Kate Steiker-Ginzberg, JD Anticipated May 2022
For years, I’ve been fortunate to enjoy the quaint Long Beach Island home that has been the summertime retreat of my friend Rebecca’s family since the 1950s. Beach Haven, New Jersey, has changed dramatically since her father Steve was growing up. Since the 1980s, developers have been replacing bungalows and empty lots with mega-mansions, each with a roof deck higher than the last. Even after Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on the New Jersey coastline, Rebecca estimates that the family could have sold the cabin-like property for over a million dollars to an eager developer.
“I think the beach will be gone in 20 years,” Steve said, when I called recently to ask about the future of Beach Haven. “It will be a community of houses on stilts and you’ll have to access your house by boat.”* But what about all that new construction? Surely the beachfront millionaires don’t share Steve’s vision for climate change adaptation, complete with house boats and pumping one’s own sewage off the island. “It’s like the elephant tusk,” he responded. “I thought as people became more aware of climate change, they would get scared and the prices would drop, but the opposite is true. The rarity of the beach home is now what makes it so valuable.” Rebecca chimed in with a quip about Boomers. “The truest statement of disposable income,” she said, laughing. “Let’s spend millions on a house that will be gone soon.”
The conversation around how coastal communities should adapt to the long-term impacts of climate change is fraught. Coastal areas in the United States are not only the vacation playgrounds of wealthy families—they are also home to some of the most disadvantaged and historically marginalized communities. As the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy revealed, places like Long Beach Island—a barrier island accessed by a single causeway—will experience hurricane activity, storm surges and flooding with increasing frequency and intensity. Traditional adaptation measures such as sea walls and protective sand dunes will not hold back the ocean. As families in high-risk coastal areas experience repeated destruction of their communities, the discourse of “build it back” and “never retreat” that followed Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy will become both emotionally distressing and economically untenable. Adapting to climate change will require a dramatic shift in the perception that those with resources are entitled to build and live anywhere they want. As retreat from the coasts becomes “unavoidable” for some U.S. communities, we must seize the opportunity to do so in an intentional and equitable way.
Coastal adaptation strategies to mitigate the impact of climate change have been costly and controversial. The toolbox includes what A.R. Siders calls “resistance” measures—constructing or strengthening seawalls, levees and sand dunes—and “accommodation” strategies, such as elevating homes on stilts both to strengthen their foundations before a storm and minimize the damage from flooding. ** Each strategy comes with a set of concerns: Levees can be breached and will become increasingly ineffective as storms and rising seas worsen over time. Seawalls, which are disproportionately constructed in wealthy beach communities, displace water to neighboring areas, leading to detrimental results. A process that engineers call “nourishment”—fortifying beachfront communities by constructing protective sand dunes and widening beaches—is expensive and requires dredging sand from offshore. One such beach nourishment project on Long Beach Island has been run by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers since 2005. Called the “Storm Damage Reduction Project,” the program will do periodic beach nourishment over 50 years. “Money talks,” Steve said, of the constant stream of trucks fighting erosion of the beach. “But the next big storm, these dunes are gone.”
Architectural and engineering innovations to adapt to sea level rise should arguably be pursued in populous coastal cities. But the questions become thornier for beach communities like LBI, whose population swells from about 10,000 year-round residents to more than 100,000 tourists and vacation homeowners in the summer months. Beach nourishment and other adaptation measures are premised on the idea that private property must be protected at all costs from the forces of nature. But what happens when storm surges become more frequent and powerful? Is our vision for the future one in which the Army Corps of Engineers uses federal funds to rebuilds the dunes forever, in order to protect the second homes of the wealthy? What about sustaining the local tourism industry, which is an increasingly important source of municipal revenue?
Current Polices: A Moral Hazard Problem
A recent legal dispute highlights how even modest mitigation efforts face steep challenges from wealthy homeowners. In Harvey Cedars, an LBI town north of Beach Haven, beachfront owners were asked to sign easements to give the local government a right of access to maintain the protective dunes. A handful of holdouts led the town to exercise its power of eminent domain, in which the government takes private land for public good. In 2010, one couple sued the town under the Fifth Amendment, arguing that the dunes obstructing their first-floor beach view constituted a governmental “taking” of private property requiring “just compensation.” The question of what constituted “just compensation” went all the way to the New Jersey Supreme Court, as new arguments emerged around whether the home’s value had been diminished or enhanced by the presence of the dunes—which, ironically, helped protect the couple’s home from destruction during Hurricane Sandy in October 2012. The couple reportedly settled the case for one dollar.
The challenges involved in implementing adaptation measures are further exacerbated by distortions in our nation’s flood insurance and disaster relief programs, which many have argued actually increase our vulnerability to sea level rise. First, the insurance premiums are heavily subsidized by the federal government. In a laissez faire model, private insurance companies decline to cover certain high-risk hazardous areas, when the costs of environmental destruction become too expensive, thus “signaling” to homeowners that rebuilding in place is no longer feasible. However, the federal government has underwritten flood insurance through the National Flood Insurance Program (N.F.I.P.) since the 1960s. Critics have argued that these insurance premiums are not actuarily sound, meaning that homeowner premiums are not paying the real cost of insuring against catastrophic loss from flooding. As a result, when a major storm like Sandy occurs, N.F.I.P. must borrow billions of dollars from the Treasury in order to cover the costs of the disaster. Congressional efforts to reform N.F.I.P. and increase flood insurance premiums post-Sandy were met with resistance, in part because the true costs would be exceedingly high for homeowners, such as the New Jersey families who would have experienced an increase of premium payments from $900 to $30,000 per year.
A second obstacle to adaptation is that N.F.I.P. and federal disaster relief programs have historically focused on rebuilding homes to their pre-storm condition, rather than assessing and incentivizing movement away from certain high-risk areas. According to the New York Times, “repetitive-loss properties” in 1998 accounted for 2% of N.F.I.P insured properties but 40% of its losses. In Dauphin Island, Alabama, residents have paid $9.3 million in premiums and have received $72 million in claims since 1988 and $80 million in disaster recovery money. Siders calls this the “schizophrenia” of property owners who want to be left alone, until they need taxpayers to fund new roads and sand dunes following a major storm
These federal programs create a moral hazard problem: residents of some coastal communities are given a false sense of security about a particular area, while the true costs of their exposure are being subsidized by the federal government. The programs also encourage continued development in high-risk zones, with homeowners and developers feeling confident that the government will repeatedly bail them out when disaster inevitably strikes.
In the very near future, these policies will become both economically impractical and environmentally unfeasible. As storms of the same intensity as Hurricane Sandy occur more frequently, difficult questions about whether and at what cost to rebuild precarious coastal communities will only intensify. What is the tipping point at which taxpayers should no longer pay for precarious beachfront lifestyles? What storm event will force us to shift our thinking about the continued viability of certain areas? As Liz Kozlov points out, the migration of residents from small islands in the Pacific Ocean is discussed as inevitable, but it is assumed that communities in the United States will exist in perpetuity.
Managed Retreat: Imagining a New Coastline
Perhaps it is time to reimagine our relationship to the waterfront. The grassroots movement for voluntary buyouts in Staten Island provides an interesting example—and a warning sign—for how to deal with vulnerable coastlines, especially those home to working-class communities. Four months after Hurricane Sandy, the community of Oakwood Beach successfully organized to demand that the state purchase and demolish their homes and transform the area into public land to be enjoyed by future generations. Rather than rebuilding in place or erecting walls, the community decided to proactively “retreat” from the homes they had lived in for generations. Then mayor Michael Bloomberg opposed the idea, invoking wartime language by calling for fortification of the waterfront. But Liz Kozlov’s ethnographic research showed that families who wanted the buyout saw that “retreat was not an abandonment of the waterfront…but rather an investment in it, one that would strengthen its natural resources while assuring the recovery and long-term safety of its present inhabitants.”
The Staten Island case study reveals both the opportunities and challenges of buyout initiatives. Several other neighborhoods followed the organizing efforts of Oakwood Beach and received buyouts as well. But one study found that 20% of participants who accepted the buyouts moved to areas with the same or greater risk of flooding, and 98% moved to areas with higher poverty rates than where they had been living. While the state buyout prohibited future construction in the area, the city’s buyout plan included the right to sell the land to developers who would rebuild in a “more flood-resistant way.”
As Siders argues, it is high time to consider retreat on a national scale. Managed retreat —”the purposeful, coordinated movement of people and assets out of harm’s way”— provides an opportunity to respond to climate change proactively, in an intentional and equitable way, rather than through ad hoc individual decisions in response to repeated disasters. Large-scale retreat would require politicians to “put long-term communal good above short-term economic or political gain” while challenging Americans to “reconceptualize our relationship with risk and what it means to own property.”
But to make such a plan feasible, officials and residents alike would need to shift deeply ingrained psychological and cultural attitudes. “Few adaptation strategies need a public relations campaign as much as managed retreat,” Siders concedes. How do we begin speaking about the idea of giving up or dramatically altering a way of life for thousands of coastal communities? Or, as my friend Rebecca put it: “There’s the sentimental value of the property, but there’s also a sense that we need to enjoy our life while we’re living it.” For her family, that includes returning to the beach house every summer, while simultaneously acknowledging that the Island as we know it will be gone within our lifetime.
Someone once said that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” I thought about this quote when I took my in-laws to Beach Haven this past winter. I had never been to Rebecca and Steve’s house in the off-season before. Driving down street after street of empty homes and closed-up shops, it wasn’t hard to imagine a future in which LBI is a ghost town abandoned to the elements. We visited a protected wildlife refuge at the southern tip of the Island that is closed to visitors in the summer months. Past the last row of beautiful homes, we walked for miles along a fragile stretch of sand that seemed to extend forever. In addition to protecting the endangered nesting birds, this refuge also prevents humans from attempting to develop the Island’s most vulnerable stretch of beach. What would it look like to extend that refuge out even further?
As coastlines continue to erode and beachfront living becomes increasingly precarious, we will be faced with a difficult choice: do we continue resisting, rebuilding, and reshoring until the forces of nature become intolerable? Or do we proactively pull back from the coasts, seizing an opportunity to implement policies fairly and equitably? The transformative solutions we need in order to adapt to climate change are not far-fetched. The examples are right in front of our eyes, if only we are able to see them.
*Interview with Steve Ebner and Rebecca Ebner (April 9, 2021).
** A.R. Siders, Temple Law Review, Vol. 93 Symposium: “A Gathering Wave: Emerging Legal and Policy Implications of Climate Migration” (Feb. 26, 2021).