My sister lived for awhile in a nice complex right off of Hillsborough. Once you got on Hillsborough proper, however, you were in the ghetto.
Most South Florida towns are "spotty" as my mother would say. You have beautiful nabes near the intercoastal, but dangerous ghetto/sleazy nabes further on the mainland, particularly immediately adjacent to I-95 in the case of Palm Beach/Broward/Dade Counties.
That I-95 rule is very true. It’s actually a valley effect — really nice places on the beach and intracoastal, progressively depressed as you move to I-95 (and in Broward extending in many cases to the Turnpike), then things slowly get better again the farther west you go. We moved from one end to the other when we had kids — from South Beach all the way out to the SW Broward ’burbs. My wife would have nothing to do with anything in between, even though it would have been closer to work for me.