HOW CLIMATE CHANGE IS GENTRIFYING BEACHFRONT DISTRICTS
Around the US, the government’s response to extreme weather is pushing lower-income people away from the shores they called home
When Hurricane Irma reached Florida’s Big Pine Key in September, it caused the floor of Terry and Sharon Baron’s cream-coloured mobile home to collapse.
On Marathon Key, 32 kilometres north, the winds lifted Diane Gaffield’s mobile home off its concrete pad and smashed it against her neighbour’s house. A few blocks over, Kimberly Ruth’s mobile home simply vanished into the storm.
Irma was only the start of their troubles. The Florida Keys building code effectively prohibits replacing or substantially repairing damaged mobile homes because of their vulnerability to hurricanes.
That leaves people living in one of the nearly 1,000 trailers and recreational vehicles damaged or destroyed by the storm with three options: find sturdier but more expensive accommodation, repair or replace the homes and hope code officials don’t notice, or leave the Keys. “There’s no place to live,” says Mrs Baron.
Around the country, the government’s response to extreme weather is pushing lower-income people like the Barons away from the coast, often in the name of safety. Housing experts, economists and activists have coined the term “climate gentrification”.
Ever-stricter building requirements make homes more expensive to build. Rising premiums for federal flood insurance make them costlier to live in. And when local governments issue bonds to pay for sea walls and other protections, as Miami did last year, taxes are often raised, further increasing costs. Hurricanes and floods disproportionately damage lower-cost homes, which tend to be older and more vulnerable to water and wind.
Those homes, in turn, are often replaced with bigger, more costly houses.
And when public housing is destroyed by storms, it may not be replaced at all, further shrinking the available options for people who can’t afford rising market rates.
On a recent sun-bleached afternoon, Mrs Baron, 73, stood on a patch of gravel outside the temporary trailer that she and her husband got from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and considered their options. After 44 years in the Keys, they don’t want to leave. But together they earn just $32,000 (Dh117,540) a year, mostly from Social Security, so can’t afford the $2,000 a month they say it costs to rent anything nearby.
Each month, a Fema employee stops by, gently nudging the couple to find a new home by June 1, when the next hurricane season starts.
“I’m just like a ship with no rudder,” says Mr Baron.
Residents, researchers and housing advocates say global warming is beginning to shift not just the physical characteristics of coastal cities, but their economic and demographic makeup as well. And local officials are starting to worry about it.
“Hospitality is the backbone of the economy here,” says Christine Hurley, the county official responsible for buildings, planning and code compliance in the Florida Keys.
She says the tourism industry can’t function without workers who can afford to live there. “The hotels and the restaurants, are they going to have to start busing people an hour and a half from Miami?”
In Stafford Township, New Jersey, Hurricane Sandy in 2012 destroyed 3,000 homes. But its lasting effect was more subtle: the superstorm also reshaped the town’s population. Developers have filled lots left empty by the deluge with larger houses, which command higher prices – and therefore wealthier residents.
“The demographics have changed somewhat dramatically,” says Stafford Township Mayor John Spodofora.
“I’m seeing $750,000 homes going up where there was a $200,000 or $300,000 home in the past.” That’s good news for the tax base. Mr Spodofora estimates that Stafford Township has rebuilt just 70 per cent of the homes it lost, yet because of their higher value the town’s property tax revenue has almost returned to what it was before Sandy.
But it’s also pushed less wealthy people away from the shore.
“They’re moving further inland,” Mr Spodofora says. The effect of Sandy, he says, “kind of weeds out people who can’t afford to live on those waterfront properties”.
The increase in extreme weather has meant less housing for the poorest Americans in other parts of the US as well. In Texas, hurricanes over the past decade have been particularly hard on public housing – units that are often older and built in places that are especially vulnerable to flooding, where land tended to be cheap.
Among the toll inflicted by 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, which caused widespread flooding in the Houston area, was the damage or destruction of almost 1,500 public housing units, according to data from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Local housing authorities, which administer those units with funding from the department, face no federal requirement to repair or replace them – and prior experience suggests many of them won’t be.
Texas has yet to replace all of the 1,260 public housing units destroyed by Hurricanes Dolly and Ike in 2008, according to Maddie Sloan, director of the disaster recovery and fair housing project for Texas Appleseed, an advocacy group in Austin. She said Galveston, a city on a barrier island that lost 569 units to those storms, has replaced only about half of them.
As with the Keys, Texas’s coastal areas suffer when public and affordable housing disappears, pushing people further inland, Ms Sloan says.
“They have tourist-driven economies, and their low-income workforce has been displaced,” she says. “This has a real economic impact on these cities.”
Brianna Fernandez, a data analyst at the American Action Forum think tank who studies the demographic effects of hurricanes, says that coastal areas often become wealthier after a severe storm.
Parishes in Louisiana and counties in Mississippi hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 showed an increase in median household income years later, long after the short-term boost of rebuilding would have faded, she says. The same was true in New Jersey counties hit by Sandy.
But the trend isn’t true everywhere. Ms Fernandez found that in Galveston and Orange Counties, the parts of Texas hit hardest by Ike, median income six years later had fallen by $6,000.
The explanation is straightforward, she says: in counties that are poor to begin with, hurricanes can push away wealthy residents and leave mostly the poor behind.
Matthew Kahn, an economics professor at the University of Southern California who focuses on climate change, explains those different outcomes through what he calls an “amenity gradient”. Plainly put: in coastal areas that people find attractive, extreme weather will entice wealthy people to invest in homes, even as costs and insurance premiums increase. In coastal areas without that physical appeal, or whose appeal isn’t widely appreciated, the opposite will happen.
“In an area that has no amenities, and that’s now at greater risk of climate change, I don’t see climate gentrification occurring,” Mr Kahn says. But in places that people want to live, like South Florida, the wealthy are willing to pay for that privilege – even as others get priced out.
New research suggests the effects of climate gentrification are spreading further inland. In a just-published paper, Harvard University researchers found evidence that concern over flooding is boosting demand for higher ground, expanding the already exclusive band of real estate along coasts to include some formerly less-desirable inland areas.
Lead author Jesse Keenan, a lecturer in architecture, found that since 2000 or so, the value of single-family homes in Miami-Dade County had increased faster for higher-elevation properties, even after controlling for size, age and when they changed hands.
That’s increased demand in areas like Overtown, a historically black neighbourhood, and Little Haiti, for years a magnet for immigrants from the Caribbean.
Carlos Fausto Miranda, a commercial real estate broker in Miami, says the increased interest in those areas reflects more than just a hot market – it also shows some degree of concern over sea-level rise, as well as the normal pattern of a growing and wealthy city.
“Our awareness has increased dramatically about this concern,” Mr Miranda says.
Housing advocates say climate worries have exacerbated the existing pressure that increased development and rising property values put on low-income housing. In Overtown, a neighbourhood just a mile from the shore, that pressure is evident: blocks of decrepit houses are interspersed with brand-new five-and six-story developments, painted in fresh pastel colours. Gretchen Beesing, chief executive of Catalyst Miami, a community-development and advocacy group, says she’s not surprised to see data suggesting climate change is accelerating the gentrification of places like Overtown.
“We see climate as a really important issue that intersects with poverty and financial security,” Ms Beesing says.
“For some families, this may feel like an opportunity to get cash for their house. But the problem is then, where do they go?”
We see climate as a really important issue that intersects with poverty and financial security GRETCHEN BEESING Miami community activist