3 February 1-7, 2024 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com New Times | Contents | Letters | news | night+Day | CuLture | Cafe | MusiC | MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2008 miaminewtimes.com MIAMI NEW TIMES | CONTENTS | LETTERS | RIPTIDE | METRO | NIGHT+DAY | STAGE | ART | FILM | CAFE | MUSIC | ▼ FLORIDA THERE’S A CATCH AVERAGE FLORIDIAN WOULD TRADE FIVE YEARS OF LIFE TO LIVE LIKE A MILLIONAIRE. BY ALEX DELUCA H ow many years of ordinary life — working your nerves raw and struggling to pay bills — would you trade in exchange for un- told riches? A year? A decade? Not a second at all? That’s the line of questions posed by the recently released “Price of Prosperity” sur- vey, in which pop culture website Wealth of Geeks questioned 3,000 people nationwide, asking them just how much of their lives they would be willing to shave off in ex- change for the “splendors of a millionaire’s existence.” The results include detailed stats and a state-by-state breakdown of where residents were most willing to sacrifice years for wealth. It may come as a surprise that the Sun- shine State did not land near the top of the list, considering its most populous region, South Florida, has an (underserved?) reputa- tion for superficiality and materialistic ten- dencies. Indeed, a few days of witnessing social climbing in Miami or Palm Beach might convince an outsider that certain locals would trade the bulk of their being for a small taste of the millionaire lifestyle. According to the survey, Florida wound up just outside the top ten states, with residents willing to “give up five years and two months of life to become a millionaire.” That’s slightly more than the U.S. average of four years and 11 months. Further bucking stereotypes, New Hamp- shirites topped the list. Folks from the Gran- ite State shed their crunchy granola reputation and said they were willing to trade almost eight years of life for a bank account overflowing with cash. On the other hand, people in Idaho, Indiana, and North Dakota were content with the simple life and would sacrifice only about six months. While the survey may come off as one of those whimsical publicity-driven exercises — if not a soul-selling proposition drafted by Beelzebub himself — Wealth of Geeks claims it designed “questions to carefully screen and authenticate respondents.” The site says the survey team thoroughly reviewed responses and used geo-verification and plagiarism de- tection for open-ended answers. (They dis- closed neither the average age of participants nor the sample size from each state, however, which leaves some questions lingering about the results’ implications.) The number one takeaway, in any event? “The willingness to trade years of life for wealth highlights a strong societal allure to- wards financial freedom and luxury, poten- tially overshadowing the importance of longevity,” Wealth of Geeks claims. After years of post-pandemic, wallet- draining inflation, it’s understandable that so many of the participants said they’d sacrifice a sizeable chunk of their lives for a chance to be financially carefree and break the cycle of crippling debt. There is a particular breed of misery associated with watching your pay- check evaporate on everyday living expenses. Case in point: Miamians are going broke en masse just trying to get by. A November 2023 report found the cost of living in Miami is among the highest in the nation, with a typical household paying nearly $2,700 a month on ten common ex- penses such as rent, insurance, and cable. Mi- ami consistently ranks as one of the least affordable housing markets in the nation, and a new study by HelpAdvisor pegged it as the most expensive U.S. city for groceries, at an average weekly cost of $327. Cost of living and personal debt have been ballooning nationwide, of course — Ameri- cans’ credit card debt surpassed a trillion dol- lars for the first time last year. Aside from giving up years of life for finan- cial freedom, the survey found that 23 per- cent of respondents would sacrifice career goals, 16 percent would give up quality sleep, 15 percent would abandon their hobbies, and four percent of people would cut ties with their friends if it meant they could spend their days nestled in the bosom of tremen- dous riches. Sure enough, the old “money-can’t-buy- happiness” mantra has been refuted by recent research from Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and economist, and Matthew Killingsworth, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. The research found not only that higher income is associated with greater joy (sur- prise, surprise) but that a person’s happiness continues to steadily increase beyond the $75,000 income threshold above which it was previously thought to plateau. “The exception is people who are finan- cially well-off but unhappy. For instance, if you’re rich and miserable, more money won’t help,” Killingsworth said. | RIPTIDE | GET MORE NEWS & COMMENTARY AT MIAMINEWTIMES.COM/NEWS Wealth of Geeks asked people how much of their lives they would be willing to shave off in exchange for being millionaire. Photo by AltModern, Oliver Habel/Getty Images ▼ SUNNY ISLES BEACH SAY CHEESE! SUNNY ISLES BEACH TO DEPLOY RED- LIGHT CAMERAS. BY ALEX DELUCA T he days of Sunny Isles Beach drivers blowing through red lights may soon be over — or so officials hope. The municipality is one of the latest to an- nounce plans to install controversial traffic cam- eras at its busiest intersections in an effort to stop drivers from zooming through red lights. Through a recent contract with RedSpeed Florida LLC, a subsidiary of the Illinois-based traffic enforce- ment company RedSpeed USA, the oceanfront city plans to install six red-light enforcement cameras at the following intersections: - 183rd Street and Collins Avenue northbound - 183rd Street and Collins Avenue southbound - 200 block of Sunny Isles Beach Boulevard - 159th Street and Collins Avenue northbound - 159th Street and Collins Avenue southbound - 193rd Street and Collins Avenue southbound While the red-light program costs $889,200 for a roughly three-year term, the contract (which piggybacks on the city of Sarasota’s, waiving the competitive bidding process) allows the city to back out during the first year without financial liability. The monthly fees for six to ten cameras, the amount Sunny Isles Beach plans to install, is roughly $3,800, according to a city memoran- dum about the contract. (So, if the city installs six cameras for a year, the fees would amount to $45,600.) According to RedSpeed’s website, its prod- ucts include speed-enforcement cameras, red- light cameras, school-bus cameras, and railroad-crossing cameras. The company’s red light photo-enforcement system features dual red light and speed enforcement cameras, a li- cense plate “rewind” function, and real-time li- cense plate recognition, among others. Red-light cameras have long remained a hot- button issue. While cities across America have installed red- light cameras over the past two decades in an ef- fort to make roads safer, some studies have shown that they haven’t achieved that goal — and, in cer- tain cases, have made roads more dangerous. Between the study results and accusations of officials treating the system like a “business” (you might recall the city of Sweetwater, whose six red-light cameras raked in $2.5 million between 2018 and 2019), a number of Florida jurisdictions have done away with the cameras in recent years. In 2016, the Miami-Dade County Commission voted to rescind the county’s power to install cameras in unin- corporated areas — places such as Kendall, West- chester, and Brownsville. In late 2017, the City of Miami got rid of its red-light cameras after the public started to question whether officials deployed them for safety or simply to line the city’s coffers. (The city was slated to rake in $10.5 million in red- light camera citations that fiscal year alone.) After installing red-light cameras at four of its busiest intersections in 2017, the City of Doral got rid of them in June 2023 after learning of the high crash rate at those crossings. “A lot of the drivers...before they were passing these intersections, they were scared every time they get the yellow light,” Pineiro said, explaining that drivers would stop suddenly, causing rear-end collisions. In December 2023, two Republican lawmak- ers — Florida Sen. Ileana Garcia of Miami and Florida Rep. David Borrero of Sweetwater — filed proposed constitutional amendments that would ban the use of red-light cameras. Their ef- fort follows an annual trend of lawmakers at- tempting to repeal a 2010 law, the Mark Wandall Traffic Safety Program, which authorized the use of red-light cameras throughout Florida. The law is named after a man killed by a motorist who ran a red light. During a recent city commission meeting, in which commissioners discussed the cameras, Sunny Isles Beach officials emphasized that money isn’t their motive. Commissioner Jeniffer Viscarra says that if the city can’t put a police officer on “every cor- ner 24 hours a day,” this is the next best way for the city to enforce its roads at all hours. “This is not about making money,” Viscarra says. “This is about changing behavior.” [email protected] A NUMBER OF FLORIDA JURISDICTIONS HAVE DONE AWAY WITH THE CAMERAS IN RECENT YEARS.
