The New York Times Op Ed — We Will All End Up Paying for Someone Else’s Beach House

Sam Kalda

Aug 8, 2022

Opinion Guest Essay by Francis Wilkinson (columnist at Bloomberg)

A video of a North Carolina beach house being dismembered by a voracious ocean was a viral hit this spring. But it won’t be long before the novelty wears off. As sea level rises and storm surges grow more intense, beach towns on every coast of the United States will soon be sacrificing more real estate to Poseidon. A 2018 study by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that more than 300,000 coastal homes, currently worth well over $100 billion, are at risk of “chronic inundation” by 2045.

The matter of large swaths of deluxe real estate erected in harm’s way is not new. But as extreme weather events compound, the obvious perils of waterfront living are growing both more obvious and more perilous. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration cited 20 different “billion-dollar weather and climate disasters” in 2021. The analytics firm CoreLogic countsmore than 7.5 million homes with “direct or indirect coastal exposure and subsequent risk from coastal storm surge and damage from hurricanes.”

In the past half-century, American beach towns shucked the bohemians and the beachcombers, the drifters and the sun worshipers. The family that was once affluent enough to own a seaside cottage has grown up, grown very rich and moved into a turreted fantasy with commodified sea views. A few years ago, I asked an old-timer at the Jersey Shore why her town was bursting with people but the beach was strangely uncrowded. She told me that the new rich spend much less time by the water’s edge. “It’s all about the houses,” she said.

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