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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
>>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
$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?!"
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
> 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)
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.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
Are consumers demanding the above with their money and not just their mouths? I doubt it.
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.
In Central Florida, this means having a safe place for people to stand and wait. That area gets frequent and often nasty thunderstorms.
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)
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicles_in_t...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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."
https://youtu.be/N7Wami6CJiA
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.
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.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/miami-ho...
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.
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.
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.
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.
After discounting property values, Miami will be cheaper place to live in the future and that means that it may attract even more people.
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.
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.
Sadly the idea that price alone affects desirability is a little niave.
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.
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?
https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-new-yorker-radio-hour/...