With all its pink buildings and historic flair, Boca Raton’s architecture really won Kim Carlson over.
Carlson knew she wanted to move from her home in Lake City, Minnesota, and she liked South Florida. And Boca Raton’s architecture was too “exciting” to pass up.
“I think Boca is a part of me, it was right away,” Carlson says. “I don’t think I’m a part of Boca, yet.”
Carlson, 55, who moved in August, is among the many Boca residents sharing their stories about why the city was so intriguing. Is it the city’s beach? Were some surprised to see it’s not just a destination for retirees? Did all the times they heard it mentioned on “Seinfeld” and other TV shows add to its appeal?
They’re participating in a documentary by Florida Atlantic University professor Aaron Veenstra. The film will explore people’s sense of place and what leads people to connecting with certain cities, especially if they have no ties there.
A seed for the creation of the documentary was planted during Veenstra’s graduate research methods class when, while developing questionnaire items for a survey, a group of students was putting together questions about feelings of connection to a particular place.
“They’re starting with feelings of connection to where you live and feelings of connection to where you’re from. And they ask, ‘Is there a way to ask about feelings of connection to a place that you’re not from and that you don’t live in and that you never lived in?’” Veenstra said.
These concepts lingered in Veenstra’s mind.
“What does it mean to have these feelings of connection? And how do you act on them? How have people acted?” he said. Thus, the idea for a documentary was born.
FAU professor Aaron Veenstra interviews Kim Carlson (not shown) at Florida Atlantic University on Monday, Oct. 13, 2025, for a documentary he is working on about Boca Raton. Carlson just moved from Lake City, Minnesota, to Boca Raton, on Aug. 15, 2025. (Amy Beth Bennett / South Florida Sun Sentinel)
‘This is all around us’
The documentary will feature two cities: Boca Raton and Perth, Australia, which have similar natural environments — plants, birds, and lizards, for example — and “visual parallels,” Veenstra said.
Choosing Boca Raton wasn’t difficult.
As Veenstra pondered connection to a place, he realized he currently lives in what could serve as a very good example.
“We’re in it. This is all around us,” he said. “People that want to move to Florida, that don’t really have a connection to Florida, people that want to move specifically to Boca, they have some idea of what Boca is, but they’re not from there, they haven’t lived there before, their family’s not from there, they didn’t get a job there. They just want to go.”
And Australia is personal for Veenstra: If he could “just live anywhere,” it’d be Perth.
He grew up in both upper Michigan and Wisconsin, having moved around as a child, so his first visit to Perth was in June 2024 with his wife after attending a conference in Gold Coast, Australia.
“When I have an international conference, we try to tack on some additional trip because we’re already going all the way to Australia, so let’s see some more stuff,” he said.
The Perth music scene had interested Veenstra, and he and his wife planned to see quokka, a small, fuzzy brown mammal that had become, as Veenstra put it, a “selfie phenomenon” a few years ago.
To Veenstra, Perth was like a tucked away Narnia. “Nobody goes to it and nobody really knows anything about it, but it’s very nice and chill and on the coast and it’s beachy and it’s just nice Australians having a nice time,” he said.
Boca Raton and Perth certainly are not identical — according to Data Commons, a public data site, Boca Raton’s population is a little more than 100,000 as of 2024 while Perth’s population was more than 2.3 million in 2023. The summer season in Boca Raton is when people in Perth experience winter. People drive on the left in Perth and on the right in Boca Raton.
But Veenstra has found that how people acclimate when they move can be compared, even when dealing with locations on opposite sides of the world.
“There’s just so many interesting parallels in the ways that people are adjusting and responding to these places that are physically very similar in a lot of ways,” he said.
Boca Raton’s image
Voices for the documentary will come from people Veenstra interviewed who moved to Perth or Boca Raton — from out of state, at least — because they wanted to live there, not because of an external factor leading them to relocate.
Veenstra first interviewed three people who moved to Perth then another three people who moved to Boca Raton. Besides a man who had lived in Perth for more than 40 years, and Kim Carlson, the other interviewees moved between three to 10 years ago, Veenstra said.
Veenstra has since interviewed another person in the “before stage”: a man in New York who recently visited Perth and can’t stop thinking about it.
Veenstra said he found that the Perth interviewees perceived the atmosphere of the city similar to how he did: friendly, relaxed. And they made the Perth move relatively early in their adult lives, while the Boca Raton folks moved during their midlife.
A drive or a walk through the city’s downtown or even some of the neighborhoods quickly gives credence to Kim Carlson’s draw toward Boca Raton’s architecture. Many of the buildings and homes have column windows, stucco finishes and barrel roof tiles, reminiscent of the Mediterranean revival style.
The color palette of many Boca Raton buildings pop, too, often with shades of bright pink. For example, there’s Mizner Park in downtown Boca. There are pink plazas. There’s the Boca Raton resort tower.
During her interview with Veenstra, Carlson said she’d just bought beach chairs, bringing her that much closer to being fully integrated into the fabric of the Boca Raton community. And Carlson likes how direct people in Boca Raton are — it’s a welcome change from the obligatory pleasantries Carlson said people in Minnesota are apt to do.
“We’re Minnesota-nice, we’re friendly, but behind your back, God only knows, and then you’re always putting in all this energy to be overtly friendly all day,” Carlson said. “But I prefer (Boca Raton) because it’s just more healthy, I think, for me. … Everybody’s not necessarily mean, they’re just doing their thing. They’re busy doing their thing.”
Not necessarily like ‘Seinfeld’
Heath Oilar’s initial idea of Boca Raton was little more than a quiet city filled with older folks resembling comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s fictional parents on the TV show “Seinfeld,” he said in an interview for the documentary.
“Why do you live in an old people’s community?” Oilar recalled saying to young people he used to work with who were located out of Boca Raton.
But after a visit to see friends who live in the city, his mind changed — so much so that he and his wife “just picked up shop and moved.”
Oilar, who associated Boca Raton with “Seinfeld,” told Veenstra during his interview that he and his wife had always known they wanted to live next to the beach, even before they were married.
After the couple visited Boca Raton, Oilar said the city wasn’t what he expected — rather than being a retiree hub, Oilar said he found a community with people of all ages. “I had never been here, so I was talking out of just an assumption based upon ‘Seinfeld’ of all things,” Oilar told Veenstra.
Oilar’s idea of Boca Raton based on a sitcom emphasizes the notion Veenstra has about how Boca Raton “exists in the popular imagination in a particular way.”
“It pops up in TV and movies a lot, just random mentions of Boca that all kind of contribute to the sense of what this is,” Veenstra said.
Watch TV and you may hear “Boca Raton” occasionally. In addition to “Seinfeld,” the city has been mentioned on various shows through the years, including “The Sopranos,” which even titled one episode “Boca.”
Celebrities also help put the city in the spotlight. That includes pop star Ariana Grande, who hails from Boca.
Veenstra said, “You’re not from here, you don’t have any connection here, but you know you want to move to Florida for some sort of ephemeral reason, and Boca has this image within that Florida image.”
The hope we have in ourselves
Robert Gutsche Jr., a professor in digital culture at FAU who conducted his dissertation on placemaking, said a sense of place is one of the most important things to humans. People’s environment and lived experience have a direct connection to physical geography, he said.
And in the case of Boca Raton, the name “just sounds cool,” Gutsche said.
“Boca, as it’s made its way through pop culture, certainly does have a reputation,” he said.
And that reputation isn’t always positive. Some of the interviewees said they faced backlash for their decision to move, getting earfuls about why Florida is a horrible place to live.
Plenty of people told Carlson not to make her Boca Raton move, she said. It’s too hot, you’ll miss the seasons and the snow, people told her. And while it’s only been about two months, Carlson doesn’t have any plans to move back.
She told Veenstra: “There’s so much to do. I feel like there’s so much to do for every age. And I know a lot of people I talk to around here think there’s not a lot to do, but they literally have not lived somewhere where there’s not a lot to do.”
As whimsical as it may sound, Gutsche said hope just might be the biggest driver behind people’s desire to move somewhere specific.
“It’s the hope people have in themselves to make a space their place maybe more than it is the place itself,” he said.
Veenstra said he hopes to finish the documentary by the end of the year. He plans to post it online and expects FAU will host a screening. Then, he said he will explore the possibility of Florida film festivals.
If the sabbatical he applied for next semester is approved, then Veenstra said he’s thinking about creating other content about exploring places, with the Boca Raton and Perth documentary being the first in a series.
“If we get through this next project and it works well and it does what I want it to do, then maybe that’s my thing,” he said.
