Why Are Developers Still Pouring Billions into Waterlogged Miami?
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Miami real estate (and other low lying shorefront) isn't quite at that 'oh crap' moment yet. While the evidence for CO2 driven rising sea levels is clear to me, there are plenty of financiers from the previous generation for whom it isn't. And even if they're wrong on global warming, they might be right on sea-walls, pumps and other mitigation methods. The Raising of Chicago lifted the entire city up 3-6 feet with merely 1850s technology, so it's not as if we can't solve Miami's sea level issue with sufficient investment. The issue is who foots the bill, how large it is, and what neighborhoods are left to the sea.
Rising sea levels are an interesting question for barrier islands like Miami Beach and Florida as a whole.
Though its important to also understand some of these articles unfairly paint sea level rise and climate change as responsible for a new phenomenon, the truth is Miami Beach has always flooded (during full moons water can rise right up through the ground). Not to mention Hurricanes, but truthfully Miami Beach has been sparred for the most part considering all the potential direct hits over the years and the fact that Andrew was a relatively dry hurricane. Al things considered, the engineering has always been impressive and continues to improve, just look at pre/post Hurricane Andrew codes.
Does the Miami Beach flood, sure, but no more than say Charleston, South Carolina. Or have you ever drove on a road that wasn't cracked in NOLA because the salt, (its actually below sea level), Miami Beach doesn't have that issue.
I will say this about the article, it doesn't even bother pretending or discussing how Miami Beach/Miami/Florida might position itself to take a leadership position issues of climate change and sea level rise. Moreover, there is almost an acknowledgement and reading between the lines of the money going into development as a scam on foreign investors...personally, I think that is pretty far off, but I can't help but admit such a fraud would be so Miami that it would be poetic.
I have lived in FL all my life (41 years), my family spans back 12 generations from me. King tides are nothing new, nor is Miami flooding during them. I live in the Keys which is lower lying than Miami beach but we have the safety of the barrier reef that mellows the tidal changes, this is just a sensational piece due to a rare but historically recurring event. Miami is not flooding for good, we are in a weather cycle coming off El Nino into a lunar cycle, it happens from time to time. It's not exactly intellectually honest to attribute a known phenomenon (King tides, which is the reason Miami is currently flooded) to climate change. It was not climate change in the 1800's when the old timers dealt with them. This is not meant to be a dissertation on climate change, rather to highlight pieces like this do more damage than good to the arguments that climate change science presents when items like this are highlighted as the predicted outcomes.
[0] http://www.rsmas.miami.edu/news-events/press-releases/2016/n...
What is that based on?
> The floods are worse this year ...
Everyone in the article is talking about long-term increases in sea level rise and flooding.
* a University of Miami study reporting that Miami Beach has seen a 200 percent increase in flooding in the last decade
* current (conservative) estimates predict a three-foot rise over the next 100 years
* The city is already elevating its roads
* the city’s new hydraulic pumps, installed as a result of initiatives by Miami Beach’s mayor Philip Levine
* Steps are being taken, buildings are being raised
* what they’re [developers are] doing now is elevating the building at a minimum of 3 feet
* The water will start coming up from the floor,” he [Alan Faena] said. “There’s not much we can do. That’s the reality.”
* the Rockefeller Foundation recently funded Miami's “resilience officer,” the first of many in what the foundation expects to be a global array to help organize various cities' responses
If only way to be sure is to wait for the data to show up 50-100 year baseline data for flooding, then by the time you act - all the costly infrastructure commitments have been made... it's another form of socializing the costs while privatizing the profits.
Sea walls, land use changes, water pumping, loss of wetlands all affect the severity of tides. All these things could be changed to avoid issues while completely ignoring climate change for now.... Yet they do nothing. Ocean bathymetry is extremely complex, messing with one thing on a shoreline effects everything around it. Just yelling "It's all climate change" is both stupid and dangerous. Trying to stop the shoreline from moving is stupid, expensive, and in the long term, dangerous.
That is wishful thinking. The clear consensus is that we can't, and that it's not a close call.
The clear consensus is that AGW is real. That is a far cry from saying that there is a clear consensus that it must be dealt with ever, let alone that it must be dealt with in the near-term.
I encourage you to read the IPCC summary report; it will clear up a lot of mysteries.
If you mean that there is no political consensus in the United States, yes, that's true beyond a doubt.
If you mean that there is no consensus among scientists and experts in the field, then that's wrong. There is and has been a clear consensus that we "must" act urgently.
However, if we're looking at the actions of everyone who might actually deal with it, then there's a clear consensus that we're actually choosing to face the consequences instead.
"Must" implies a degree of certainty, a statement that we will have to deal with it one way or another, and thus we will deal with it - however, that doesn't seem to be the case here, it is quite plausible that we will choose to not deal with it properly. It would be nice if we acted urgently, but there's no "must" there - it's quite likely that we will not do so.
If we want to use the word "must" then it might be more appropriate to say that irreversible climate change is the thing that must occur, given the current global political 'climate'.
> if we're looking at the actions of everyone who might actually deal with it, then there's a clear consensus that we're actually choosing to face the consequences instead.
Very many are denying that climate change is happening, or falling back to denying the consequences, or falling back to saying there's nothing we can do about it.
After you've made a decision that for your country/company/party/economic group/whatever the desired course of action is to not work against climate change, then you still have to communicate and "sell" that decision to everyone else, and denying the consequences or saying that we can't do anything has much less backlash than openly saying "fuck you, got mine".
While it's also true that "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!", I believe that most of the involved politicians understand the future consequences (at least the mid-term consequences to their particular area) quite well, but politic communication is about telling whatever will get your goals achieved the best, not about communicating your personal beliefs truthfully.
It's the same thing with jobs - can you imagine any politician telling to a distressed area/industry "no, your jobs are never going to come back" even if that's an obvious truth?
> can you imagine any politician telling to a distressed area/industry "no, your jobs are never going to come back" even if that's an obvious truth?
One thing I like about Bill Clinton is that he actually would say that, at least sometimes. Few have that political courage.
Personally, I didn't know about the Gulf El Nino issue kls pointed out, but there is no ignoring the lunar events (2016 Supermoon) and so it will be interesting to see if flooding begins to decline as the moon begins to move away from the Earth for a couple decades. Again the linked article is very clear the increased flooding is attributable to tide (lunar) events for the most part.
Like all articles it also fails to acknowledge that Miami was swamp turned into land that could be through engineering a massive canal/waterway system and Miami Beach wasn't originally a beach it is artificial, complete with manufactured sand. One thing to also keep in mind is the continued development of Miami Beach over this 10 year time period, which has also meant more recently the island lost land that used to soak up rain water like a sponge in lieu of asphalt that floods (compare this to Florida Keyes where much of the land is protected from development and continues soaking rain water). Again if this were a natural phenomenon caused by climate change as opposed to over development and tide events, Miami and the Keyes would see increase flooding as well but these studies appear to be limited to Miami Beach.
> the linked article is very clear the increased flooding is attributable to tide (lunar) events for the most part. ... it will be interesting to see if flooding begins to decline as the moon begins to move away from the Earth
That is not what the article says. The article does not at all attribute the increased tide height to lunar activity; the words "moon" and "lunar" do not appear in the text. Everyone says this is a long-term problem and they do not mention any possibility of improvement due to the moon.
> the island lost land that used to soak up rain water like a sponge
The water causing the floods is coming up through the ground from the sea, not coming down from the sky. Rain isn't an issue.
> if this were a natural phenomenon caused by climate change as opposed to over development and tide events, Miami and the Keyes would see increase flooding as well but these studies appear to be limited to Miami Beach.
What is that based on? The article explains the reason that Miami Beach is affected.
This nails it. Miami Beach real estate values will decline as soon as insurance companies throw up their hands and refuse to insure the losses. Can't insure, can't finance a property.
The article clearly states that already; the point of the article, for which it provides ample evidence, is that the flooding has become much worse.
That being said, even though Chicago had high-rises at the time, buildings were all pretty much held in place by gravity at the time. Raising them was just a matter of having enough jackscrews to support the building and making sure the building was raised evenly so that it didn't crack.
I suspect that the higher level of integration between modern buildings and their foundations probably means that it's going to be cheaper to just tear down the buildings and rebuild them. My best friend is a structural engineer, so it would be interesting to see what he has to say on the topic. If Miami is anything like Chicago, all the buildings are probably built on piles already, and burying them is one of the most time consuming and expensive parts of the construction process. If you could re-use the piles for a new building you might be able to get away with rebuilding buildings on the cheap.
I suspect raising the vast majority of buildings would still be eminently possible though. You see this all of the time in flood-prone areas already. The only difference is that you'd be adding fill up to your new front door.
Not quite as impressive as the Chicago effort, but proves that it could be done.
Unfortunately, Florida will have an even harder time than most in mitigating rising sea levels, because the ground is heavily porous limestone. The sea can literally bubble up from below through the ground, and nothing short of dropping a state's worth of granite will help once the sea level rises high enough.
Miami should prepare to become America's Venice in 100 years.
Another thing to note is that it costs money to short -- you are borrowing the shares after all, so you need to pay interest on the loan. This makes a multi-year position shorting select REITs troublesome.
The position I'm taking (roughly) is to hold oceanfront property with excellent sea-level protection. Think cliff-front, not beach-front. A different play? Construction companies specializing in sea level mitigation.
Of course if you pick sturdier cliffs you might be better off.
There's probably a few places where a narrow strip of land has enough of the right slope to be a win for quite a range of sea level increases.
Maybe the best climate change hedge is investing in low carbon power production. (incrementally) Good for the climate, benefits if things go worse than expected.
Sulam's sibling comment nails it.
> While a destructive fire was not unusual for the time, instead of rebuilding the city as it was before, the response of the city leaders was to make two strategic decisions: first, that all new buildings must be of stone or brick, as insurance against a similar disaster in the future; and second to regrade the streets one to two stories higher than the original street grade. Pioneer Square had originally been built mostly on filled-in tidelands and, as a consequence, it often flooded. The new street level also assisted in ensuring that gravity-assisted flush toilets that funneled into Elliott Bay did not back up at high tide.
"And their time frame is what, five years? How do you reconcile those two things: It’s a 100-year problem and a five-year investment cycle." The answer is simply that the private equity firm does not account for the long term, but that the city of Miami Beach will have to—soon.
And that is fundamentally what makes climate change so difficult to deal with. The economic incentives, which only really look 5-10-15 years out, can't respond to consequences that are 50-100 years out, and by then it's really too late.
There will be a day of reckoning soon when the next major hurricane hits and all of these new developments are damaged beyond repair. Miami got very lucky with Matthew a few months ago, but the next one is really going to hurt today's buyers.
On the global level (let's say 50-100 years out), do you think we as a species are headed toward an "Easter Island" effect, where we "whistle past the graveyard" and assume everything is "fine" - until it isn't - and at that point we can't do anything and have to deal with the potentially existential consequences?
The conversation at the moment is about power, but moves to get off fossil are, globally, token. The conversation hasn't got to agri-business, deforestation and meat especially beef, or population, or water. Forests are still being felled and burnt for cattle and palm oil, new fracking is still reported as opportunity for jobs and profit.
I'm starting to arrive at the belief that my children's best hope is being amongst the 100m or so left.
On the flip side, major hurricanes have bankrupted insurance companies and left property owners without the benifits they paid for. The two solutions I see are larger (more diversified) insurance companies or the government stepping in to regulate.
* I have little faith that this is actually true
Just as with the housing collapse, the question will be whether the government bailout will successfully resolve the crisis.
Second, even if coordination can be solved, by and large the groups/areas that can make a meaningful reduction are not the groups/areas that will bear most of the consequences, there's no such thing as a single, aligned direction of interest/benefit for humanity.
My electrical usage is so low that I don't think installing solar would be a net win in carbon emissions.
Based on various calculators, my carbon footprint is about half that of a typical American. Now can I ask for a 28% decrease in carbon emissions?
Look into how much water and food you need to grow cows.
Can you build a structure now, while it is above sea level, that in a post sea level rise will be really nice? First suspend the building on pylons that are sunk all the way down to bedrock, second design it so that as an "island" it has great access, an easy Marina attachment, a helipad on top (for example). And then make it reasonably self contained (internal shops for transacting supplies, and entertainment). And finally give it oil platform like stamina against hurricanes and storms.
Sort of planning for a post apocalyptic refuge today.
There is a lot of research on building a "cloak of invisibility" against ocean waves. Earliest I saw about this was back in the 1990's or early 2000's I think, with some Japanese researchers who were the first I recall proposing what is now commonly cited as a discovery in 2008 by UK and French researchers [1].
It would be interesting if the building design can take the large wind loads and use the energy to create and store hydrogen, perhaps re-direct the wind to anchor the building even more if that is a structurally sound approach.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14829-invisibility-cl...
I suppose that might be tricky to predict though.
It could be Miami. It's certainly low-lying enough, and big enough to count. But it's also in the United States, which has a lot of money to throw at problems. Some city in a poorer country would be a better bet.
We've lost cities in the past due to hurricanes (which I count as a type of rising water).
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi865.htm
Galveston would have disappeared decades ago, until they lifted it and built a seawall. We throw a lot of money at the problem of the ocean. The issue is, sea level rise or not, the ocean will always win unless a constant stream of money is continually pumped into defense.
TL;DR don't live near the ocean.
Real estate is unique because it's value is realized over long periods of time and it's easy to get mortgages.
In my area, they're building massive gluts of apartments and condos. The dumb money -- mostly smaller regional banks trying to break into commercial lending are leading the deals, and the bigger or more sophisticated banks stay away.
That's a big reason why you have extreme boom/bust cycles, special tax rules, etc.
If you can sell the last apartment in a condo tower, who cares that a day later the rising tides rust out the elevator components?
The wealthy very much like Miami and even if rising tides make Miami Beach uninhabitable then at worst it's a hit to their portfolios, not a collapse of their assets.
The party keeps going until it stops.
They could put an Armani Hotel in Nashville or Indianapolis but those cities are not cool.