Climate Gentrification, Climate Apartheid

The Earth is warming.  Even the climate deniers recognize that, they just refuse to accept responsibility.  Sea levels are rising, storms are becoming more ferocious and perhaps will become more frequent.  Living on the seacoast has become more hazardous and it will only get worse.  One might expect that the prudent would retreat in an orderly fashion to higher ground, but what is actually happening is far from prudent.  Gilbert M. Gaul provides a view of what has been occurring along our eastern and gulf coasts over recent decades in his book The Geography of Risk: Epic Storms, Rising Seas, and the Cost of America's Coasts. 

Our coasts, except for the cities and towns long established at strategic locations, were relatively undeveloped until the era of postwar affluence when even the middle class could envisage a small summer home along the ocean for escape and recreation.  This surge of building would lead to organization into municipalities that bred politicians and real estate lobbyists.  The result was a need to maintain and protect whatever had been built, even if the homes were periodically flooded or destroyed.  As it became clear that the costs of residing on fragile coasts exceeded local and regional means, it would have to be the federal government that acquired the responsibility for supporting this infrastructure.

“Over the next few decades, a surge of second homes filled beach towns and communities along the ocean, gulf, and bays.  That wave of development has only accelerated since, backed by an array of federal and state programs that provide inexpensive financing and tax breaks; offer heavily subsidized flood insurance; underwrite roads, bridges, and utilities; and distribute billions more in disaster aid to help beach towns rebuild after hurricanes and floods—setting the stage for a seemingly endless loop of government payouts.  It isn’t an exaggeration to say that without the federal government, the coast as we know it simply wouldn’t exist.”

“The result, this book argues, is one of the most costly and damaging planning failures in American history, with at least $3 trillion worth of property now at risk of flooding and catastrophic storms, and the U.S. Department of Treasury serving as the insurer of last resort.”

The combination of climate change and continuing real estate development has dramatically increased the cost of maintaining this system.

“Hurricanes and coastal storms now account for sixteen of the twenty most expensive disasters in U.S. history, with well over half a trillion dollars in damage in the last two decades alone—far more than the damage caused by earthquakes, wildfires, and tornadoes combined.  Worryingly, the pace of destruction has accelerated, with seventeen of the most destructive hurricanes in history occurring since 2000.  In 2017, Harvey, Irma, and Maria resulted in over $300 billion in losses, the most in a single year.  As I write, Florence is bearing down on an area of North Carolina that has repeatedly been pummeled by storms, yet is rapidly adding houses and people.  No doubt the damage will cost taxpayers billions.  Meanwhile, federally subsidized flood claims at the coast have increased twentyfold in the last two decades and account for three-quarters of all flood losses nationwide, effectively leaving the government’s insurance program insolvent.  Now with rising seas, warmer oceans, and more property than ever before at risk, even more calamitous storms—and government payouts—are inevitable.”

Gaul devotes much of his book to the history of Long Beach Island which stretches along the New Jersey coast.  Barrier islands such as this are common along our shores.  They are essentially mounds of sand that have accumulated over time.  The sands naturally shift and move under the action of currents and waves, with major storms capable of causing significant erosion.  Early builders of houses seemed to recognize that their investments were risky.  They built modest structures that could quickly be replaced if destroyed.  Once one allows houses to be built in a significant number the pressure builds to protect that net investment.  Local politicians and real estate interests would clamor for ever more assistance in rebuilding or in replacing continually eroding beaches with dredged-up sand.  One ends up with a never-ending rebuilding and maintenance cycle.

What is curious about this process is that it has led to ever greater property values—at least thus far.  The more middle-class initial homeowners have been replaced by a wealthier class better able to deal with the frequent damage and the paperwork involved in filing federal claims.  The process is akin to the gentrification that is often identified with urban areas.

“By the mid-1980s, the rapidly rising cost of land at the coast motivated homeowners to build bigger houses to maximize their investments.  Real estate records highlight the trend: in the 1960s, the average size of a Long Beach Island bungalow was about 600 square feet.  The following decade it grew to 1,000 square feet.  In the 1980s, it crept up to about 1,500 square feet and then 2,000 square feet.  After Hurricane Sandy wrecked the island, the average size of a new house swelled to over 3,000 square feet, which is about 500 square feet larger than the typical American house in the suburbs.”

The value of the island’s property would rise from about $100 million in the 1960s, to over $15 billion today.  The island’s communities would undergo fundamental changes as the homeowners they fought to protect became infrequent visitors.

“Tellingly, as prices, taxes, and other costs soared, Long Beach Island began emptying out.  In 1980, when Jim Mancini was battling the state over the right to build along the oceanfront, he told regulators the local population would double by the year 2000, to 28,000, as baby boomers reached retirement age and moved to the shore year-round.  In fact, the year-round population of Long Beach Island (and many other shore communities) has plummeted to about 7,000 as families sell or are priced out and wealthy investors gobble up more of the real estate.”

“In winter, Long Beach Island takes on an abandoned, ghostly feeling, with row after row of blackened houses.  There are fewer year-round workers, fewer families, and far fewer schoolchildren.  The island once sponsored four Little League teams.  Now it doesn’t have enough kids for one.  A few years ago, Long Beach Township tore up its field and replaced it with pickleball courts favored by the elderly.”

One of the reasons the costs of coastal storms have begun to skyrocket is that the residents have become wealthier and have built more expensive structures.  Government policies put in place to protect the vulnerable from devastating financial disaster are now being used to maintain the lifestyles and playgrounds of the wealthy.

The barrier islands represent one form of evolution along our coasts.  Because of the wealth concentrated there they receive political and financial consideration from the powers that be.  However, there is another class of places equally threatened by rising seas and climate change.  There the residents are much poorer and often of darker skin.  In a practice that has been referred to as climate apartheid, they are generally left to fend for themselves.

Gaul tells of a tour he took of small towns along the shores of Eastern Carolina with a coastal geologist named Stan Riggs. There, many of the towns had an elevation of less than a foot and were encircled by a complex array of waterways whose threat to the populations was increasing rapidly as the ocean water rose.

“The towns were tiny and poor.  The dwindling populations ranged from the hundreds to a few thousand.  Some had been formed by freed slaves who’d worked for decades on nearby farms.  Others were fishing villages now trying to reinvent themselves as ecotourism destinations.  They were filleted by black-water creeks and rivers.  Water abounded in bogs, swamps, agricultural dikes, rivers, lakes, and sounds.  Trees stripped of foliage and color haunted the landscape where saltwater had invaded fresh.  ‘Ghost forests,’ Riggs said.  A wharf that was once three feet above sea level was now two feet below…All were choking on tidal water rising up from the nearby estuaries and rivers.”

“Riggs was angry because no one was paying attention.  Most of the focus of the rising water was on the barrier islands, which was where all the property and money was.  ‘The issue isn’t the Outer Banks,’ Riggs stressed.  ‘They can take care of themselves until the water gets them.  The politics ignores all of these small, poor places on the Inner Banks’.”

Karen Plough, an associate of Riggs, put the town of Columbia in perspective for Gaul.

“…some residents of Columbia didn’t want to hear about sea-level rise.  ‘They enjoy living here for the simple life and values and don’t want to leave,’ Plough said.  ‘Fishermen will tell you that they see it.  But people fifty and younger don’t believe it.  I think part of it is that people are afraid of science.  They don’t understand it, or they don’t trust it’.”

“In North Carolina, it is practically a blood sport to attack scientists.  A few years earlier, Riggs had quit a state panel on sea-level rise when state lawmakers rewrote the panel’s report after being pressured by real estate and development interests.”

“Until then, North Carolina had enjoyed a reputation as a national leader in coastal management, even embracing rules limiting oceanfront development.  But after conservative Republicans took control of the state capital, the politics turned ugly, and they began rolling back rules.  In 2012, they criticized the committee’s findings on sea-level rise as unfriendly to business and rejected the science as unproven estimates…”

Columbia is luckier than many of its neighboring towns. The time still exists to save the town if there was the will to do so.

“Columbia has some time, Riggs said, but the residents need to act now.  ‘If the sea level rises two feet, Columbia will have to move—period.  If it rises three feet, it’s gone’.”

That conclusion illustrates what Gaul has been trying to demonstrate.  One can hold back the waters for a long time if there are only a few places to protect and one is willing to spend enormous amounts of money to do so.  But there are many places where the people will have no choice but to pick up and leave at some point.  The ideal situation is to try and recreate a town further inland at a higher elevation if possible.  Such an outcome would take years of planning and considerable resources.  The worst result would follow from ignoring the problem until the town essentially dissolved, dispersing refugees throughout the region.

Retreat will be necessary.   We might as well recognize that fact and plan to do it efficiently.