Insurance costs are going to make people stop living near the coast
Posted by Chris in Tampa on 9/28/2013, 12:17 am
My dad constantly tells me we should have sold our house years ago. One of these days we will and we will be long gone from the coast. It is just too expensive to live on the coast. It was cheap to build here over three decades ago. (My dad at the time had the option to build higher, but hurricanes and rising sea level were just not concerns then. Oh how very, very, very costly that decision was!) But now, insurance is just killer and keeps getting massively worse. (If the whole FEMA thing really kicks in for long standing homeowners, that might be it for us.)

We rarely get hit here in Tampa. The last major storm here, or kinda near here, was in 1921. If the land and my house had been here at that time, we might have had some flooding in my house. Although, with high deductibles, the risk to an insurance company would not have been too bad. I am around 8 to 9 feet above sea level. This just ain't the place to be! It seems like every direct hit from a tropical storm now floods the front entrance to my neighborhood. The storm drains are connected of course to the canal, so they go up and down with the tide. The cost of insurance is so much higher than the historical risk to my area, but then again they are looking into the future, which is not a rosy picture!

With the risk to coastlines, it just doesn't pay to keep living, and when it comes to it, rebuilding, along the coast. Anybody actually deciding at this point to live along the coast must be nuts! Build well away from the coast and maybe just visit occasionally. It would be so much smarter.

Well, just to prove my point about why everyone should no longer live along the water, let me write a little more. I literally just got an email at 11:47pm reminding me of a rally tomorrow that the neighborhood next to me is taking part in Saturday about trying to stop FEMA. (A lot are going on nationwide.)

The email also goes into a lot about the new act, which they had previously sent a lot of information about. Of course the new rates affect a lot of people, not just immediately along the coast, as everybody is rather low around here. (and the land is not getting higher!) It talks about realtors losing a lot of sales due to the higher insurance. One example was someone's insurance that they have now, and the one quoted for the lost buyer, going up 1600%.

Of course the ugly truth is, while I do think the rates are astronomical compared to our current risk, they are, in some part, thinking about down the road. Of course personally I wish they would make it come into affect more slowly and allow current homeowners to get a huge break. (until a hurricane comes and then let it kick in) As my dad says, they encouraged people to build near the coast by having flood insurance low. And now they changed their mind! It's not the current homeowner's fault. Either tear down your home and build higher or get the heck out.

I just want the market to turn around a little bit more, decide on a new place to move and then find someone who has a lot of money and doesn't believe in climate change to buy the land under my house for a lot of money so they can tear my house down and build a really big one. I'm not asking for much, just that lol.
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climate change and South Florida tidal flooding - jimw, 9/27/2013, 6:13 am
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