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America’s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys

bloomberg.com

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Re: America’s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys

#81

Post by hunter2_ »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #75
smadge wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the government is interested in minimizing future economic losses from repeated flooding. It's not charity, it's rational planning.

It's not even that. It's votes and party donations. I'm in NJ. A few years back we had hurricane / super-storm Sandy. Not only did the GOP gov at the time ( Chris Christie) find the money to rebuild. The state actually ran adverts with the tag line "Stronger than the storm." It made no sense to me. The people living at the shore (as we call it in NJ) aren't in denial. They don't even see it.

While we're on the tangent of local vernacular:

at the beach

down the shore

Re: America’s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys

#82

Post by ilamont »

About 6 million Floridians will need to move inland by century’s end to avoid inundation, according to Hauer, the demographer, in a 2016 paper. By then, about 80% of the nearby Keys, the archipelago that includes the tourist mecca of Key West, will be underwater. About 3.5 million people would be flooded in South Florida’s Miami-Dade and Broward, the two counties with America’s biggest exposed populations.

The article then shows a chart predicting population displacement caused by a 1.8-meter sea level rise.

Is that the accepted consensus, that the sea level is rising ~6 feet?

Re: America’s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys

#83

Post by Gibbon1 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #45
acdha wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about who owns waterfront property, yacht clubs, etc. and ask whether those rich people are likely to be well-represented in the legislatures. Government agencies do what the law makers tell them and it’s really hard to roll back decades spent ignoring the problem for short-term profit, especially when there’s a large and effective propaganda machine which will attack anyone who suggests policies which realisti…

The woman profiled in this Bloomberg piece is 60, likely is not wealthy (her insurance settlement is a bit more than half of what remains on her mortgage, and she cannot afford to bring her house up to code due to the extent of the damages), and could possibly be homeless without a relo buyout. If it was me, I’d buy a new home in Florida (far above sea level!) with my settlement, and default on the shack she’s stuck…

> Should people know better? Perfect information is hard.

Ordinary people aren't the perfect agents we're propagandized them to be. People often are forced to gamble tomorrow to live through today. I've seen people make the gamble and lose badly and others manage to slip out from under it.

Re: America’s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys

#84

Post by jumelles »

olivermarks wrote: post #8

'By the end of the century, 13 million Americans will need to move just because of rising sea levels, at a cost of $1 million each, according to Florida State University demographer Mathew Haeur, who studies climate migration.' I couldn't find any concrete evidence to validate this, it seems more of a prediction? Mr Hauer is a sociologist so this seems a bold claim https://coss.fsu.edu/sociology/mhauer 'his research…

> Mr Hauer is a sociologist so this seems a bold claim

He also has a PhD in geography from the University of Georgia.

Re: America’s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys

#85

Post by MuffinFlavored »

shadowprofile77 wrote: post #76

Presumably I'll get downvoted for this but here it goes.. I know that news sites like to link anything they can to climate change in the global human-caused sense because it might create more clicks but how is this a "climate exodus" in that sense? It's more a case of people having built homes in a very flat, easily flooded place that has always been really, really shitty for living due to the dangers of extremely ba…

> It's more a case of people having built homes in a very flat, easily flooded place that has always been really, really shitty for living due to the dangers of extremely bad hurricane damage (something that has been the case since Europeans settled the region).

I don't know how to say this politically but this is something that took me back when the call-to-arms came about for the Bahamas recently given the latest hurricane.

Isn't it kind of a broken system? Every hurricane season, the Bahamas stands to get absolutely hammered. It's devastating, but... almost on a schedule?

Re: America’s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys

#86

Post by dexterdog »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #75
smadge wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the government is interested in minimizing future economic losses from repeated flooding. It's not charity, it's rational planning.

It's not even that. It's votes and party donations. I'm in NJ. A few years back we had hurricane / super-storm Sandy. Not only did the GOP gov at the time ( Chris Christie) find the money to rebuild. The state actually ran adverts with the tag line "Stronger than the storm." It made no sense to me. The people living at the shore (as we call it in NJ) aren't in denial. They don't even see it.

If you think people were just bailed out you're crazy. I have a neighbor whose multi million dollar beach house was completely destroyed. He got little to no help for his property. Sure, the infra was probably all govt money, but aside from some minimal insurance he was his own insurer.

Re: America’s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys

#87

Post by kls »

shadowprofile77 wrote: post #76

Presumably I'll get downvoted for this but here it goes.. I know that news sites like to link anything they can to climate change in the global human-caused sense because it might create more clicks but how is this a "climate exodus" in that sense? It's more a case of people having built homes in a very flat, easily flooded place that has always been really, really shitty for living due to the dangers of extremely ba…

I live in the Keys (Summerland Key), so I think I have some skin the the game here. These is not and climate change exodus happening there is a real economic issue in the keys with workforce affordability, the average rent in the keys sits very near the average rent for San Francisco. A decent home for rent will run you between $3500 to $4000 a month. Meanwhile the average non-skilled job pays about $10 an hour in the keys. This has been going on long before Irma hit us. Irma exacerbated the problem by destroying most of the ground level homes built before 1979 as well as Mobile homes and RV's. The exact homes that where the most affordable to the workforce. These people are leaving due to economics not because Irma was somehow a freak of climate change.

Article on work force housing issue and how Irma made it worse: https://therealdeal.com/miami/2019/07/21/many-residents-of-t...

I have lived in Florida for 44 years and have seen storms far nastier than Irma long before climate change was a thing. It's the nature of the beast here, and homes can and are being built to withstand these storms. They do a lot of damage, but they are not these cyclones of death that the media makes them out to be. At CAT 4 or 5 storm is a serious storm don't get me wrong. I took a lot of damage from Irma due to a roof hatch failing, but it was all water damage, structurally my house is fine. But it also sits 9 foot above sea level as far as ground and then 14 foot pier foundation above that. Storm surge here can be up to 15 ft. If you are not above that your house is going to flood in a serious storm. If you are above that, and your house is built to code, it is going to survive the storm. If you are ground level, anywhere on the islands other than by the cemetery in Key west, which IIRC is 15 to 20 ft above sea level, you are going to flood.

Take a look at the 1935 Labor day storm that hit us, look at the devastation, compare it to Irma and you will see that these storms come and go, The 1935 storm was the worst storm to have ever have made landfall.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1935_Labor_Day_hurricane

It was horrific, my grandparents and great grandparents went thru it, all of them said they would never live to see another one like it, and they where correct.

I wish people would focus more on ocean pollution and preservation, I have seen the decline in ocean stock first hand in my life. Killing the ocean is what is going to kill us, and it has to do directly with what we are pumping into the water.

Edit: Forgot to note outside of commercial shellfish, fishing and fishing guide occupations there is no industry down here other than the service industry.

Re: America’s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys

#88

Post by kls »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #85
shadowprofile77 wrote: post #76

Presumably I'll get downvoted for this but here it goes.. I know that news sites like to link anything they can to climate change in the global human-caused sense because it might create more clicks but how is this a "climate exodus" in that sense? It's more a case of people having built homes in a very flat, easily flooded place that has always been really, really shitty for living due to the dangers of extremely ba…

> It's more a case of people having built homes in a very flat, easily flooded place that has always been really, really shitty for living due to the dangers of extremely bad hurricane damage (something that has been the case since Europeans settled the region). I don't know how to say this politically but this is something that took me back when the call-to-arms came about for the Bahamas recently given the latest h…

See my post below, Bahamas is no different, most of those houses that where destroyed where built pre-codes. I have a lot of family in the Bahamas, there houses are all on stilts and cat 5 rated. All of their houses survived.

Hurricanes are nothing new, we have endured them all of our lives, they are not getting worse or more frequent.

My family has been in Florida and the Bahamas for 14 generations along the way it just became second nature to instruct the next generation on what to look for in a house that will survive the storm. My original family homestead is still standing and was built in the 1700's, it has seen many storms some worse that Irma and Dorean.

Re: America’s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys

#89

Post by kls »

acdha wrote: post #41
watertom wrote: post #26

Why is the government buying these people out? The homeowners weren't forced to purchase these properties, so it's not the government's responsibility to remediate the situation.

Think about who owns waterfront property, yacht clubs, etc. and ask whether those rich people are likely to be well-represented in the legislatures. Government agencies do what the law makers tell them and it’s really hard to roll back decades spent ignoring the problem for short-term profit, especially when there’s a large and effective propaganda machine which will attack anyone who suggests policies which realisti…

This would actually be closer to the realities in Miami, Ft. Lauderdale up to Palm Beach (Mara Lago), than the Keys. Most of the people in the Keys are not heavily politically active and have moved here to fall of the face of the earth or where born here. A decent amount of waterfront property is still family owned and used in family businesses such as shrimp, lobster or stone crab operations.

Funny enough, waterfront property in the keys is rather affordable when compared to other areas of Florida.

Re: America’s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys

#90

Post by toomuchtodo »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #83
toomuchtodo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The woman profiled in this Bloomberg piece is 60, likely is not wealthy (her insurance settlement is a bit more than half of what remains on her mortgage, and she cannot afford to bring her house up to code due to the extent of the damages), and could possibly be homeless without a relo buyout. If it was me, I’d buy a new home in Florida (far above sea level!) with my settlement, and default on the shack she’s stuck…

> Should people know better? Perfect information is hard. Ordinary people aren't the perfect agents we're propagandized them to be. People often are forced to gamble tomorrow to live through today. I've seen people make the gamble and lose badly and others manage to slip out from under it.

Of course. That’s why I said this is reasonable policy. Bailouts shouldn’t be a four letter word when done properly.
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