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COPYRIGHT 2001 The Miami Herald
May 23--Change swept forcefully through South Florida's retirement havens and Hispanic communities during the 1990s, turning sleepy places such as Hallandale Beach and Bal Harbour into magnets for families, while Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and others of Latino ancestry arrived in numbers large enough to match the long-established Cuban population, newly released Census 2000 figures show.
The figures depict a region in flux, increasingly a destination for working-age immigrants from Central and South America even as its one-time mainstays--the U.S. retirees who flooded Florida starting in the 1950s--now largely shun Broward and Miami-Dade counties for other parts of the state.
The youth movement was evident in every coastal retirement community from Miami Beach to Deerfield Beach in Broward County, and to a lesser but still obvious degree in some other municipalities such as Miami Shores, Coral Gables and Coconut Creek.
In the seaside cities, the median age dropped, sometimes precipitously, along with the proportion of the population over age 62. At the same time, the number of families with children rose sharply in most of those communities.
Amy and Jerry Simonson watched for five years as their home -- the Harbour House,...
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