Heaven or High Water – Selling Miami's Last 50 Years | Hacker News Reader

Heaven or High Water – Selling Miami's Last 50 Years

popula.com

211 pointsollieglass147 comments

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.

Yes, the article mentions this problem.

Although Miami can do what synctext mentioned, just like in the Netherlands; raise money, appoint responsible bodies and do something about it.

Even 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.

Miami doesn’t worry much about hurricanes either.

If your city is built on a sponge and in the flattest state to boot your solutions look like seasteading, not dams and pumps. From an engineering point of view Miami should be looking to Venice, not Amsterdam. You can’t save Florida land by pumping so the only way to go is to make your own taller land or to build what amount to boats or oil rigs.

> From an engineering point of view Miami should be looking to Venice

I might consider moving to Miami if this ever happens...

Who’s going to pay for that retrofit?

If the problem looks imminent, as opposed to "we'll deal with it in 50 years", you will suddenly have a lot of VERY incentivized landowners to contribute money.

Is this the ideal way to do things? F* no. Is it what's likely to happen? Yeah.

Adding some fun science: pumps are particularly unsuited to FL because of the "sponge" that makes up its land. As freshwater is taken up from the soil for human use, saltwater slowly follows it in (contaminating Fl's freshwater source). If there's a mismatch in the rate of percolation, you can get sinkholes -- the land collapses because there isn't water in the cracks holding it up. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/science-behind...

this also happened in Orange County, California years ago. they'd pumped so much groundwater that some of the wells near the shore saw saltwater infiltration. nowadays, Orange County replenishes its existing aquifer by pumping purified, recycled waste water back in.

This is what annoyed me a bit about the article. Sea level rise doesn't seem like that much of a problem.

If the foundations will still be tenable, and the buildings are built appropriately (e.g. parking garage for first level), they're going to be there.

For older ones? Hell, Americans were lifting entire buildings 6' in the 1850s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago

Miami already has canals, so swapping transportation from roads to waterways isn't a huge leap. Where you really need a road, loft it up above the water. Roads are probably the lightest / easiest thing to lift.

That said... the real killer of the city is likely to be drinking water access. Groundwater in porous limestone means saltwater infiltration doesn't just flood, it mixes with freshwater.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-29/miami-s-o...

Reconfiguring height is a one-time problem. Desalination of all your drinking water is a much more expensive problem.

I don't think seasteading would be an easy sell in an area susceptible to powerful hurricanes. Though, I do think seasteading is an underrated idea. I think the best place in the US for it is the western part of the SF peninsula

That may be politically more difficult when a substantial portion of the population insists that lower taxes and less government/regulation are an absolute good, to be pursued in all circumstances.

The vast majority making that argument only do so over issues where they think it is in their own interest. Where spending or legislation is in their interest, it's just common sense.

Many of them advance such arguments because someone else may benefit.

Well, of course you are going to say that the things you want are good all round.

Politicians can’t do anything about physics and geology conspiring to wipe your city of the map. Only scientists and engineers can. (And if they don’t have a solution for you, it’s like having cancer circa 1650. You’re SOL.)

Say what you want about New Orleans, at least the drinking water isn’t screwed.

Is this a joke? We have water boil advisories on a quarterly basis because the drinking water is totally screwed by neglected infrastructure.

A boil advisory because of short periods of low pressure is one thing, needing RO because saltwater has infiltrated your aquifer (like what will happen in Miami) is another can of worms

I'd rather deal with saltwater intrusion than the NO SWB and mayor.

???

Wait? What?

Was that a joke?

I think we’re all just frustrated down here with the lack of transparency and employees literally sleeping on the job. I remember getting out of my car on Broad St in August 2017 during the flood and arguing with people in traffic in front of me about whether the pump house in front of me was working - they thought it was just another excuse for the city to take their money.

And you can bet the coverage and bailout money will both be a lot larger than Puerto Rico despite a 15 year warning period.

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 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 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 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.

It'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?

It 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.

> 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.

Except taxi ranks are a queue of fungible vehicles; uber/lyft's are "bespoke" so the exact same structure won't work quite as well.

But it wouldn't be hard to make a pickup/dropoff area. I suspect there already is one at most places, it's just a pissy, petty policy that doesn't allow ridesharing (etc) to use it.

It’s more than policy. It is architecture. As I described above, I live in a new building. I step out into traffic to get into an Uber. This was an obvious thing to consider during this building’s design.

In SF planning meetings, I have seen buildings explicitly discouraged from accommodating pickup/dropoff on the theory that it would make traffic impacts worse (this is backwards) and undermine the “transit oriented” argument (harder to argue).

There's no reason why rideshare queues and car-rider assignments couldn't be fungible up to the point the passenger steps into the vehicle, special needs excepted.

Those are called taxis. Even then they only line up at major locations, not residential buildings.

No.

Rideshare still behaes ona requ basis. But the vehicle at the head of the queue serves the passenger first requesting a ride, special needs excepted. Out-of-order arrival of rides is addressed that way.

That means the rider wouldn't know what vehicle is coming and when, which goes against the whole experience.

Also it's unlikely for there to be that many rides queued up at a single residential location which is why they aren't queued up there in the first place.

it's unlikely for there to be that many rides queued up at a single residential location

The premise of this thread was that there were.

I think it's about having a pickup/dropoff area, not necessarily a queuing system, especially because ridesharing does not use traditional waiting queues.

Again, specifically not the case here. You are having a different discussion.

"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."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19596930

Yes, they are already unfriendly to taxis. In Orlando and many other places we didn’t use taxis as much as we use Uber now. When we get to fully autonomous vehicles this will be an even greater problem as it will not make sense to park the car. Real estate investors should be planning for that now in the buildings they are designing that will still be standing in 30 years.

You can't install more than a handful of chargers without needing to run new circuits back to the main panel. Installing a hundred (not unreasonable for future needs!) would probably double the power consumption of the entire building, and require upgrading the utility connection, maybe even running new lines to the closest substation.

Not to mention that with such an increase in overall electricity consumption in the garage, one might want to charge the residents for use of it. Doing so might require changes to architecture (e.g., putting electric cars on a different floor or section). There are lots of things to consider and real estate investors/developers are not thinking of any of them.

> "Planning" for Uber involves what?

In Central Florida, this means having a safe place for people to stand and wait. That area gets frequent and often nasty thunderstorms.

> Any practical advice you can share with the architects here?

Could they at least run one regular (120v/15a) circuit + wall outlet to each parking spot? Is that too much to ask?

That's enough electricity to give every EV car an extra 60 miles of EV range overnight. And would be plenty for any other use (ebikes and the like)

I’m similarly perplexed at RE. For one, I make a good living and yet I can’t find decent, affordable homes near me. They’re all dated and much too expensive/soft. Dated in that they almost never have AC despite climate change making it necessary in the area - and rampant lead paint/asbestos.

Apartment buildings are similarly dated. Last I looked, in a big city apartment complexes were rare if they had one or two charging spots. They don’t exist in smaller or less affluent towns.

I think RE suffers from a similar situation as infrastructure regarding retrofitting and upkeep in the US. Once it’s built, there’s almost no inherent market mechanism for keeping structures up to date.

>they almost never have AC despite climate change making it necessary in the area

I'm really sorry but this isn't how climate change works. Climate change is a slow increase in average temperature over 100+ years that has dramatic impact on lots of things, but probably not the "need" for AC.

Depends on your age; heat-related deaths among the elderly and other vulnerable populations are up in several areas. Is RE Reunion? If so, in a place like that if nighttime temps start failing to drop humans start experiencing heat stress.

RE = real estate. Modernizing real estate isn’t common anywhere I’ve lived/visited. Modern RE almost exclusively exists in recent developments.

Well, I won't die from a heatwave but without AC the impact on my wellbeing, not to mention productivity, will be considerable.

Climate change is both:

1. A slow and steady increase in the average temperature.

2. A rapid increase in the frequency of extreme weather events.

Point 1 doesn't force people to buy ACs, but Point 2 will. For example, you generally don't need AC in San Francisco, but a heat wave in 2017 killed 14 people[0]. As the frequency of heatwaves increases, people will need to equip themselves against the temperature _extremes_, even though the _average_ temperature hasn't changed much.

[0] https://www.kqed.org/science/1932692/climate-change-dishes-u...

>As the world has warmed, that warming has triggered many other changes to the Earth’s climate. Changes in extreme weather and climate events, such as heat waves and droughts, are the primary way that most people experience climate change. Human-induced climate change has already increased the number and strength of some of these extreme events. Over the last 50 years, much of the U.S. has seen increases in prolonged periods of excessively high temperatures, heavy downpours, and in some regions, severe floods and droughts.

[1] https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/highlights/report-findings/...

>One of the most visible consequences of a warming world is an increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events. The National Climate Assessment finds that the number of heat waves, heavy downpours, and major hurricanes has increased in the United States, and the strength of these events has increased, too.

[2] https://www.c2es.org/content/extreme-weather-and-climate-cha...

I’ve definitely personally seen the affects of climate change. Many people should be able to same the same who have lived decades in the Southwest US. Fires are more common, they’re more often extremely damaging, record setting summers year after year, and so on.

As a side note, I’m offended by the commenter above you. As if someone else is going to be able to tell me what I’ve witnessed over the course of my life.

As a side note, I’m offended by the commenter above you.

Rather than being offended, I think it would be more persuasive to others if you were able to quantify what you've witnessed.

You imply that there are buildings that did not need air-conditioning when constructed, but do need it now because of climate change. I don't know what the answers are, but let's consider what statistics would be useful to defend your statement.

First, since you are talking about air-conditioning, we can probably restrict to summer temperatures. It's not clear if we can look only at daytime highs, since higher temperatures at night are also uncomfortable. Since we're talking about a threshold, we can probably restrict to the single hottest month. For Phoenix (and I'd guess the rest of the Southwest?) this looks to be July.

So to tell a compelling story, you'd probably want to show that the average high or average low for July has increased significantly since the time the building was built. How much is significant? I don't know, but if the claim was that it didn't need AC when built (as opposed to saying that it needs it more often now) I'd think we'd want to see a change of about 5F (2C). There might be a good argument for a lower number (perhaps humidity has also increased?), but it likely would be less convincing than a large jump in temperature.

Finally, you'd want to show that the increase in temperature is due to climate change, rather than the effects of urbanization. More blacktop, more buildings, and more air conditioners (!) will increase the number on the thermometer in an urban environment even if the climate hasn't changed. On the bright side, most published temperature records have already been adjusted to remove these Urban Heat Island effects. But do realize that your perception that it is hotter might be affected by the build up of the environment, so the temperature either needs to be measured outside of urban areas, or adjusted for the non-climatic changes.

So instead of taking offense, could you perhaps point to a historical chart of July temperatures for where you live, showing that the temperature (adjusted for urbanization) has increased significantly since the buildings were built?

Just an anecdote from Hawaii. We used to have steady and regular trade winds that would keep the humidity at bay, thus making AC a "nice to have" rather than a "really want to have." That's changed as the climate change has shifted the trade wind patterns and given us plenty of more days in the year without this natural air conditioning.

I suspect the time will come when trade wind days are the exceptions.

Location / metro area?

I know this is getting a little off topic, but I'm as surprised as you that electric charging isn't taking on at parking lots and structures much as I expected.

I mean even Disney only has like 2-6 charging spots in each of their parking lots designed to hold over 12,000 cars per lot!

And then you look at other parking structures and see that they have a token charger or 2 and the few I've reached out to never have any plans on increasing the number of them.

People don't like to spend money until they're in real pain. If you don't go to Disney because you have purchased a car that can't go there unless there are electric charge stations, I don't think that's painful for them yet.

I think we all agree that some investors won’t spend capital until it is too late. The thing that interests me is that there is apparently no incentive for real estate investors to plan for the long term.

If I were a real estate investor, I'd be wondering about all sorts of variables. How cheap will car batteries get? How will that impact the range that EVs will have? What charge standard will people prefer? What rapid charging infrastructure will exist?

It could be that nearly every EV will have plenty of range from just charging at home, and for those few who need to charge to make the trip, they will be able to get enough charge with a 5-minute stop at one of the dozens of 350kW chargers nearby.

Given all this uncertainty, why would I, as a real estate investor, pay for the increased utility capacity, the installation of the electrical lines plus permitting, the charging hardware (plus unbounded maintenance), and the hassle of additional policing of which stalls customers are allowed to park in and for what reasons?

I get that some savvy investors may take all of the factors into account and decide to do nothing. That is not what I am seeing. They are not thinking about it at all. The entire real estate industry does not do long term planning, at least where I have lived for 47 years. Just as the article describes, it is a problem for some future entity.

You, as the hypothetical real estate investor, might care that the building you built two years ago is not the ideal place for affluent residents today. But as the entire local market is failing at long term planning, I guess there is no competitive incentive.

Disney doesn't want you coming in and taking up a premium parking space and expensive charger for a full day while you're at the park. That's a money loser for them.

As a counter on a much smaller scale, if I was setting up or redoing a midrange or better fast food place I'd absolutely be looking into the costs of having public paid charging stations in my lot. Drive in, plug in, come inside (and don't blink at the price of our current run of premium sandwich meals), order, eat, head out 20-30 minutes later having paid a few dollars for a fast charge plus $8-12 for a meal with a great profit margin. Not something you'd do every day, but I see people just sitting in their cars at the Tesla chargers in the parking lot of my local Meijer.

At least right now people with plugin EVs or hybrids are people with disposable income. If I have a business that I'd like those people to come to for 20-60 minutes a few times a week then chargers make a ton of sense.

Market penetration by electric vehicle just isn't very high. It's in the very low single digits in the US as of 2018 and was far lower before. [1] Most parking structures were built well before it got near 1%. I doubt the availability will change very quickly without legislation to encourage retrofitting.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicles_in_t...

qq: why is an expectation that there must be charging spots for electric cars? Dedicated parking lots for green vehicles, sure I can see some logic behind cities enforcing that. But I don't show up at your parking lot and expect a mini gas pump at my spot.

It's not an expectation in any sense of the word, but it is a "nice to have" which makes both the owner of the location and owners of electric cars happier. Dedicated parking spots for "green" vehicles are worthless, and I'd be against any city enforcing that at all. I'm not quite sure if i'm for or against mandated charging spots yet, but regardless...

I'm simply wondering why it's not taking off more. It seems to be a win-win. Places like Disney where many will drive from far away and spend whole days there seem like a perfect fit for a ton of charging spots, especially since EV owners PAY to use the electricity there. EV owners win because they can get there easier and with less range anxiety, and the business owners win because EV owners come to their location more frequently and in many cases are required to spend time there!

A response of "qq" when all I did was say i'm surprised it's not catching on more is weirdly aggressive. I don't think businesses should have to install them, just that i'm surprised that they don't have more of them, especially in new-construction where it seems like a no-brainer to increase the number by 3 times or more just seeing the increasing percentage of plug-in vehicles on the road.

Ha, I added the qq so you would interpret my comment as the question it was, rather than an attack.

I didn't realize that EV vehicles paid for the charging, I thought it was free. If paid then it's a nice to have that leverages the long time you spend at the park anyway.

Oh shit I'm sorry, "qq" has a meaning similar to "cry about it" or "just quit if you don't like it" in some gaming circles, and I completely misinterpreted it!

"quick question" completely changes the tone of that comment!

Most buildings last more than 20 years. I get you can make rennovations...however if you plan for the future during construction those rennovations can be much cheaper.

For example making their be excess circuit breaker capacity during construction doesn't cost much and enables ev charging to be added at a later date for less money than if that spare electrical capacity wasn't installed

This is not the conclusion reached by the people spending money currently trying to retrofit the garages.

I've worked as an intern at a commercial property company (Colliers International) several years ago. One thing I've learned is that commercial property (be it office or residential) is always being sold. They are essentially large bonds you can touch and live in.Party A develops or buys the building, gains an annuity via rent, attempts to raise rent slowly over a few years (thus increasing the value of the property), and selling it to Party B, which repeats the process. In commercial residential buildings, this process happens faster than in an office building because leases are shorter and residential tenants can accept rent raises every 2-3 years. In this business model, Long Term thinking is not in the best interest of making profit.

Markets are made by both buyers and sellers. Demand is ostensibly driven by consumers, and value created by meeting consumer demands.

Are consumers demanding the above with their money and not just their mouths? I doubt it.

That thing that interests me is that it is a clear market failure. 30 year bonds pay a higher interest rate than 5 year bonds. So one would think there is incentive to plan better for a building that lasts for 30 years. But we are changing the climate and other things with effects that will be felt long before 30 years. The U.S. Treasury does not offer bonds beyond 30 years, so presumably the entire system can't plan for a time horizon beyond that.

Every two to three years? The apartments I've lived in raise the rent by $100 every year without fail.

Do you live in a high-priced urban area? I'm curious what this increase is for you as a percentage of total rent.

It's about 0.5%.

Don’t forget the tax shelter aspect of it. Many real estate transactions are driven by moving tax liabilities around.

>>I don't know how it works elsewhere, but the entire real estate industry in Florida is not capable of long term thinking.

They aren't incentivized to think long-term, because they are making money hand-over-fist. Whatever they build gets sold at very high margins because consumers aren't educated (thanks to things like Florida banning the term "climate change" from school textbooks) and don't have modern expectations.

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.

There'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-ho...

Why 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.

Where do you put the salt? Israel has that problem now.

Insurmountable 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.

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.

Miami's mistake was in not developing their port to be a more critical piece of infrastructure to the United States. It's just not that important as a port. As a piece of infrastructure in the US portfolio, it's totally expendable. It's just not a New Orleans, or Norfolk, or Galveston/Houston type port.

Not sure what the best way forward for Miami is? Dams and pumps won't help, because they sit on limestone. They could try to recreate Venice, but they already have some fairly serious issues with algae blooms. Shallow canals will definitely not help those issues. I don't know? Maybe there will be some new technique for living with water than comes along, and they can implement that technology?

But you're correct, at the moment, the most reasonable course of action is definitely, "Get the hell out of Dodge."

“Rich is a fleet of private planes with a decoy to hide your scent”:

https://youtu.be/N7Wami6CJiA

There's a ton of dumb, rich money in Miami pushing prices up to embezzle money out of corrupt regimes all over the world. When things get bad, they'll just find the next place and fly out on private jets. Those flying commercial will be left holding the bag.

Just remember that Miami Beach isn't Miami. There are a lot of Miami residents who don't feel like putting a dime into Miami Beach because it's only tourists and foreigners.

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 !

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.

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.

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.

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.

I can't see any way out of this besides massive population shifts over the next 50-100 years.

$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.

Seeing as they failed New Orleans in the first place with the levee pilings, 14 billion is penance, not anything forward looking

What would be an appropriate number, then?

https://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/environment/art...

$92 billion for the coast and probably another $20 billion for New Orleans? It doesn’t have to be all at once.

You're WAYYY off if you think 92 billion will save coastal cities. So is the Advocate. The diversity of soil, or bedrock types, of seismic profiles, of infrastructure, etc.

I call BS on that number.

Obviously places like Galveston/Houston, and New Orleans have to be saved at any cost, but we have to get realistic about how much this stuff actually costs. And we have to get real pragmatic, real fast about deciding which of these ports we really don't need anymore.

All that said, yes, Miami is pretty high on the "Not Needed" list. So, I guess if the rich people who live there decide to save the place, great. If not, no biggie. We'll live. It's not like losing Houston, Norfolk, or New Orleans.

Adding in shoreline topography.

It's amazing how different ports are. Some are essentially flood plains. Others (e.g. the Chesapeake Bay) have surprisingly steep elevation meeting the water.

Savannah - Charleston - Norfolk are a good east coast trio to illustrate the differences.

https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/#/layer/slr/6/-9028683.402612444/...

Downvote me all you want, you come live here then before you gainsay me

There's some visibly new pumping stations and some that shut down, but they don't run these. As a result, they're left to the city to mismanage and have normal storms turn into bad floods. I'm not being political here, this is fact with people walking off the job or just not doing their job.

The city's sewer systems are completely busted and need way more than $14b to fix.

Yeah the Corps fixed what they broke, but there's not a lot of new investment by them.

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.

That would make for a great follow-up article.

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.

One 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.

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.

I 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.

The 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.

That's probably how the end comes. So much damage that it's not worth rebuilding even cheaper and temporary.

But as I said, until that happens people will live, property values will decrease and stuff that is rebuild will be build cheaper.

What will most likely happen first is "climate centrification" within Miami. Poor people in high elevations will be move out when land value increases. Low elevation areas become new low income neighborhoods.

That’s a big change from your earlier “What happens 50 years from now should matter relatively little for people living there now”. People need to plan now for those big disruptions because they’re either going to live long enough to be directly affected, because any buyer will be taking that into account, or both. Miami won’t go to zero overnight but everyone should assume that the next 50 years will be quite different from the past 50.

That's not a change from my earlier.

People who rent or live in cheap property just move and other people come in. Property values change gentrification happens but that's usual for a big city.

If you move to Miami now and have children, you can raise them in next 20 years and move elsewhere in next 30 years.

… as long as you don’t mind losing money on a house, living somewhere the landlord invests nothing in, dealing with accelerated infrastructure collapse and paying higher taxes for reduced public services as all of the mitigation costs tank budgets everywhere. A city with a declining tax base is not business as usual.

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.

> Except that it will cost a lot more to build, insure and maintain.

Those are not counterarguments. Increasing running costs directly decrease property values. The property value vs. replacement property value will adjust.

Consider normal case whre property price is $1M, upkeep an maintenance etc. cost is $10k per year and investor gets $70k in rent.

Now change it to property price being $100k, yearly cost $30k per year and investor gets $60k in rent.

Witch one has better ROI?

Like all the people flooding to live in Baltimore, now property is so cheap?

Sadly the idea that price alone affects desirability is a little niave.

Related, 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/...

I just went to Miami for the first time. I loved Miami Beach. Also surprised by how relatively inexpensive real estate was.

It's the hurricane and flood insurance that are insane

> 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.

Maybe 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.

Most 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.

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.

California real estate agents minimize erosion, earthquakes, fires, zombies and so on...

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.

This article may have been better if she didn't spend so much time mocking people's lifestyles and tastes.

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.

I 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.

I appreciated the imagery myself - it kept the topic going with the drumbeat of “they are flat out wrong”

This 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..."

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.

Do you have a specific example?

There are no instances where she got it wrong. She mentions being west of Miami Beach and east of Miami, both of which are correct.

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