Florida ? When Eric Feichthaler became mayor of Cape Coral three years ago, the town was booming. The city issued 800 permits that month to build single-family homes.

Cape Coral still has thousands of empty lots, but last month, it issued just nine permits.

A number of factors explain the downturn, and many of them are not unique to Florida. But it is becoming clear the Sunshine State is losing some of its luster.

Census figures show that in 2007, the number of people who moved to warm and sunny Florida from other states outnumbered those who left by just 35,301, down from 268,347 in 2005. It was just the second year since 1990, when the Census Bureau started keeping such records, that the state saw fewer than 50,000 net U.S. arrivals.

Experts blame the recent slowdown on a combination of circumstances: The national mortgage crisis and the bursting of the real estate bubble, hurricanes, Florida’s steep insurance rates and property taxes, and rising unemployment.