It’s quite an assumption as to which state’s reality and its priorities in governance qualify it to be the biggest loser. We have states devasted by wildfires, vast swaths of agricultural lands succumbing to permanent desertification, unbridled poverty in states where citizens seem to be left behind with, massive flooding in other areas – in blue and red states – so let me provide the basis for my “loser” assessment. I have focused on the greatest economic and value losses impacting the greatest number of people. Sure, New York City experienced sequential unprecedented flooding from recent tropical storms, but the damage was not widespread across the state, and life has pretty much returned to normal. Not to mention that NYC has financial resources to target future devastation, albeit a very expensive effort.
Florida, on the other hand, is the third most populous state (behind California and Texas) with lots of large urban areas spread across the state with the majority near or on the coast. It sits in a hurricane alley that continually gets pounded by some of the worst tropical storms anywhere. So much of the state sits on very porous limestone that is a major conduit for underground water and coastal seepage, giving rise to sinkholes and underground collapse for buildings not properly anchored against that reality. It is also one of the flattest states in the union, with estimates that coast erosion will continue to claim very valuable real estate, perhaps even as much as a third of the entire state, within a century. Mortgages in coastal areas are often limited to 10 or 15 years and property insurance in these coastal communities is either unavailable or with premiums and deductibles soaring into the stratosphere.
Once considered a political “swing state,” Florida has drifted solidly into MAGA Republicanism. Climate change is marginalized. COVID is considered irrelevant to the point where government has disallowed mask mandates and suggested that vaccines are both dangerous and ineffective. Led by a governor with strong autocratic leanings, Florida has mounted an “anti-woke” campaign that bans books from schools and public libraries, requires teachers to follow a strict curriculum that distorts current and past racial and gender realities (including whitewashing slavery itself), but not only ignores fixing educational failings and teach shortages but mounts a campaign that makes recruiting new teachers very difficult.
With 22 million people, mostly residing in large coastal cities, Florida has faced a disproportionate number of catastrophic hurricanes, undeniable coastal erosion, and its future only suggests “more of the same only much worse and more frequent.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whose fall in the GOP candidacy polls can only be described as precipitous, has been one of the most vociferous anti-educational/particularly medical and scientific “elite” critics, you’d think he was a high school dropout. Instead, he is a Yale (BA history) and Harvard (Law School)-educated high school dropout wannabe. COVID should have been left without vaccinations (he got them, though), and climate change just requires raising a few highways and buildings, an easy fix.
But Florida is beginning to lose values and money by the billion-load: Climate change is affecting communities nationwide, but Florida often seems like ground zero. In September 2022, Hurricane Ian devastated southwest Florida, killing at least 156 people and causing an estimated $113 billion in damage. Then Hurricane Idalia shut down the Florida Panhandle in September 2023, augmented by a blue supermoon that also increased tidal flooding in southeast Florida.
Communities can adapt to some of these effects, or at least buy time, by taking steps such as upgrading stormwater systems and raising roads and sidewalks. But climate disasters and sea-level rise also harm local governments financially by increasing costs and undercutting their property tax bases. Local reliance on property taxes also can discourage cities from steering development out of flood zones, which is essential for reducing long-term risks.
In a newly published study and supporting online StoryMap, we present the first-ever municipal fiscal impact assessment of sea-level rise in Florida and combine it with a statewide survey of coastal planners and managers. We wanted to know how sea-level rise would affect municipal tax revenues and whether coastal planners and managers are accounting for these fiscal impacts.
Our study finds that more than half of Florida’s 410 municipalities will be affected by 6.6 feet of sea-level rise. Almost 30% of all local revenues currently generated by these 211 municipalities come from buildings in areas that will become chronically flooded, potentially by the end of the century. Yet planners and managers remain largely unaware of how much climate change will affect local fiscal health. Some communities with the most at risk are doing the least to prepare...
Property taxes are critically important for municipal governments. Nationwide, they provide 30% of local revenues. They are one of the few funding sources that local governments control, and climate change directly threatens them.
As climate change warms ocean waters, it fuels hurricanes and increases their reach and intensity. Climate change also is raising sea levels, which increases coastal flooding during both storms and high tides, often referred to as sunny-day flooding. Unlike storms, sea-level rise doesn’t recede, so it threatens to permanently inundate coastal lands over time.
Property tax revenues may decline as insurance companies and property markets downgrade property values to reflect climate impacts, such as increasing flood risks and wildfires. Already a growing number of insurance companies have decided to stop covering some regions and types of weather events, raise premiums and deductibles, and drop existing policies as payouts rise in the wake of natural disasters. Growing costs of insuring or repairing homes may further hurt property values and increase home abandonment.
Climate change also makes it more expensive to provide municipal services like water, sewage and road maintenance. For example, high heat buckles roads, rising water tables wash out their substructure, and heavier rains stress stormwater systems. If cities don’t adapt, increasing damage from climate-driven disasters and sea-level rise will create a vicious fiscal cycle, eroding local tax bases and driving up services costs—which in turn leaves less money for adaptation.
However, if cities reduce development in vulnerable areas, their property taxes and other revenues will take a hit. And if they build more seawalls and homes fortified to withstand hurricanes and storms, they will induce more people to live in harm’s way… In Florida, we found that these theoretical dynamics are already occurring. Linda Shi, assistant professor of city and regional planning at Cornell University, Tisha Joseph Holmes and William Butler, associate professors of urban and regional planning at Florida State University, in FastCompany.com, October 8th (reprinted from The Conversation).
Indeed, all coastal communities will face ocean erosion to one degree or another. Florida is an extreme example, with its limestone underpinnings under land that is mostly at sea level, but it is cursed with one of the least effective state governments that simply refuses to deal with what is already happening. What are your state and local governments doing to contain or deal with seemingly unstoppable climate change?
I’m Peter Dekom, and denial and marginalization have never impressed Mother Nature … ever… and Florida is the poster-state for how do it all wrong.
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