In Fort Lauderdale (and Miami's postwar suburbs east of I-95), it's common in low-lying neighborhoods on/near canals that were built prior to the 1990s to find a variant of split-level homes. Usually, with a single-car garage at ground level, the "main" level of the house a half level up, and the master bedroom above the garage. Or in areas with wider lots, a two-car garage with kitchen/living room/dining room/some-bedrooms a half level up, and either the master bedroom or two bedrooms + bathroom above the garage.
The general idea is that even back then, everyone knew the main floor of the house had to be at least 4-5 feet higher than the minimum halfway-sane height for a garage, but a lot of people didn't want to have to ALWAYS walk up an entire flight of stairs to get into the house, so the split-level variant was a compromise. It also gave the builder a convenient "middle load-bearing concrete wall" so the smaller second living floor sitting above the garage could be entirely concrete-walled as well (with its walls resting on the walls around the garage).
The main thing that killed split-levels HERE was the combination of soaring land values in the old neighborhoods, narrow lots in NEW ones, an expectation that any new house is going to have at LEAST a two-car (often 3-4 car) garage, and the fact that someone who can afford to spend a million+ dollars buying a teardown postwar home on a canal-front lot expects to ends up with a MINIMUM of 5-6 bedrooms and 3,000+ square feet. By the time the architect is finished designing the garage, there's no room LEFT for anything alongside the garage besides a stairway, and the only way to fit 3,000+ square feet and 5-6 bedrooms without blowing past zoning codes is to build two full stories over the garage.
The latest trend I've seen in Fort Lauderdale teardown-infill new construction: "inverted" second stories... ground-level has a lot-width bank of garages along the front, foyer and stairway to the side, and swimming pool in the back. The second floor (first living floor) has the same footprint as the garage, but the THIRD floor (second living floor) partially overhangs the pool (so sunlight still has a 45-degree angle to fully illuminate the pool for most of the year, but the builder can shoehorn another thousand or so square feet of living space into the lot without crowding out the pool. It looks fine from the street, but absolutely HIDEOUS from the canal (or from the back yard of your neighbors across the canal). As an added bonus to the homeowner, though, it also gives them more reinforced concrete to shore up the pool cage against(*)
(*)Pool cages are almost universal here, though not really for the reason people think... mosquitoes are a problem, but snakes -- specifically water moccasins -- are the REAL problem. For a few years, it was vogue and trendy to build "open" pools, until people started having face to face encounters with aggressive venomous water snakes & quickly rediscovered WHY pool cages became so popular in Florida in the first place.