Retirement is supposed to be relaxing. But for 79-year-old Joe Pika, it’s full of “everyday annoyances, traffic, and a lot of stress.”
In the booming beach towns of southern Delaware, where Pika and his wife moved full-time four years ago, congestion on local roads can quadruple travel times. Medical appointments require even more persistence and patience—a nine-month wait for his colonoscopy, and 18 months for a dental visit. He gave up on finding a local dermatologist, and drives to a doctor 40 miles north instead.
“Much of your life is devoted to trying to figure out survival strategies,” he says.
Pika is among a flood of Baby Boomers retiring to Sussex County, Delaware, drawn by low taxes and wide beaches. More than 40,000 people have moved to Sussex since 2020. That has boosted the population of this rural, oceanfront county by 17%, a growth rate five times the national average.
As the U.S. ages, the senior population has increased almost everywhere. But many Boomers on the move are looking beyond traditional retirement destinations such as Florida and Arizona, Census Bureau data show. Driven by Sussex’s growth, Delaware’s population 65-or-older has soared 23% since 2020, more than any other state.
A key factor is cost of living. “Moving to more affordable areas has been a national trend this decade,” says University of Virginia demographer Hamilton Lombard.
For affluent retirees coming from the northeast, Florida is no longer the bargain it once was. Rising prices of homes and property insurance have given the Sunshine State’s major cities the worst inflation in the nation since the pandemic. And while Florida’s cost of living now exceeds the national average, U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates show Delaware remains slightly cheaper than the rest of the U.S., and significantly more affordable than nearby states like New York, New Jersey or Maryland.
Transplants to southern Delaware are significantly older and richer than longtime residents. Sussex County’s median age jumped to 53.2 last year, according to Census estimates, nearly five years older than in 2015 and almost 14 years higher than the national average.
The influx of seniors has left Sussex’s roads, hospitals and retail options struggling to keep up with the surge, prompting complaints about overdevelopment from long-time residents and recent arrivals alike.
“Everybody wants to be the last person to move here,” says financial planner Brad Travis, Jr., 46, who grew up in the area.
While acknowledging the irony, Pika is one of those complaining, blaming “an appalling lack of planning” for the strain. The retired University of Delaware political science professor heads up an organization, the Sussex Preservation Coalition, trying to slow down growth.
Boomers flocked to the area during the pandemic, when summer homes became year-round residences. Others grew up visiting the area’s beaches as children, and decided somewhere with proximity to friends and grandchildren living in cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Washington could make for an ideal retirement. Rehoboth Beach, where former President Joe Biden has a home, has been nicknamed the “Nation’s Summer Capital” for a century.
While Delaware levies an income tax, it has no sales tax. Homeowners can pay less in property taxes all year than those in neighboring states pay per month. From New Jersey, “property tax refugees” can often swap annual bills of $18,000 for something more like $1,500, says Travis, managing partner at Sussex Wealth Partners. “That’s a big move from a cash flow standpoint for a retiree.”
Unlike the rest of the northeastern U.S., where homebuilding has stalled over the last decade, lax development laws and lots of open land let developers in southern Delaware respond to housing demand. To do so, they’re going inland, turning farm fields into residential communities, much of it marketed to those 55 and older. That’s provided lots of options for retirees, even as property values near the beach surged.
Typical of the new arrivals are Annette Babich and her friends.
Now 60 years old, Babich—a Long Island native—first started Googling for the “best places to retire” more than a decade ago. The results never seemed like destinations she’d actually want to spend her golden years. An event planner, she says: “I’ve been to Florida in the summer. To me, that’s like a nightmare.”
One day, Lewes, Delaware, popped up. She’d never heard of the town, four hours from her then-home in Brooklyn, New York. “I became a little obsessed with it,” she says. Visiting with her partner on a winter weekend in 2018, they were charmed, but a realtor steered them inland to Milton, a smaller community where historic homes were selling at a fraction of prices in Lewes.
“Before we knew it, we were making an offer on a house,” she says, one that was “just ridiculously priced compared to New York.” Within months, they decided to relocate there full-time, working remotely.
Then Babich invited three high school friends and their partners for the weekend. Soon all three couples were also buying houses in Milton, a walkable riverfront town of less than 4,000 people centered around a main street with a library, a professional theater, and a few antique shops and restaurants. Other New York friends have followed them.
“It’s the kind of place where people come and they’re like, ‘Oh, this is different. It’s a different energy. It’s quieter, it’s slower, it’s friendlier, it’s cheaper,’” says Scott Richardson, one of Babich’s high school friends. After splitting time between New York and Delaware for years, he and his husband moved down full-time this summer.
Now a crew of about a dozen transplants at or near retirement, they have a regular weekly hangout at the Dogfish Head Brewery in Milton. “Sometimes I feel like I’m on a cruise ship and it’s on land,” Richardson says. Babich says she “used to joke with our realtor that I should be employee of the month.”
Sussex County offers several other friendly, small towns that can make you feel like you’re living in a movie, residents say. Adding to their appeal, tourism helps support year-round amenities absent from other rural areas, including an array of restaurants, outlet shopping, music, theater and even some nightlife.
The risk, however, is that too many suburban-style tract homes and strip malls are robbing the area of its best attributes, especially a laid-back reputation that has earned it the nickname “Lower, Slower Delaware,” or, as some bumper stickers label it, “LSD.”
“It’s not so slow anymore,” says Lisa Falzarano, owner of a Milton antique shop who relocated with her husband from Montclair, New Jersey, 13 years ago. It’s a shame “when the whole premise of being down here in the first place is not to rush.”
This fall, for the second election cycle in a row, growth is a top issue in races for the Sussex County Council. The winners of the November vote will help rewrite the county’s comprehensive plan, scheduled to be updated by 2028. In 2024, three incumbents on the council were defeated by challengers who argued for slowing down development.
“There’s a lot of good” that comes with growth, says longtime resident Don Post, 67, an antique shop owner and former Milton mayor, but he worries higher taxes and other inconveniences are on the way. The new arrivals have “left a screwed-up mess that they don’t like,” he says, and now “they’re coming here and going to screw up this place.”
Families moving to Sussex from other states earned more than $136,000 annually according to the latest Internal Revenue Service migration data from 2022, compared to less than $92,000 for existing residents.
“You throw a rock and you hit a retired lawyer or professor or government servant,” says Leslie Calman, 73, a retired nonprofit chief executive officer who relocated from the DC area full-time in 2018.
Some worry about the implications of this increased affluence.
“We can’t price out the people who are going to be our teachers and our healthcare workers,” says Alonna Berry, a Democratic state representative elected last year in a district covering Milton and Lewes.
Keeping Taxes Low
Helping to keep taxes low is Delaware’s role as the legal home for millions of corporations, trusts and other entities, whose taxes and filing fees bring in nearly a third of state revenues. Nonetheless, growth is putting a strain on local governments. Sussex County’s schools need modular classrooms to handle overcrowding, for example. “Your taxes are incredibly low here,” Calman says. “The downside of that is so are your services.”
The biggest source of stress for many seniors is healthcare. Like many rural U.S. counties, Sussex was already designated “medically underserved” by the federal government before the population started to soar. Getting a doctor’s appointment may only get harder as Boomers age. Sussex County residents 80 or over will more than double by 2040, according to Delaware Population Consortium projections.
Beebe Healthcare, the county’s 110-year-old community hospital in Lewes, is adding staff and opening new facilities. One goal is to serve patients closer to where they live, in a county stretching across more than 900 square miles, says Beebe CEO David Tam. Another is to reduce the number of patients who need to be airlifted to Philadelphia for emergencies such as strokes. Beebe has hired more than 50 doctors in four years, a 47% increase, and started a residency program in family medicine in 2023.
Other healthcare providers are moving into the area as well. Pennsylvania-based Novus Medical Services, focused on sexual health and HIV care, opened a clinic in Milton in July. An intended source of clients is the area’s large LGBTQ community.
Gay and lesbian tourists have been coming to Rehoboth, the busiest of the beach towns, for more than 50 years. Many bought up second homes and retired there. But surging home prices near the ocean have priced newcomers out.
“This continues to be a place for LGBTQ folks to come and retire, but they’re not necessarily in Rehoboth” anymore, says Sussex Pride executive director David Mariner. Instead, “we’re just taking over more of the county.” Launched four years ago to serve the LGBTQ population of the broader county, Sussex Pride recently opened a community center in Milton.
Across southern Delaware, companies in a range of industries are expanding, “trying to catch up to the influx of population,” says county economic development director Andrew Harton. The number of business establishments in Sussex surged 49% from 2020 to 2025, Bureau of Labor Statistics data show, and nearly 100 restaurants have opened. With so many transplants looking for financial advice, “there’s plenty of business to go around,” says Travis, who co-founded his firm two years ago.
Next Phase Of Growth
Because many employers are hiring from outside the region and persuading them to move to Sussex County, Harton expects the next phase of population growth to be driven by younger, working-age people.
Tam says the biggest challenge is not necessarily recruiting physicians. For every new doctor, the hospital must hire about six other support workers. “Our challenge is how to recruit the rest of the workforce,” who have more trouble affording housing near their jobs.
Workers employed in the busy, expensive beach towns can face hour-long commutes from the cheaper western side of Sussex. The county’s main east-west corridors are narrow two-lane roads, which everyone agrees are overdue for upgrades.
Traffic problems have become a local obsession, particularly in the summer when tourists clog the roads to and from the beach. It’s the constant subject of small talk, much like the weather everywhere else, says Mariah Calagione, who founded Dogfish with her husband, Sam, in 1995.
The brewery, known for its high-octane IPAs and beers made with beachy flavors like black lime and sea salt, has itself embodied some of the region’s transformation. Dogfish still operates a tasting room in Milton that doubles as a production and research-and-development facility for Boston Beer Company, which merged with the Calagiones’ company in 2019. Dogfish also runs an inn in Lewes, as well as a taphouse and a seafood restaurant in Rehoboth.
When it comes to traffic, “look on the bright side,” she says. “You’re living in a place that people want to come to.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.