Fishkind: It affects it directly because it creates demands for all the goods and services in the local economy. It affects it directly because of the demand for construction to house people and the stores that they will shop in. So it has a very large effect.

And then because we get a significant portion of retirees, retirees bring their income with them. So even though they don't work in the local economy, they create a lot of cash flow and a lot of spending. And so for all those reasons Florida's economy is very dependent upon population growth and the economy of Central Florida is very dependent upon on it.

We have large retirement communities, some of the largest in the whole world — The Villages for example. So population growth is critically important to the Florida economy and that's why we track it so carefully over the course of the business cycle.

Q: So why is the population growing here?

Fishkind: The population is growing because people love Florida. We continuously attract significant amounts of retirees and significant amounts of people in the labor force. But that flow is very sensitive to the business cycle. So at the peak of the business cycle we were attracting almost 500,000 people a year to Florida. Then we got to the trough of the cycle in 2009 and only a 126,000 came.

Then as we began to have a recovery, our population growth moved up. But it was very unusual. It sort of plateaued out at about 200,000 per year in 2011, 2012 and 2013. I had thought that perhaps that was the top of the cycle. And then we got this report that said 'No, in 2014 Florida's population growth spurted up to 293,000 — a gain of over 50,000.' That was a big deal.

Read more