Florida Blues: Workers are priced out of Key West

The L.A. Times reports:

KEY WEST, FLA. — The old salts of the shrimp fleet have been undercut by Asian shellfish farmers. Flower children who hitchhiked here in the '70s have taken their beads and tambourines and boogied back north. But the Conch Republic is losing more than just its slackers, aging hippies and self-styled pirates.

Teachers and firefighters, grocery clerks and bank tellers, hotel maids and falafel fryers -- all are leaving Key West, unable to pay rents and mortgages twice as high as on the mainland. At least 14% of those younger than 55 have left in the last few years, cutting into the workforce.

"I'm a sixth-generation Conch and I don't know if I'll be able to stay here," says Millie Bringle, 26, who manages a real estate office by day and tends bar by night at the boisterous Meson de Pepe Cuban eatery on Mallory Square.

For five years, Bringle and her husband, a firefighter and electrician, have worked four jobs between them to keep up with a $450,000 mortgage on the tiny house they built on a mobile-home lot. Now they are divorcing and have to sell, and Bringle isn't sure where she'll land.

Much of Bringle's family has left, even those who bought their homes in the days when trailer parks far outnumbered oceanfront town houses. Despite Florida's 3% cap on annual property tax rate increases, the skyrocketing home prices in the Keys have compounded a traditionally high cost of living, with most goods trucked in over 150 miles from Miami while gas prices routinely hit record highs.

Monroe County, which stretches from this southernmost key to the unpopulated western Everglades, has lost more than 2,000 workers since the 2000 census. That's a body blow to the service-oriented economy of a county with only 75,000 residents and 2.25 million overnight visitors a year.

"We have a shrinking population -- one of the few places in Florida going in reverse," said Ed Swift, owner of the Conch Tour Trains, which thread the narrow streets of the historic Old Town.