Climate Change? Nahhh ...

The world Az envisions is simply a different world. And it comes with considerable costs.

It's human nature to build flawed systems.

 

To be clear ... the "market rates" sermon is mine, and mine alone.

 

I don't know anything about the group of beach houses in N.C. which are under discussion, but I can talk a little bit about similar houses in Galveston. Back in the day, most beach houses that were built very close to the water were not terribly elaborate. Many of them started out as one step up from fishing shacks. Generally they were fairly inexpensive frame structures, often raised on pilings in an effort to protect them from the storm surge of the hurricane people knew was eventually going to hit the area. The nicer and more elaborate beach houses and vacation home sites on whatever higher and more protected ground were built on years back, a process that began decades in the past and generally meant that there were no more such somewhat protected areas remaining available.

The problem was that people still wanted beach homes, and that often the people who wanted them were affluent and wanted a much more elaborate vacation home, comparable to their homes in town. Home developers and builders wanted to build and sell such homes. Cities and counties lusted after the boost to their budgets that the property taxes on them would bring them. Homes began to be built in areas that historically had been considered to be at too high a risk of extensive storm damage. Home inspectors, often under pressure by the city who employed them to allow this new construction (or financially persuaded by the developer through bribes and kickbacks) allowed construction to go forward. I have driven past new construction of elaborate beach vacation homes worth a couple of hundred thousand dollars which were being built on land that was not much more than a sand spit, a foot or two above the high tide mark. I looked at them in a sort of bemused horror, because it was completely obvious that if the area was hit by a hurricane of any substance they'd be underwater, possibly washed away. It blew my mind that a builder would construct these, knowing this, and it was incomprehensible to me that anyone would be dumb enough to buy one of them.

I had a friend who owned a vacation home on the Bolivar peninsula, a ferry ride across the bay from Galveston Island. It was essentially a small frame house, built on pilings that raised the floor of the house about twelve feet above the ground. I went down to help him with clean up and repair after Hurricane Alicia hit the area in 1983. As we drove down the county road that paralleled the beach to get to his place, the barbed wire fences on each side of the road had seaweed and other debris caught in the fence up to the top strand of wire, indicating that the water had washed over the beach, the road, and the entire area to a level of at least four to five feet. When we got to his place, you could see the high water mark on the pilings seven or eight feet above the ground, indicating that the tide that washed across the area was that deep.

You want to build or buy an elaborate vacation home right on the water, one that costs a couple of hundred thousand dollars? Fine, it's your money... but YOU get to pay for the insurance, and you really don't have a leg to stand on when you go whining to the state if something happens to it. No one then had a clue about global warming and rising sea levels, but the risk was obvious to anyone except the willfully blind. You want to sue someone, look at the developer/builder who built it, the city council that approved it because they wanted that sweet tax money, but maybe you should start by looking at the dumbass in the mirror who bought it.

 

I can't access the original story, but I can speak to this from a position of authority.
My guess is the main houses it's talking about in the Outer Banks are built directly on the beach. They have several of them there. At least in my area, you can't build directly on the beach, and any construction after '96 must be built above ground. The elevation certificate for my house is about 10 feet above sea level, and the first floor of the house is another 12 feet off the ground.
The only insurance that isn't "market rate" is the required federal flood insurance. That runs me $790 a year (I think).
Your homeowners insurance - which would cover storm damage - is market rate. Trust me. It's "market rate."

 

I bet it is. A few years ago I was half-assedly looking into buying a beachfront house, because several bargains (seemingly to me) popped up. Then I did a little deeper dive and realized ... uh, no.

 

In many places (coastal Florida, for one), regular homeowners doesn't cover wind or hail. You need a separate windstorm policy, with its own deductible (up to 5%), which can mean tens of thousands of dollars before insurance pays a thing.

 

I just wrote a check for $4K for the deductible on my new $15K roof (hail).

 

I'm still waiting on insurance settlement on my 1-year-old $26K roof. I had to write a check for . . . $26K.

 

If you lived in Houston, you could have got this guy to represent you (and, yes, there's a delicious sj.platforms irony there) ...

https://www.dicklawfirm.com/

 

The guys I hired have super high ratings and got my next-door neighbor a settlement 8 months ago, which makes this even more maddening.

 

Yeah, I have two different deductibles. One for storm damage, and one for everything else.

 

If the flood insurance for beach homes doesn't cover damage ... what the hell does it cover?