Miami sunshine.”
Pareto has made about 100 investments, with another 100 expected by the end of 2021. The team is focusing on telemedicine, fintech and consumer-relationship management companies.
The inflow has been such that the median home sale price in Palm Beach, which is part of Greater Miami, had soared to $4.9 million by the end of 2020, up 29 percent from a year earlier, according to Douglas Elliman, the real estate company. Over the same period, Manhattan co-op and condo prices rose about 5 percent.
Meghan Maloof Berdellans, who runs the executive relocation firm S&S Global, said she was moving two executives from San Francisco or New York to Miami every week. “It’s something we like to call the Mass Techxodus,” she wrote on her blog in December.
Marc Lotenberg, the chief executive of the design magazine Surface, said he had bought a house in Miami and was not going back to New York. He sees his family more. They spend their days outside.
“I’m in the pool, my son in one hand, iPad in the other. That’s how I’m working at 3 p.m.,” he said over salmon salads at the Miami Soho House. “When is that happening in New York? I’m not going back to the traditional office again.”
Coming Home
Unlike San Francisco and New York, Miami is diverse in its politics, with Republicans and Democrats living together in relative peace.
It is also racially diverse and international in a way that is vastly different from where some of the newcomers used to live. Miami — with a population of about 500,000, in a Greater Miami area of 6.2 million — is about 70 percent Hispanic and 15 percent Black. San Francisco, with a population of 900,000, is 15 percent Hispanic and 5 percent Black.
“The universities in Miami graduate more minority engineers than any other city in America,” said Leigh-Ann Buchanan, who is starting Aire Ventures, a nonprofit consultancy to help create diverse tech communities.
Ms. Buchanan said she hoped some of the investment money coming to town went to local entrepreneurs in need, not just new tech founders. It would be a way to spread the wealth.
“Miami has all the material to be something different,” she said. “We’ll see what happens.”
One hot winter day, longtime tech community organizers lounging on fake grass reflected on how frustrating it had been for Miami to have been ignored as a place of innovation for decades. The city was seen as somewhere to retire or to buy a big house and hide out after striking it rich.
“I’ve been annoyed about this for years: We have these demographic patterns, we have this talent, but we underutilize our own people,” said Ms. Martinez-Kalinina, 34, who organizes the tech newcomer book club. “San Francisco has a superiority complex, but Miami has an inferiority complex.”
Adam Garfield, 33, founder of SpeedETab, a start-up that provides digital ordering tools to restaurants, said most of the friends he had grown up with in Miami left for jobs in New York or San Francisco and never came back.
“The main option for work here was the tourism industry, so most of my friends left,” he said. “Now they’re starting to come home.”
Chris Adamo, a Pied Piper of the local movement who runs a newsletter-support company, Letterhead, said the newcomers were converting to permanent residents. They might be coming for lower taxes, but he was fine with that.
“This is our Ellis Island moment,” he said. “People can come here, live free and build.”
