I'm shortly leaving the Gulf coast of Florida, have been here over a decade. I'm moving even more tropical, and resonate to your post. I'm curious if you considered Puerto Rico and/or Hawaii.
Hurricanes are a thing, yes. How well you fare during a direct hit depends a lot on the infrastructure. The home we're leaving is in a well-engineered development a dozen miles or so from the beach. We've had a couple of direct hits. The last one, Ian, took half of 2
trees out, but otherwise we were fine. The thing that amazed me is I awoke at 4 am (when the
lights came on and everything beeped), and our streets were already dry, because of the well-maintained ponds and drains that gather the
water. Older areas with poor planning flooded.
If you're looking inland, planning for hurricanes is doable. The horrible pictures you see in the news are typically close to the coast. Your structures
should be built to code or retrofitted. Don't have big trees where they can fall on anything you don't want them to fall upon. Hurricane winds go 360 degrees -- even if the storm comes from the south, the winds may be from due north, just depending on whether it hits you to the east or west side.
Something to be aware of is the
politics. This is Proud Boy country. If you're BIPOC or a sexual minority, your kind are not welcome in rural areas. The state has zero incentives for alternative
energy, and actually disincentivize. E.g., I have
solar and pay retail for electricity I receive (at night), but only get credit at wholesale for surplus during the day.
For
permaculture, like anywhere there are some blessings and some challenges. There's a good amount of rainfall in season. Dry season seems to be getting drier and drier. Sunshine State nickname is true. It hasn't frozen since.... can anyone remember? The main challenge I see is that the soil is so poor. That's common in tropical soil, but is worse here because we have mainly sand over a limestone base, very little loam or clay. All the fertility is in the trees and plants. Abundance can be found easily, because that's what tropics do. If you're from the North, you'll be amazed how much biomass you generate. And you'll be shocked how brutal full sun is. For example, when I first got here I put tomatoes in full sun, right? Ya, nope.