So growing up, we always traveled to the Palm Beach area. My grandmother had property just south in Lake Worth. Anyway we were raised in the Chicago area and always loved the East coast of Florida. I’m just confused as to why there is so much love for the west coast by people from the Midwest? Is this something that has happened recently over the last 20 years? Because from what I remember no one went there that I knew of. It was always the East coast down by Palm Beach, Boca Raton and Miami.
The main reason why Chicago and other midwestern cities relocated to the west coast of FL, as opposed to the east coast of FL like New Yorkers did and other eastern cities did was a matter of simple logistics, as Lenox had pointed out.
Decades ago, when Florida was starting to draw people from other states (in the years right after WWII), most of those people drove they're cars there. Air travel was still a rarity for most Americans. They used the newly developed U.S. Interstate Highway system then being build right after WWII. It was part of a national program by Washington to develop a network of roadways across America (it also put all those returning G.I.s from the war to work).
I-95/295 is the major highway that run from the Northeast straight down to Florida's east coast (Miami, Fort Lauderdale, etc). I-75/475 (I think) is situated in the Midwestern part of the U.S., by Chicago and those other cities. That midwest highway (as you probably know) runs from the Midwest straight down to the west coast of Florida (Naples, Fort Myers, etc).
It was a simple matter of logistics, and where they landed in Florida, is where they landed...and eventually settled those areas. With few exceptions, Midwest cities heavily populated the west coast, while Eastern cities populated the east coast.
