Great article on the disconnectedness and short-term-ism:
> She said the main thing is just that Miami was being very forward thinking. She mentioned Amsterdam, and how they were making it work, and how the Dutch were just the poster child for how this worked, and that they were sorting out a way to make this work. “I think the takeaway is just that Miami is doing something about it.”
Guess this will take a few floodings, billions dollars write-offs, and giant cultural shift to sink in. We Dutch people have "dry feet tax". Some of the organisations that collects those taxes have been founded in the 13th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board_(Netherlands)
As far as I know Florida is basically all limestone, which is porous, so dams don’t work. The water will seep through the bedrock so you can’t do the same thing in the Netherlands in Miami.
The repeated self-comparisons with the Dutch, were, as the Dutch themselves apparently used to say, droll. I did a bike trip along the northern coast of the Netherlands recently. If you want to appreciate the level of concerted, society-wide effort needed to address flooding and storm surge, look no further than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oosterscheldekering. (Which is itself part of the even larger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works.)
I had no idea whatsoever that this thing existed or what it was for until it simply hove into view one day while biking from town to town. It is a truly spectacular sight and worthy of the title of "8th Engineering Wonder of the World".
Compare the $billions and $billions and centuries, literally centuries, that the Dutch have invested in tackling this problem with, as the TFA puts it, some pumps the size of a large airedale. It drives home the point of how utterly fucked Miami, and the rest of the coastal world that is not the Netherlands, really is.
I would question how many of the buildings and infrastructure in South Florida will still be usable/habitable 50 years from now, even without a sea level rise.
In California both the San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles have a significant amount of near term risk in terms of water and seismic risk. The absolute worst case scenarios probably make Miami in 2069 look mild.
During the cold war, the assumption was that any major US or European city could become un-inhabitable in moments and most of the humans would be dead. That provided a pretty strong incentive not to build in a dense urban areas, but it was balanced out with the sense of total annihilation for everyone. Some still chose to put their money in to fallout shelters than "prime" Manhattan real estate.
I don't know much about cities and populations outside of the US. I suspect a lot of them are at risk. In Iraq, if the Mosul dam failed, most of the major cities would be wiped out. This is probably true in many other places with questionable hydrology infrastructure.
It would be interesting to build risk models of geographical areas that are at risk of instant destruction (dam failure, earthquakes, nuclear power plant failures, nuclear weapons) and longer term risks. What parts of the world will humans live in 500 years?
Also I'd like to hear from people who are living in the Millennium Tower in San Francisco.
The Dam the Delta project was very impressive, and having seen it up close doubly so.
Am I right in thinking that some areas have now been designated as "we'll flood those to protect other areas, because the cost of compensation is less than the cost of adding ever more complex defences"? I recall hearing that somewhere.
I live in Orlando. I have lived in Florida for all of my life (47 years) and I also wonder how we are going to adapt. I don't see any long term planning.
A few years ago I was looking for a new office building. Considering the parking situations, I asked each developer what they were planning for electric cars, Ubers, and autonomous cars. None of them had a plan. They all said such changes were 20 years or more away. I was surprised at this because I predict it taking much less than 20 years for these changes to have a big impact.
I moved into a newly built high-rise apartment building in downtown Orlando 15 months ago. The building is less than two years old. There are not enough charging outlets in the garage to accommodate all of the electric cars. It will be an expensive refit to upgrade the garage.
I don't know how it works elsewhere, but the entire real estate industry in Florida is not capable of long term thinking.
This article is patent nonsense. Nobody knows what the fuck is going to happen to Miami in 50 years including the author, and an anecdotal poll of front line real estate agents is mindless.
Even in that context the real estate agent’s worldview seems a lot more sanguine than hers. History has shown in this country that you’re a lot more likely to be right predicting that the rich will figure out how to preserve their assets than betting on the other side of that argument.
A shame because it’s an interesting topic.
What will a city like Miami look like in 50 years? It’s an interesting question with a lot of unpredictability in it, based on combinations of climate science, financial predictions, cultural shifts, and some guesswork.
Would have loved to read an article about the various perspectives on that, but that would have required the author to really do some work. Instead they decided they knew the answer already and flew there to make fun of people just trying to get through a day at work.
Nobody knows what the fuck is going to happen to Miami in 50 years including the author
True enough if you want detailed predictions, but the generalizations that are pretty much assured are bad enough. Will there be 3 feet of rise in that time? Unlikely. 1? Maybe, maybe not. How much rise does there actually need to be for raw sewage in the streets to be an issue any time there's a heavy rain?
The other thing is storm surge in hurricanes. Nobody can tell you now exactly how high future storm surges will be, but a foot of rise still means that the same amount of storm surge will be a foot higher than in the past - 2 feet higher than a century ago. With increasing storm intensity due to higher energy levels those surges and rainfall totals are only going to get higher.
Rich people have multiple passports, Swiss bank accounts and real estate in New Zeeland for when shit goes down. They have options. Namely get the hell out of Dodge. I don't think they are really all that attached to Miami.
You say that, but Detroit is a pretty good counterexample. Tons of money / land just left to rust because it wasn't worth the effort. And that was just due to industrial changes not even something approaching a natural process.
If the ports not worth that much, the beaches (and tourism) has washed away, they've got a new sewage problem due to rising waters, and they can't get fresh water as easily, then what reason is there to rebuild? You need trade, fresh water, and waste removal to keep a city running, and for Miami, they're going to have problems with all three areas.
It gives one schadenfreude to think that such people live in Miami. If only we could move all climate change deniers to low lying areas, and get others out.
You really think it’s nonsense? I mean, it’s pretty clear what’s going to happen. The city will be under water, and relatively speaking, fairly soon. It’s basic physics at the end of the day.
Beyond that, this article really cuts to the heart of the astounding carelessness and wastefulness of humanity. IMHO, we deserve what we’re about to get.
I agree. The opening of the article intrigued me, so I read it. All I could think was: what fun to read about a lady who has never met a real estate agent !
As often seems to be the case in many parts of the US, the city of Miami is unlikely to muster the political will to do anything about this existential threat until after the city's businesses and residents have suffered serious, irreversible consequences. Think permanent loss. Few things can create as much political will as an irreversible crisis.
By then, of course, it will likely be too late for prevention, so the solution will have to be technological. Engineers of all kinds will have to come to the rescue of Miami and many other low-lying/coastal cities in the US.
Honest question: has anyone, engineer or otherwise, yet come to the rescue of New Orleans in the fourteen years since Katrina? The flooding there, and our response to it, is so far our best benchmark of what we can expect as sea levels keep rising.
from a long distance away, and a few news articles, it appears that the politicians in Venice actually do generate quite a bit of money, and plans, and proceed to hoard it and play favorites and invite others to try to get it from them (wink wink) .. meanwhile, storm days in Venice can get rather exciting, in a negative way.. so that leads to more money, again.
I wish she had talked to some loan officers at local banks. I bet she'd get a different picture to contrast with that of the realtors. Of course realtors are going to pretend like they don't care even if they do (although they probably don't). Once the sale goes through, they don't care if the house is swept away the next day. Banks on the other hand are in this for the next thirty years. From what I understand, some are hesitant or even refuse to offer thirty year mortgages in Miami. That's a story if it is indeed true.
Yep, this is just such a poor article. Would it be shocking if I talked to a car sales person, pretended I wanted an inefficient (but high-margin) large pickup truck and the sales person downplayed all the negatives of the vehicle?
Such a shame that the author was so focused on mocking other people and preaching to the choir, since this is an extremely interesting topic that deserves a much better article.
They do credit ratings of packages of securitized mortgages. Right now, they don't look at "will parcel be flooded before the mortgage runs out". If they did, mortgages on submerged property would be much more expensive.
Startup opportunity here. Come up with a system which reads through a package of mortgages and quantifies the climate change risk. Sell this to the major traders in securitized mortgages - AIG (yes, them again), Credit Suisse, etc.
This already happens, and the mortgage is subsidized by the federal government via the National Flood Insurance Program. You wouldn’t be able to get a mortgage without flood insurance, and since private insurance companies won’t offer it at a sufficiently low price, the federal government subsidizes the insurance, therefore allowing the mortgage to be made.
What happens 50 years from now should matter relatively little for people living there now. Property owners and banks start discounting the resale value of the land and large property investments, but it's gradual process.
After discounting property values, Miami will be cheaper place to live in the future and that means that it may attract even more people.
> What happens 50 years from now should matter relatively little for people living there now. Property owners and banks start discounting the resale value of the land and large property investments, but it's gradual process.
You’re missing a lot of the details explained in the article: this isn’t something like a predictable 2% tax but something which fails significantly at unknown intervals when a bad storm hits, or when infrastructure is overwhelmed and goes from functional to unusable all at once. That leads to highly correlated failures on a large scale: everyone in your zip code can’t get insurance, the entire city needs key infrastructure replaced at the same time, etc. and those also affect the desirability of the area and its ability to attract businesses, tourism, etc. That’s a recipe for volatility and in many cases the potential savings on property values are going to be significantly canceled by higher taxes to pay for all of that infrastructure and increased maintenance costs.
Except that it will cost a lot more to build, insure and maintain.
That being said, I wouldn’t be surprised if people with too much money start buying just to have bragging rights on a magnificent view of the sea level rise.
Also surprised by how relatively inexpensive real estate was.
It's not just the price, it's whether you can get financing for it. As noted elsewhere, there are areas where a 30 year mortgage is simply not an option.
I don't doubt the sea level is rising and that Miami will be inundated. But I think there's too much money and development put into that city so people won't just give up and leave in 30 years. Instead I think there will be increased investment in technology and infrastructure to keep the waters at bay. It might become something more akin to Venice or Amsterdam.
Tl;dr: The author went to Miami and spoke to real estate agents, whose job it is to sell property, whether they thought climate change is going to make real estate a bad purchase. Surprisingly, the real estate agents, whose livelihood depends on selling homes, minimized the dangers of global warming.
Is it possible that people just keep filling the sea to keep the land? Sure rebuilding will be needed, but tearing apart 50 year old buildings shouldn't be too controversial. It looks like they already raising the roads and installing pumping stations. If this happens than it would take much more than 6 feet of sea level rise to fear from climate change.
This article would be so much better if the author did not keep pausing to editorialize and interpret the opinions and perspective of her subjects. Trust the reader to draw their own conclusions. This style of writing insults our intelligence. All the worse because the approach and topic are quite good.
Does the author know the difference between east and west? Seems a pretty important fact that she mangled in an attempt to disparage the real estate agent, but she’s the one who gets it wrong.
[+] [-] synctext|7 years ago|reply
> She said the main thing is just that Miami was being very forward thinking. She mentioned Amsterdam, and how they were making it work, and how the Dutch were just the poster child for how this worked, and that they were sorting out a way to make this work. “I think the takeaway is just that Miami is doing something about it.”
Guess this will take a few floodings, billions dollars write-offs, and giant cultural shift to sink in. We Dutch people have "dry feet tax". Some of the organisations that collects those taxes have been founded in the 13th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board_(Netherlands)
[+] [-] barry-cotter|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperbovine|7 years ago|reply
I had no idea whatsoever that this thing existed or what it was for until it simply hove into view one day while biking from town to town. It is a truly spectacular sight and worthy of the title of "8th Engineering Wonder of the World".
Compare the $billions and $billions and centuries, literally centuries, that the Dutch have invested in tackling this problem with, as the TFA puts it, some pumps the size of a large airedale. It drives home the point of how utterly fucked Miami, and the rest of the coastal world that is not the Netherlands, really is.
[+] [-] AJ007|7 years ago|reply
In California both the San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles have a significant amount of near term risk in terms of water and seismic risk. The absolute worst case scenarios probably make Miami in 2069 look mild.
During the cold war, the assumption was that any major US or European city could become un-inhabitable in moments and most of the humans would be dead. That provided a pretty strong incentive not to build in a dense urban areas, but it was balanced out with the sense of total annihilation for everyone. Some still chose to put their money in to fallout shelters than "prime" Manhattan real estate.
I don't know much about cities and populations outside of the US. I suspect a lot of them are at risk. In Iraq, if the Mosul dam failed, most of the major cities would be wiped out. This is probably true in many other places with questionable hydrology infrastructure.
It would be interesting to build risk models of geographical areas that are at risk of instant destruction (dam failure, earthquakes, nuclear power plant failures, nuclear weapons) and longer term risks. What parts of the world will humans live in 500 years?
Also I'd like to hear from people who are living in the Millennium Tower in San Francisco.
[+] [-] taurath|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philjohn|7 years ago|reply
Am I right in thinking that some areas have now been designated as "we'll flood those to protect other areas, because the cost of compensation is less than the cost of adding ever more complex defences"? I recall hearing that somewhere.
[+] [-] mcculley|7 years ago|reply
A few years ago I was looking for a new office building. Considering the parking situations, I asked each developer what they were planning for electric cars, Ubers, and autonomous cars. None of them had a plan. They all said such changes were 20 years or more away. I was surprised at this because I predict it taking much less than 20 years for these changes to have a big impact.
I moved into a newly built high-rise apartment building in downtown Orlando 15 months ago. The building is less than two years old. There are not enough charging outlets in the garage to accommodate all of the electric cars. It will be an expensive refit to upgrade the garage.
I don't know how it works elsewhere, but the entire real estate industry in Florida is not capable of long term thinking.
[+] [-] CPLX|7 years ago|reply
Even in that context the real estate agent’s worldview seems a lot more sanguine than hers. History has shown in this country that you’re a lot more likely to be right predicting that the rich will figure out how to preserve their assets than betting on the other side of that argument.
A shame because it’s an interesting topic.
What will a city like Miami look like in 50 years? It’s an interesting question with a lot of unpredictability in it, based on combinations of climate science, financial predictions, cultural shifts, and some guesswork.
Would have loved to read an article about the various perspectives on that, but that would have required the author to really do some work. Instead they decided they knew the answer already and flew there to make fun of people just trying to get through a day at work.
[+] [-] fencepost|7 years ago|reply
True enough if you want detailed predictions, but the generalizations that are pretty much assured are bad enough. Will there be 3 feet of rise in that time? Unlikely. 1? Maybe, maybe not. How much rise does there actually need to be for raw sewage in the streets to be an issue any time there's a heavy rain?
The other thing is storm surge in hurricanes. Nobody can tell you now exactly how high future storm surges will be, but a foot of rise still means that the same amount of storm surge will be a foot higher than in the past - 2 feet higher than a century ago. With increasing storm intensity due to higher energy levels those surges and rainfall totals are only going to get higher.
[+] [-] Tsubasachan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nikdaheratik|7 years ago|reply
If the ports not worth that much, the beaches (and tourism) has washed away, they've got a new sewage problem due to rising waters, and they can't get fresh water as easily, then what reason is there to rebuild? You need trade, fresh water, and waste removal to keep a city running, and for Miami, they're going to have problems with all three areas.
[+] [-] YjSe2GMQ|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevenwoo|7 years ago|reply
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/miami-ho...
[+] [-] king_magic|7 years ago|reply
Beyond that, this article really cuts to the heart of the astounding carelessness and wastefulness of humanity. IMHO, we deserve what we’re about to get.
[+] [-] malchow|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cs702|7 years ago|reply
By then, of course, it will likely be too late for prevention, so the solution will have to be technological. Engineers of all kinds will have to come to the rescue of Miami and many other low-lying/coastal cities in the US.
[+] [-] kibwen|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistrial9|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mnm1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zrobotics|7 years ago|reply
Such a shame that the author was so focused on mocking other people and preaching to the choir, since this is an extremely interesting topic that deserves a much better article.
[+] [-] danmaz74|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|7 years ago|reply
They do credit ratings of packages of securitized mortgages. Right now, they don't look at "will parcel be flooded before the mortgage runs out". If they did, mortgages on submerged property would be much more expensive.
Startup opportunity here. Come up with a system which reads through a package of mortgages and quantifies the climate change risk. Sell this to the major traders in securitized mortgages - AIG (yes, them again), Credit Suisse, etc.
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nabla9|7 years ago|reply
After discounting property values, Miami will be cheaper place to live in the future and that means that it may attract even more people.
[+] [-] acdha|7 years ago|reply
You’re missing a lot of the details explained in the article: this isn’t something like a predictable 2% tax but something which fails significantly at unknown intervals when a bad storm hits, or when infrastructure is overwhelmed and goes from functional to unusable all at once. That leads to highly correlated failures on a large scale: everyone in your zip code can’t get insurance, the entire city needs key infrastructure replaced at the same time, etc. and those also affect the desirability of the area and its ability to attract businesses, tourism, etc. That’s a recipe for volatility and in many cases the potential savings on property values are going to be significantly canceled by higher taxes to pay for all of that infrastructure and increased maintenance costs.
[+] [-] stevekemp2|7 years ago|reply
Sadly the idea that price alone affects desirability is a little niave.
[+] [-] Amygaz|7 years ago|reply
That being said, I wouldn’t be surprised if people with too much money start buying just to have bragging rights on a magnificent view of the sea level rise.
[+] [-] doe88|7 years ago|reply
https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-new-yorker-radio-hour/...
[+] [-] temdbej|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itomato|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fencepost|7 years ago|reply
It's not just the price, it's whether you can get financing for it. As noted elsewhere, there are areas where a 30 year mortgage is simply not an option.
[+] [-] vonmoltke|7 years ago|reply
Compared to what? South Florida real estate is pretty expensive, compared to the rest of the US.
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