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Is it true? Are Boca people rich, shallow and consumed with consuming? This admittedly unscientific study from 2000 asked locals highly personal and irreverent questions designed to give us a snapshot of, well, who we are. In the end, the survey resulted in a major media brouhaha and a fun read about our neighbors and ourselves.
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Is it true? Are Boca people rich, shallow, consumed with consuming? Are we all cell phones and silicone, coupon clippers and Boca babes? Or are we more than that: people in a community with distinct patterns and priorities, likes and dislikes, histories and heartaches?
We decided to find out once and for all if the good people of Boca Raton deserve to be the butt of Seinfeld humor (not that there's anything wrong with that) or if we deserve a break. So we hired market researcher and Boca Raton resident Barry Sinrod to conduct a survey of people with the nine zip codes in and around the city, asking highly irreverent (and personal) questions designed to give us a snapshot of how we live and who we are. Of course, what started out as a perfectly innocent exercise turned into a major brouhaha, but that's another story.
In the meantime, we managed to get enough data to give us a picture of Boca behind closed doors. Although this data is not presented as scientifically accurate, we think it does start to delineate a community profile that will, at the very least, keep people talking about us...
The Snowbird Factor
So much for the little myth about snowbirds; we knew Boca was a full-time town. It turns out that 93 percent of those who participated in our survey live here all 12 months of the year and almost all of them have been here for more than 10 years! So our respondents should know the score.
The people living here the longest, according to our survey, generally live east of Federal Highway near Boca Raton Resort & Club, along A1A and the water and they live in older homes that tend to be about 6,500 square feet in size. They tend to be Democrats, have been -- and are still -- married to one person, and for a long time at that. Their incomes are in the $150,000 range and they tend to be Catholic and around 70 years old.
Of the people who returned our survey, almost 60 percent are from "West Boca" which we loosely define as that area west of the Florida Turnpike; 34 percent identify themselves as "easterners." Then there's that pesky 7 percent who apparently don't know where they live. Maybe Boca Del Vista? New London? Town Center Mall?
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