Once a fledgling senior retirement community in the early 1960s, a young millionaire named Ken Behring came from the Midwest and bought up all the land and then started to build. He originally made his fortune with a chain of car washes called Car-A-Mat. He called his new city Tamarac, Car-A-Mat spelled backwards.
The city's first development is east of State Road 7. The boundaries narrow to a sliver from Northwest 31 to 37 Avenues, then widen to the south to include Tamarac Lakes South, and to the north to take in Tamarac Lakes North and The Boulevards. The city's easternmost boundary, Tamarac Lakes Section One and Tamarac Lakes Section Two, extends below Commercial Boulevard to Northwest 16 Avenue. Altogether, the city encompasses about 900 homes east of State Road.
The median income for a household in the city was $34,290, and the median income for a family was $41,927. Males had a median income of $32,317 versus $28,360 for females. The per capita income for the city was $22,243. About 6.1% of families and 8.9% of the population were below the poverty line, including 13.5% of those under age 18 and 7.2% of those age 65 or over.
As of 2000, speakers of English language as a first language were at 78.08% of the population, while Spanish was at 13.69%. Also, Yiddish was at 1.90%, French at 1.15%, Haitian Creole consisted of 1.12%, Italian made up 1.08%, German comprised 0.62%, and Hebrew as a mother tongue made up 0.52% of residents.
Over the years, the multicultural population has expanded in Tamarac. There is a notable Colombian population in Tamarac, with Caribbean and Latin-American populations also making up a sizeable portion of the city.
As of 2000, Tamarac was the fifty-first most Colombian-populated area in the US, with 2.74% of the population. It also had the thirty-second highest percentage of Jamaicans in the US, (tied with Royal Palm Beach and Goulds) at 4.1% of all residents.
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