Florida’s Risky Bet

In the night hours after Hurricane Milton smashed into Siesta Key, a barrier island near Sarasota, Florida, high winds and a deluge of water pummeled the state’s coastal metropolises. In St. Petersburg, a construction crane toppled from its position on a luxury high-rise, meant to soon be the tallest building on the flood-vulnerable peninsula. The crane crashed down into the building across the street that houses the newspaper offices of the Tampa Bay Times. High winds ripped the roof off a Tampa stadium set to house emergency workers. Three million homes and businesses are now without power.

As this morning dawned, Hurricane Milton was exiting Florida on its east coast, still maintaining hurricane-force winds. The storm came nerve-rackingly close to making what experts had feared would be a worst-case entrance into the state. The storm hit some 60 miles south of Tampa, striking a heavily populated area but narrowly avoiding the precarious geography of Tampa’s shallow bay. Still, the destruction, once tallied, is likely to be major. Flash flooding inundated cities and left people trapped under rubble and cars in the hurricane’s path. Multiple people were killed yesterday at a retirement community in Fort Pierce, on Florida’s Atlantic coast, when one of the many tornadoes whipped up by Milton touched down there.

The barrier islands, if they’ve done their job, may have protected Sarasota from the worst of the storm surge, but those vulnerable strips of sand have their own small civilizations built on them, too. This stretch of southwestern Florida happens to be one of the fastest-growing parts of the state, where people are flocking to new developments, many of them on the waterfront. Milton is the third hurricane to make landfall in Florida this year, in an area that has barely had time to assess the damage from Hurricane Helene two weeks ago. Because it skirted a direct strike of Tampa Bay, the storm may soon be viewed as a near miss, which research has found can amplify risky decision making going forward. But this morning, it is a chilling reminder of the rising hazards of living in hurricane-prone places as climate change makes the most ferocious storms more ferocious.

The threat of catastrophic inundation has for years loomed over that particular cluster of cities—Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater—and on some level, everyone knew it. About a decade ago, Karen Clark & Company, a Boston-based firm that provides analysis to the insurance industry, calculated that Tampa–St. Petersburg was the U.S. metropolitan area most vulnerable to flooding damage due to storm surge. Even Miami, despite all the talk of its imminent climate-fueled demise, is in a better situation than Tampa, where the ocean is relatively shallow and the bay “can act almost like a funnel,” leading to higher peak storm surge, according to Daniel Ward, an atmospheric scientist and the senior director of model development for Karen Clark. The regional planning council has simulated the impacts of a Category 5 storm, including fake weather reports that sound eerily similar to those of Milton; estimates of the losses, should a storm hit directly enough, were on the order of $300 billion.

The region’s building spree has only upped the ante, adding to the tally of potential damages. Siesta Key, the barrier island where Milton hit first, had been locked in a battle over proposed high-density hotel projects for years; Sarasota is adding people at one of the fastest rates in the county. Farther south, Fort Myers is expanding even faster (and in recent years has been battered by storms, including this one). Tampa in particular has been a darling of Florida development. Billions of dollars in investment remade its waterfront districts with glassy condo towers, and the traditional retirement city was reborn as a beacon for young people. The population of the Tampa metro area, which includes St. Petersburg and Clearwater, swelled to more than 3.2 million; median home values nearly doubled from 2018 to June of this year, according to Redfin data cited by The Wall Street Journal.

Like everyone in Florida, people who live on the southwestern coast understand that hurricanes are a risk, perhaps even one that climate change is accentuating. (More than Americans on average, Floridians believe that climate change is happening.) But “every coastal area has a mythology about how they’re going to escape climate change,” Edward Richards, a professor emeritus at Louisiana State University Law School, told me. “We have a culture of downplaying risk.” The last time Tampa Bay was directly affected by a major hurricane was in 1921, when a Category 3 storm hit the metro area, then home to about 120,000 people. It sent an 11-foot storm surge crashing into houses, wiped out citrus fields, and killed eight people. The possibility of another hit was always a real danger, even before the effects of global warming started setting in. “Climate change absolutely makes the storms worse,” Richards said. “But we focus so much on how they will get worse, we haven’t paid attention to how bad they’ve already been.”

Most days, Tampa has plenty of benefits to beckon people, and a century-old storm is likely not on their minds. “The amenities of jobs and economic opportunities and, quite honestly, just the amenity of being close to the beach oftentimes outweigh the disamenity of climate exposure,” Jeremy Porter, the head of climate-implications research at the analytics nonprofit First Street, told me. Getting a mortgage in a FEMA-designated flood zone requires flood insurance, which is mostly supplied by the National Flood Insurance Program, but plenty of people drop it after a year or two, either because they don’t feel they need it or because they can’t pay the bill, Porter said. If your home is paid off, there’s also no requirement to carry flood insurance. Developers pass future risk on to the people who buy their condos; city managers generally welcome developments, which are good for the local economy, as long as they’re still standing. If they’re destroyed, the federal government helps pay to rebuild. “Any time you disassociate the profit from the risk, you get these catastrophic problems,” Richards said. Attempts to undo any of this—by making people face the actual risk of the places they live—can also be a trap: Raise flood-insurance rates to market price, and suddenly plenty of people can’t afford it. Continue subsidizing insurance, and you keep people in dangerous places.

Even before Milton’s blow, though, the region’s great real-estate boom was faltering. Homeowners in the floodplain zone were watching their insurance prices go up dramatically, after FEMA rolled out new adjustments to make its highly subsidized National Flood Insurance Program premiums better reflect the true cost of risk. Thanks to rising insurance costs and repetitive flood incidents in recent years, more homeowners are now looking to sell. But they’re finding that difficult: Supply of homes in Tampa is rising, but demand is falling, and roughly half of the homes for sale—the third-highest share of all U.S. major metropolitan areas—had to cut their asking price as of September 9, according to The Wall Street Journal. That was before Hurricane Helene sent six feet of storm surge into the city and Milton crashed through, damaging properties and likely undercutting chances of a good sale. Plus, Florida passed a flood-disclosure law this year, which took effect on October 1. That means homeowners who try to sell their home after this storm will have to tell prospective buyers about any insurance claims or FEMA assistance they received for flood damage, no matter when they sell.

In the short term, both Richards and Porter predict that people will simply rebuild in the same place. No levers currently exist to encourage any other outcome, Richards said. FEMA has a buyout program for homes in frequently damaged areas, but the process takes years. In the meantime, homeowners have little choice but to rebuild. And even knowing the risk of floods might not dissuade people from coming back, or moving in. A report on New Orleans, for instance, found that almost half of homebuyers surveyed did not consult risk-disclosure statements required after Hurricane Katrina: When people can afford to live only in a flood-prone part of a city, knowing the risk doesn’t change their options.

In the longer term, “from a geologic point of view, we know what’s going to happen,” Richards told me. Over the course of the next century, parts of Florida’s coast will be suffering from regular floods, if not permanently underwater. Hurricane flooding will reach farther inland. Living in certain places will simply no longer be possible. “Eventually we’ll hit a tipping point where people will begin to avoid the area,” Porter said. But he doesn’t think Milton will be it.