So many Floridians now sojourn in the area that in recent years UF officials have had to split the mountaintop bash into two parties over two nights. To treat the Carolina crowd to an evening of “bluegrass, barbeque and Bernie,” President Bernie Machen has to spend one night in Highlands and the next across the mountains in Linville.

“It’s grown so much, we’ve really maxed out the seating,” says Carter Boydstun, senior associate vice president for development at the UF Foundation. “Every summer, we have a lot more names to add to the invitation list.”

Whether chased north by the heat, the hurricanes or property-tax and insurance costs, more Floridians are buying second homes in western North Carolina — or packing permanently for the mountains.

And Florida home builders are following their customers north. Seeking to diversify operations as they ride out Florida’s housing downturn, the builders are buying up mountaintops and developing them by the thousands of acres.

But they are betting on an uncertain boom. For in these cloud-laced mountains, Florida history is repeating itself in a dozen different ways. In some areas, speculators have lost money on development deals that proved too good to be true. In others, rising land values and taxes are leading locals, such as artisans and farmers, to sell out and move on, homogenizing the mountain culture as Christmas tree crops become rooftops. Across the region, lack of development regulation has led to environmental problems, from groundwater scarcity to soil erosion.

“People move to western North Carolina communities because they think these small towns are so quaint, and then they perch a 5,000-sq.-ft. house on the side of the mountain,” says Robin Cape, an Asheville city councilwoman first exposed to western North Carolina on many summer trips from Tampa with her grandparents.

“I wish people could remember that they’re not in Miami anymore.”