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Heaven or High Water – Selling Miami's Last 50 Years
- stuart78 8y agoThis 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.
- nugget 8y agoI read the article as half editorial and half Tom Wolfe -esque fictional narrative - and while I know that may not have been the author’s intention, I quite enjoyed it as such.
- taurath 8y agoI appreciated the imagery myself - it kept the topic going with the drumbeat of “they are flat out wrong”
- brendanmc6 8y agoThis is one of the few things that annoys me about HN, this exact comment is almost always here if the article makes any attempt at creative writing or storytelling. Insulting? Give me a break. Writing is an art not a science. Good writing should convey emotion. That's not an easy thing to do. That's why I loved this piece. It captured many of my own feelings, feelings I hadn't found a way to communicate even though I've been involved in sustainability for some years now. I associated the characters with people I know in my personal life, I related to the author, and I learned a few things too. This paragraph is probably my favorite: > "We work, and at the end of the day, if we think at all, all we have time to think about is that we are cowards, or, before the thought comes, to escape it. Raise your hand if you have never hoped you will die before you have to thoroughly disrupt your own life for the lives of those who will live after you are dead. I do not mean to yell at anyone. Every day, I ask myself, what are you willing to do? And sometimes I feel righteous and strong, but mostly what I feel is fear, and a drive towards self preservation. I can laugh at the prettily arranged soap, or the privately-viewed sunsets, or the Jet Skis, because those are not my drugs..."
- synctext 8y agoGreat 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board_(Netherlands)
- barry-cotter 8y agoAs 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.
- danmaz74 8y agoYes, the article mentions this problem.
- EliRivers 8y agoAlthough Miami can do what synctext mentioned, just like in the Netherlands; raise money, appoint responsible bodies and do something about it.
- kibwen 8y agoEven with effectively infinite money, "do something" might be able to raise the entire city above sea level but it won't be able to stop hurricanes, which the Netherlands doesn't have to worry about.
- veryworried 8y agoMiami doesn’t worry much about hurricanes either.
- temdbej 8y agoI just went to Miami for the first time. I loved Miami Beach. Also surprised by how relatively inexpensive real estate was.
- itomato 8y agoIt's the hurricane and flood insurance that are insane
- vonmoltke 8y ago> Also surprised by how relatively inexpensive real estate was. Compared to what? South Florida real estate is pretty expensive, compared to the rest of the US.
- bilbo0s 8y agoMaybe this guy is from San Fran or Manhattan. In which case, yeah, 2 or 3 thousand square feet on South Beach seem "cheap". But compared to most of the US, South Beach is pretty expensive.
- opportune 8y agoMost of Miami outside of the immediate vicinity of downtown Miami and Miami beach is pretty affordable as far as coastal cities go, especially compared to ones with Miami-caliber weather. Not sure what the climate change situations are, but there are condos in an amazing location (Brickell Key) which go for like $300-400k for a 2bed.
- fencepost 7y agoAlso 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.
- mnm1 8y agoI 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.
- danmaz74 8y agoThat would make for a great follow-up article.
- zrobotics 7y agoYep, 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.
- nabla9 8y agoWhat 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.
- acdha 8y ago> 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.
- nabla9 8y agoI don't see how not enumerating details that reduce property values (like repair and maintenance cost and cost of insurance) changes anything I said. Investing includes risk management. You can discount the abrupt disruptions into the price. Everything you say reduces the value of the property. Eventually large areas will be abandoned but until that happens people can live there.
- acdha 8y agoThe distinction is that this is widespread new risk without accurate actuarial data. Someone looking at buying a house today doesn’t just have to wonder whether the value will be zero in 50 years but whether it might be 30% the next time a big storm causes enough damage that people don’t just rebuild, which could happen much sooner than that. Once there’s an event which makes it hard to get insurance, mortgages, or utilities the values can drop very quickly and you won’t have much advanced notice.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- doe88 8y agoRelated, a very good episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour podcast on the subject of climate and real-estate in Florida. https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-new-yorker-radio-hour/the-financial-crash-and-the-climate-crisis https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-new-yorker-radio-hour/...
- sytelus 8y agoIs 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.
- euroclydon 8y agoDoes 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.
- philipkiely 8y agoThis article reminds me of the scene in The Big Short where Mark Baum and friends wander around Florida housing developments looking for signs of a bubble.
- g6nhe9twPd66 8y agoVery odd how Miami isn't already underwater considering the same was being said about 2020 in the late 90's and early 2000's. This article is climate change hoax fear mongering from a california "journalist". Interesting how these folks can never seem to explain how we can't even predict the weather accurately a few days in advance or a hurricane path a week in advance (15 computer model guesses is not a prediction), but apparently ice cores are supposed to be a predictor for future climate change that is without doubt and rock solid. Give me a break.
- cs702 8y agoAs 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.
- kibwen 8y agoHonest 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.
- xnyan 8y agoI can't see any way out of this besides massive population shifts over the next 50-100 years.
- ethbro 8y ago$14B in new Army Corp of Engineers work, in and around New Orleans? Doing work isn't sexy, and it doesn't make national news media, but it's what gets shit done. And the Army Corp of Engineers has its management problems, but it also tends to be caught between "We don't believe anything will happen, so we're not giving you enough funding / control, but are giving you an unfunded mandate" and "Something happened! How did you let this happen after we trusted you to fix it?!" In reality, they do a lot of good work.
- selimthegrim 8y agoSeeing as they failed New Orleans in the first place with the levee pilings, 14 billion is penance, not anything forward looking
- sdca 8y agoCalifornia real estate agents minimize erosion, earthquakes, fires, zombies and so on...
- mcculley 8y agoI 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.
- yostrovs 8y agoIt's not expensive to install electric chargers in existing building. "Planning" for Uber involves what? Having a drive in in front of the building? How do you plan for non-existent self driving cars? Any practical advice you can share with the architects here?
- mcculley 8y agoIt is certainly more expensive to install electric chargers into an existing inert concrete structure than it is to design them in from the beginning. The building I am in is working this out right now, as are many others. Planning for Uber and autonomous cars includes architecting porticos and pickup/dropoff points in favor of garages. Many buildings are hostile to use of Uber in my daily experience.
- chii 8y ago> Many buildings are hostile to use of Uber in my daily experience. if there's already a taxi rank, then uber should be using that space to pick-up/drop-off. If there isn't, then the current building is _already_ unfriendly to taxis.
- CPLX 8y agoThis 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.
- stevenwoo 8y agoThere's a bit of that in this older article. The problem of spoiling of fresh water is insurmountable. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/miami-how-rising-sea-levels-endanger-south-florida-200956/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/miami-ho...
- chr1 8y agoWhy is it insurmountable? With cheap solar energy desalination becomes cheaper. And even without that countries like Israel now use desalinated water for 70% of their total water use.
- rabidrat 7y agoWhere do you put the salt? Israel has that problem now.
- stevenwoo 7y agoInsurmountable perhaps is too strong - economically unfeasible may be better. But all the cheap fresh water most of Florida have now goes away in the near future. This is in addition to all the other problems listed in the article that other areas of the USA will not have. Israel may be a good technical example but not a practical example, it has to make the most of their limited land for expansion and geopolitical situation of being surrounded by enemies - they also do not have to care about financial considerations since the about 1/3 of the USA's foreign aid goes to Israel, the political situation in the USA means this foreign aid is pretty safe for the forseeable future.
- chadash 8y agoTl;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.
- Animats 7y agoOne company could change all this: Fitch Ratings. 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 7y agoThis 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.
- MagicPropmaker 7y agoThis article may have been better if she didn't spend so much time mocking people's lifestyles and tastes.
- anonu 7y agoI 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.