By DAMIEN CAVE


HOLLYWOOD, Florida - For a century, Florida welcomed thousands of newcomers every week, year after year, becoming the nation’s fourth-most-populous state with about 16 million people in 2000.

Imagine the shock, then, to discover that traffic is now heading the other way. That’s right, the Sunshine State is shrinking.

Choked by a record level of foreclosures and unemployment, along with a helping of disillusionment, the state lost 58,000 people from April 2008 to April 2009, according to the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research. Except for the years around World Wars I and II, it was Florida’s first population loss since at least 1900.

“It’s dramatic,” said Stanley K. Smith, an economics professor at the University of Florida who compiled the report. “You have a state that was booming and has been a leader in population growth for the last 100 years that suddenly has seen a substantial shift.”

Growth gave Florida its famous carefree confidence. As a state tourism advertisement put it in 1986, “The rules are different here.”

But what if they are not? Or if those Florida rules - an approach that made growth paramount in the state’s self-image and revenue structure - no longer apply?

“It’s got to be a real psychological blow,” said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, D.C. “I don’t know if you can take a whole state to a psychiatrist, but the whole Florida economy was based on migration flows.”

Florida grew from 2.8 million people in 1950 to 6.9 million in 1970, and by about three million people each decade after that.

Now consider Broward County in 2009. The county, between Miami and Palm Beach, was one of the first areas to shrink, losing 21,117 people from April 2007 to April 2009, according to University of Florida data.

Hollywood, in particular, embodies what the Sunshine State was and might become. It was founded in the 1920s as “the dream city of Florida” by a transplant from Washington State named Joseph Young who built ranch-style homes. After growing from 22,978 people in 1955 to 139,357 by 2000, Hollywood has lost 1,562 people over the past year, according to the University of Florida count.

Sandra Woodward, 25, grew up here. A secretary with dreams of working in education, she said eight houses on her block were in foreclosure. She knows 20 families who have left Florida in the last two years.

“I used to go up north to visit my family, and they all wanted to come here, to be part of this,” she said. “Now I’m thinking about leaving, too. It’s scary.”

As housing prices and property tax revenues have fallen, municipalities have been forced to scramble. Facing a deficit of $109 million, Broward County’s commissioners have reduced hours at libraries and parks.

Jim Findlay, 66, head of the rare books section in the county’s main library, said he had noticed more competitiveness among his colleagues as they wait for expected layoffs.

“It weighs on me because there has always been this hope, this expansiveness, this welcome of the new, this welcome of the unusual and eccentric in Florida,” he said. “That seems to have come to a halt.”