Best Cities to Start a Business in Florida

Florida’s economy has recovered handily from the collapse of its housing market during the grimmest months of the Great Recession. So well, in fact, that the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area was recently declared number one in startup activity among the nation’s forty major metropolitan areas by the Kauffman Foundation, a Kansas City-based group that combs through government data to calculate the rate of entrepreneurs opening businesses in a given area per month.

Why are entrepreneurs flocking to Florida to open businesses? The balmy weather, white sand beaches, and vast amusement parks certainly don’t hurt, nor does the oceanfront real estate available for a portion of the price of similar California properties.

Manageable living expenses and the promise of a sun-drenched, epicurean lifestyle are the pull for participants in South Florida’s startup community, a scene with no specific focus but rather a bunch of growing companies in divergent fields united by geography and ambition. By lacking a single dominating industry, Florida’s startup climate remains open to anyone with an idea and a plan to implement it.

Only cities with over 50,000 inhabitants are reported in the results. Some data had to be interpolated to the county level and extrapolated to all the cities in the county. We concentrated on the following metrics to obtain our ranking: Cost of living, Best state for business, Unemployment, Kauffman index, and Universities.