10/03/2026
Mexico Beach was a town of low concrete block cottages with jalousie windows and carports, sitting on the sand behind a line of sea oats. Before 2018, seventy percent of the homes along this stretch of coast cost under 300,000 dollars. 🌴
It had been there since 1946, when development began, and incorporated in 1967. The census counted 588 residents in 1970 and the population climbed slowly to a peak of 1,072 in 2010. A resident later described the change in one sentence that does the work of a paragraph. Before, it was like a fishing village. Now it is an investment place.
The hinge was 10 October 2018, when Hurricane Michael came ashore here with sustained winds of 140 knots and a minimum pressure of 919 millibars. Post storm analysis in 2019 made it a Category 5, the first to make landfall in the United States since 1992. Nearly every home was destroyed. The school and city hall were devastated, the pier washed away and the water tower came down. Three Mexico Beach residents were among the dead.
What happened next is the part worth sitting with, because the storm took the buildings and something else took the people. Rebuilding meant meeting stricter codes, and many households were uninsured, or elderly, or simply could not carry the cost. The 2020 census counted 916 residents, down fourteen and a half percent from 2010. Median home prices went from nearly 220,000 dollars in 2019 to 310,500 in 2024. Average household income here rose from 68,000 dollars in 2017 to over 100,000 in 2024, and households earning 200,000 or more nearly quadrupled. 🏚️ Census data show Black and Hispanic residents decreased significantly and residents aged twenty to thirty four declined. The town came back. Most of the people who had built it did not.
