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A wealth boom is powering crucial parts of the metro area’s economy and has shrunk its population

MIAMI—Miami is booming, with waves of wealthy people drawn to the metro area in recent years. Yet there is a countercurrent: Its population is shrinking.

The result is a glittering urban center that is richer, smaller and built to cater to upscale living. Gone are the gritty warehouse districts, the nocturnal desolation of downtown and the shabby chic of South Beach. It is now a sophisticated, cosmopolitan hub with gleaming Cartier boutiques, avant-garde art installations and luxury districts dotted with Michelin-star restaurants.

The new economic order is squeezing out the middle. The growing ranks of the affluent fuel the area’s economy with avid consumption and fuller tax coffers. At the lower end are the retail, hospitality and construction workers who service them but are finding it increasingly difficult to stay. While the city of Miami itself continues to grow slowly, the broader county population is declining.

“Miami is becoming very different,” said Richard Florida, an urbanist and author who lives part of the year in Miami Beach. “We have never witnessed this kind of relocation of wealth,” he said, but “it’s getting harder and harder for the young professional to enter.”

Miami has long lured wealthy people from the U.S., especially the Northeast, and abroad. The influx went into overdrive during and after the Covid pandemic, as newcomers from a wider swath of the U.S. started pouring in. Business leaders such as Ken Griffin, who relocated his hedge-fund firm Citadel from Chicago to Miami, cited a more business-friendly environment, and professionals who could work remotely came for the warm climate and vibrant lifestyle.

People moving to Miami-Dade County from other states had on average $178,000 in adjusted gross income, more than double that of people who left the county for other states, according to an analysis of 2022-23 Internal Revenue Service data by Maria Ilcheva, associate director of the Jorge M. Pérez Metropolitan Center at Florida International University. Those coming from Manhattan earned on average $358,000, and those from Chicago earned on average $711,000.

The number of millionaires in Miami soared 94% to 38,800 between 2014 and 2024, according to Henley & Partners, a residence and citizenship planning firm. That was the second-largest percentage increase among the U.S. cities it studied, behind the San Francisco Bay Area.

Such wealth is powering key sectors of the Miami economy. The million-dollar real-estate market is outperforming the overall housing market in Miami-Dade County, said Gay Cororaton, chief economist at the Miami Association of Realtors. Million-dollar-plus sales of single-family homes increased 20% in the first quarter, compared with a year earlier, while overall sales of such homes rose 7%.

The Miami Design District, a onetime furniture center that fell into disrepair in the 1980s, is now a luxury destination with scores of designer fashion houses, art galleries and sleek architecture featuring glass facades and geometric forms. From 2019 to 2025, sales grew 350%, said Craig Robins, chief executive of developer Dacra. Foot traffic, based on cars parked in the area, increased 250%. Luxury brands including Bulgari and Fendi have expanded their boutiques, and a condo project, hotel and office buildings are in the works.

New establishments catering to a rich clientele crop up regularly.

The Seia Club, an invitation-only private club on the 55th floor of a high-end office building in the Brickell financial district, opened in March, featuring gourmet cuisine and a curated art collection. Nearby is Amazónico, a restaurant, bar and lounge that opened in September and has locations in cities including Madrid and Dubai. Its owners chose Miami for their U.S. debut.

CollectionSuites just completed a second phase of its luxury storage suites for collectors of cars, art and wine to showcase their prized possessions. Each space runs $3 million to $5.5 million and includes an auto gallery, a lounge area and a fully appointed kitchen.

The infusion of wealth has sent tax revenue soaring. Property taxes levied by Miami-Dade County rose 66% to $3.43 billion in the 2025-26 fiscal year from $2.07 billion in the 2019-20 fiscal year, according to county data.

Whether these trends generate broader economic benefits has been a subject of debate. The Miami-Dade Beacon Council, an economic-development organization, said the area is becoming a more diversified global business hub, driven by sectors including finance, technology, healthcare and logistics. Financial-services jobs increased 8% from 2021 to 2026, and average wages rose to $232,000 from $163,000, the organization said.

Yet some economists say an insufficient supply of high-paying jobs, coupled with rising living costs, is driving away college graduates and the middle class. High-income job growth has slowed in recent years, according to data from John Burns Research & Consulting.

Lower-income people are getting squeezed the most. Half of all households in Miami-Dade County are cost-burdened—meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on housing—according to a 2023 study by the Shimberg Center for Housing Studies at the University of Florida. The county has a gap of more than 90,000 affordable units for renter households with incomes below 80% of area median income, the study found.

For years, Miami-Dade County has been losing growing numbers of people through net migration to other states. In 2025, the rate of people leaving metro Miami for other places in the U.S. was higher than that of any other large metro area, according to an analysis published last month by Jed Kolko, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “Miami is the new San Francisco—at least in the sense that housing affordability is pushing people out,” he wrote.

Rising home prices have prompted many people to leave traditionally working-class neighborhoods such as Overtown, said Annie Lord, executive director of Miami Homes for All, which focuses on producing more affordable housing.

Jasmine Jamison, who grew up in Liberty City and worked as an administrative secretary for the county, moved to Locust Grove, Ga., outside Atlanta, in 2022 with her husband and their five children because they needed more space and could no longer afford Miami rents. They settled in a four-bedroom house that costs about $2,500 a month—the same amount they were paying for a smaller townhouse in South Florida.

The couple’s income—from her current job as executive director of a nonprofit and his as a truck driver—stretches further in Georgia. Four of her close friends from Miami have joined her in the state.

“Miami has become impossible,” said Jamison, 33 years old. “Everything is so different now.”

Matt Kuscher, who owns three restaurants in Miami, has seen many of his employees struggle to continue living in the city. Some pack into homes with family and friends, while others turn to motels they rent by the week. One of his managers moved north to Broward County and now commutes as much as an hour each way.

Kuscher is building 10 studio apartments above one of his restaurants in the Wynwood neighborhood, a once-edgy area now packed with stylish stores and expensive eateries. He plans to rent them out to service workers in the area at affordable rates set by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Kuscher recently attended a conference organized by Miami Homes for All in Overtown, in the shadow of swanky new towers downtown. The aim was to highlight new approaches to small-scale development that could increase the stock of affordable housing.

“It’s a way to prevent total mass displacement of the community from those neighborhoods,” said Lord, of Miami Homes for All.

Global oil inventories have fallen at a record pace during the Iran war

An underappreciated surplus of crude oil, sloshing around storage tanks and aboard ships, cushioned the global economy when the Persian Gulf closed 2½ months ago.

That excess supply is now dwindling at a record pace, with oil executives and analysts predicting that a harsh reckoning is set to upend the relative calm in energy markets. Acute shortages of key fuels and soaring prices could emerge within weeks if the Strait of Hormuz remains shut.

The drawdown in private storage and government strategic reserves along with a fall in demand due to the higher prices, has bought time and prevented oil prices from exploding. But it has left little margin for error in the months ahead.

“You can only decrease consumption so much, and when inventories run out, they are going to run out,” said Ellen Wald, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center. “At some point the market is going to collide and prices are going to shoot up.”

Global oil inventories—which include onshore tanks and oil floating on tankers at sea, and are a measure of the slack in energy markets—have fallen at a record pace since the start of the war. They plunged by 250 million barrels over March and April, according to the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based club of energy consuming nations. That is equal to around 2½ days of global oil use.

The runway to avoid reaching critical levels—known as tank bottoms in industry parlance—is vanishing rapidly.

In a report titled “The illusion of plenty,” JPMorgan Chase estimated that if the strait remains blocked, stockpiles in a group of wealthy nations could plunge to “operational stress levels” early next month and to system-straining “operational floor level” by September. The bank said it doesn’t expect inventories to actually reach those levels because history suggests demand would be curtailed first.

The implications of an oil supply shortage are vast. Prices at the gas pump are already touching their highest levels in years in the U.S. and could shoot higher when stocks run low. Airlines are reorganizing flights to adapt to potential shortages of jet fuel. Central bank decisions over whether to raise interest rates will depend in large part on whether oil markets remain well supplied.

The chief executive of Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company, said this week that global stockpiles for refined products such as gasoline and jet fuel could reach “critically low levels” ahead of the summer driving and travel season.

In a possible sign the supply worries are bleeding into markets, oil prices jumped Friday, with global benchmark Brent crude rising at one point more than 3% to $109 a barrel. That’s still below its closing high of $118 at the end of March.

The oil market’s saving grace was the remarkable surplus it carried into the conflict, which cushioned the blow far better than analysts predicted when the Strait of Hormuz first closed. Both Iran and Russia had millions of barrels of oil floating at sea, looking for buyers. U.S. Treasury waivers on sanctions of Russian oil unleashed a gusher of supply onto the market.

Another major part of the emergency backstop is coming from the U.S. and other Western governments. The 32 member nations of the IEA deployed roughly 164 million barrels through May 8, helping to offset the 10 million barrels a day lost in the Gulf.

The IEA expects its members to release an additional 210 million barrels of government stocks through the end of July.

But releasing stocks isn’t the same as replacing supply. It shifts the shortage problem from today into the future, when governments and companies eventually will have to rebuild depleted reserves. The IEA estimates that replenishing the cumulative deficit, including strategic reserves, would require roughly an extra one million barrels a day of supply for three years.

As a result of the inventory depletion, U.S. stocks of diesel are likely to fall below 100 million barrels, the lowest level since 2003, by the end of May, according to consulting firm Eurasia Group. Even sharper declines are hitting Asia, the region most reliant on Persian Gulf exports before the war.

Based on current supply trends and domestic inventories, countries like India, Thailand and Taiwan are rapidly approaching critical scarcity levels of refined products such as naphtha, fuel oil and diesel, according to estimates by Goldman Sachs.

Some countries in the region have imposed fuel-saving measures, cut refinery runs or restricted product exports to conserve domestic supplies.

To be sure, surplus inventories aren’t the only factor. Falling oil consumption—known in economic parlance as demand destruction—is doing some of the balancing work. The IEA expects global oil demand to contract this year, with the sharpest hit in the second quarter, as high prices, fuel-saving measures and weaker economic growth weigh on consumption.

Demand destruction, however, at a large enough scale, will eventually translate into a hit to economic growth.

The drawdown of excess oil inventories has eased the immediate market panic. The premium commanded by physical oil barrels over futures has fallen in recent weeks after shooting up earlier in the conflict when refiners and traders bid up every cargo available. According to the IEA, the premium of North Sea Dated physical crude over the Brent futures price fell from as high as $35 a barrel in mid-April to around $3 a barrel earlier this month.

That spread is important because it measures how urgently buyers need real barrels now, compared with later delivery. Its narrowing suggests the market has moved from panic to managed scarcity—not that the underlying shortage has disappeared.

“The urgent, immediate grab for physical cargoes has died down,” said Hamad Hussain, commodities economist at Capital Economics. “However, we are drawing down those stocks pretty quickly, and as a result, prices will have to rise as a direct consequence of that.”

He expects that if the strait remains closed and the inventory drawdown continues, oil prices could top $130 to $140 a barrel next month.

Even if Washington and Tehran reach a swift deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the physical flow of Gulf oil won’t immediately bounce back, analysts say. Clearing possible mines, repairing infrastructure and untangling maritime logistics will push the resumption of normal shipping traffic back by at least two to three months, the IEA said.

“Supply is unlikely to recover in the next few weeks or next few months, even if the strait opens tomorrow,” said Tamas Varga, analyst at London-based oil broker PVM.

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Blackstone and CD&R in early stages of evaluating bids - sources

Magnum seen as potential turnaround target

Unilever retains 19.9% stake, plans full exit within five years

May 15 (Reuters) - Blackstone and CD&R are among private equity firms in the early ‌stages of exploring bids for Magnum Ice Cream Company (MICCT.AS), opens new tab, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, less than six months after the owner of Cornetto and Ben & Jerry's was spun out of Unilever (ULVR.L), opens new tab.

The ​firms are monitoring Magnum's share price before deciding whether to make a move, ​the two people said.

Magnum's shares have fallen from a high of 16.5 ⁠euros ($19.19) earlier this year to trade close to their debut price at about 13 ​euros. The ice cream maker listed on December 8 with a valuation of about 7.8 billion ​euros, below analyst expectations of up to 10.8 billion euros. The shares have traded as low as 11 euros.

British consumer goods giant Unilever, which took nearly two years to list its ice cream brands, ​retains a 19.9% stake in Magnum and plans to exit within five years.

Deliberations are ​at an early stage, and both firms are waiting for Magnum to report summer sales before making ‌a ⁠decision, one of the sources said. Magnum makes a large share of its revenue during that period. Other private equity firms are also interested, the people added.

Magnum, Unilever, Blackstone and CD&R declined to comment.

A deal to take Magnum private would be the latest in Europe ​as private equity firms ​seek to deploy ⁠funds after several years of subdued dealmaking.

Magnum is trading in an environment where some shoppers are opting for healthier choices amid a ​boom in GLP-1 weight-loss drugs.

However, the company could offer buyout firms ​a turnaround ⁠opportunity through cost cuts and margin expansion, bringing it closer to rival Froneri, the two sources said.

Magnum says it holds about 21% of the $87 billion global ice cream market, ahead of ⁠Froneri's ​11%.

Froneri, a joint venture between PAI Partners and Nestle (NESN.S), opens new tab, ​secured an investment in October that valued the company at 15 billion euros.