Meet the New Snowbirds

Arielle Castillo has a vision for life after the pandemic. Specifically, the 30-something content producer for Manchester City (the soccer club) wants to figure out a way to live in two places: one in the winter and another in the summer. “I think between luck and some careful budgeting, I can manage it through keeping my main lease in Miami, and home-swapping or paying for a sublet for the time I want to be in New York,” she says. In case you’re wondering what time of year she’d like to live in each city, well, just ask the South Florida native: “Florida summers and even spring are not for the faint of heart.”

This migratory pattern—spending the warm months up north, and the cold ones down south—isn’t exactly new. The idea of the snowbird—somebody who leaves their colder, full-time residence to stay out the winter somewhere with higher temperatures — dates back to at least 1909 in Florida, when John A.P. Lane wrote an op-ed for The Miami News saying “the country people who are here day in and day out are doing their part to build Miami up not to leave it down as you property owning snow birds who take out of it much more than they contribute.” Traditionally, snowbirds have always been older, usually retired. The stereotype tends to be Jewish or from the East Coast, but things vary depending on where you are. The Pacific Southwest, for instance, has long been a destination of Midwestern social security collectors, and anybody from South Florida can tell you that, come wintertime, you’ll likely run into a few older French Canadians escaping the harsh Quebec weather. Similarly, California’s Coachella Valley, various parts of Arizona, and even parts of the South along the coast have all been destinations for older folks who can just pick up and leave for a few months and return home when they feel like it.

But things have been changing. Especially in South Florida, where old pictures of Jewish bubbes walking the beach or Richard Nixon decamping to Key Biscayne to his “Winter White House” fixed the area as a destination for older people. Today, Miami Beach is a lot closer to Soho Beach, especially with one of Manhattan’s hardest reservations, Carbone, opening up shop in the 305. The big magazines with New York in the name have taken note of this. Adam Platt, writing for New York magazine, wrote that eating at the Carbone on South Beach and the other NYC import to Miami, Cote, made him feel “hopeful” for the future of his own city’s restaurant scene making a post-covid comeback, while Helen Rosner of The New Yorker tried to make a reservation at the South Beach Carbone and found “months and months of grayed-out calendar dates.” People are obsessed with Miami right now, and if you can make it work to be down there for some of the year and then in another city, it doesn’t sound like a terrible idea. Hell, it sounds downright fun.

Castillo is the embodiment of the young snowbird: people in their 30s to 40s who are looking to live in two different places (one of which is probably in Florida) through home swaps or sublets. Although Castillo says she has been working toward this goal for several years (“I am very sensitive to not wanting to seem like I am treating a horribly mismanaged global tragedy as an opportunity for a lark”), the pandemic has radically altered where a certain kind of upwardly mobile, travel-fluent kind of employee can work. After most knowledge work industries shifted to Zoom meetings and Slack conversations, it’s still uncertain if or when many of us will ever have to go to an office five days a week again. Some companies, however, are making it easier for employees to make the choice themselves—and many of those employees are choosing to do what their grandparents might have done in retirement. If the traditional office is a thing of the past, some of us can now work from wherever, and living in different places throughout the year is feasible, why wouldn’t you trade snow and ice for sunshine and warmth for part of the year? While we might not get more time off or more money, at least some companies are realizing that letting their employees WFW (work from wherever) is a way of keeping them happy.

“Since we operate a PR and marketing firm, we can now be more nomadic for a period of time,” says Eric Hendrikx, creative director at NKPR, “especially because of what we learned during the pandemic about people’s capability to zoom rather than meet in person.” Hendrikx and his wife, company founder, Natasha Koifman, have their own version of snowbirding in mind: they are looking to maintain their residence in Toronto (where Koifman is from), and to find a new place in California, Hendrikx’s home state, for when it gets too cold in Canada. While places all over Florida have always catered to part-time residents with timeshares, resorts, and lower taxes that made owning a second home there easier for some, today I went on Airbnb and found multiple places I could have to myself in Austin, New Orleans, Tucson, and a number of other spots for less than I pay in NYC. The average rent in Brooklyn is currently $2,785. Somebody paying that could charge a subletter just a little more, go somewhere warmer for a few months, and make a profit. If you can swing it, that really doesn’t sound like a horrible option.

But whether you’re freelance or full-time might not matter. Companies of all sizes are making it possible for employees to live in two places, and, in some cases, never go into an office. Google, for instance, recently announced that, as of September 1, 20 percent of its workforce will be able to continue working from home, while Spotify announced employees will be able to work anywhere and still get paid the same rates they would in New York City or San Francisco. So that means you could work for a company with an office in Manhattan, live in, say, New Jersey for a few months, then rent a place in Arizona for the winter, all while making NYC wages but not paying NYC rent.

While anybody with the means, a really good plan, or a sweet apartment hookup can essentially live the young snowbird lifestyle, most of the folks I spoke to have some connection to the tech world. With all the talk of “the future of the office” in the post-pandemic world, few industries are as suited to cut the need to have everybody working in the same place as tech. One employee at a startup I talked to pointed out that his company didn’t bother to renew the lease on a Manhattan office and is now 100 percent remote, and that he could just as easily take Zoom meetings from a rented place in Silver Lake as he could from his Brooklyn apartment when the temperature drops. “I mean, why not?”

There are plenty of places where people can work in shorts in December, but no city is planning for—and in some cases already embracing—this new crop of new residents quite like Miami. Mayor Francis Suarez has been actively trying to get tech and finance firms to open up shop in the city, while the crypto exchange FTX recently bought the naming rights to the Miami Heat’s arena. Some people will make the move full-time (Goldman Sachs is reportedly “considering moving a big chunk of employees from New York to Miami,” per Bloomberg), and others will be able to pull off a two-city tango.

Of course, Miami has always been a party town for locals and tourists alike, which is why it could conceivably sustain a portion of its population only being there half the year. It’s not as if trendy New York restaurants like Carbone cater exclusively to residents of the five boroughs. But as anybody that knows even a little bit of Magic City history can tell you, Miami has always been a boom town. Whether this most recent bubble nets more lifetime residents, or people that just want to use the place for its nice weather—and then get out of town—remains to be seen. Ultimately, Castillo says, the math makes the Young Snowbird life impossible to resist. “60 percent of the year is devoted to swamp ass,” she says. “But winters are pretty damn nice.”