Sierra — UNDERWATER ; Could climate chaos sink the US real estate market?
A flooded neighborhood in Pender County, North Carolina, after Hurricane Florence in 2018. | Photo By Kristen Zeis/The Virginian-Pilot
Spring 2023
By Amanda Abrams — Could climate chaos sink the US real estate market?
Liz Greene hadn’t originally intended to buy this house. She’d been looking at another one here in the River Haven subdivision, 20 miles northeast of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. It had the same beige siding, the same slab foundation and still-growing-in yard, but it was in a location she liked better. At the last minute, though, the developer who built the subdivision slid her into this one.
Before she bought the house, Greene said, she asked the builder and the real estate agent if the property tended to flood. “They said, ‘Not a drop.’” Shortly after moving in, she began to get hints that this might not be true. A utility-company worker told Greene, “We wondered who’d get stuck with that lot.”
Soon she understood why. The house sits a good eight feet below the road behind it, and five or six feet lower than the other homes on the block. When it rains, water immediately gathers in the yard. “You get a drizzle, and if the ground is already saturated, it’ll be like a moat around the house,” Greene said. “I sit in water all the time.”
So far, the water hasn’t entered her house. But in 2018, two years before Greene bought the property, Hurricane Florence came through and badly flooded the area; her lot was underwater. She’s terrified it will happen again and inundate every thing she owns.
In Horry County, flooding experiences like Greene’s are far from rare. The Facebook page of Horry County Rising, a local flood-focused group, is busy with thousands of followers. In between informational messages from the group’s founder, April O’Leary, residents write about their swamped kitchens or soaking yards. Such posts often earn dozens of sympathetic, “I’ve been there” comments.
“Prayers for everyone that is flooding. Our yard has flooded now for the eighth time. We have lost so much stuff,” one resident wrote. Another said, “I have lived here my whole life, and it has gotten far worse. Yes, these areas have always flooded, but never this often. This is insane.”
It’s true that recent hurricanes have been severe; Hurricane Florence led to more than 2,000 flooded homes in the county. The problem, though, isn’t simply storm surges along the coast. It’s the very nature of the low-lying landscape. Several rivers meander through the flat, swampy county and overflow after intense downpours, the kind that are occurring much more frequently as a warmer atmosphere leads to more intense rain events.
This is a deep-red county in a Republican state, and the term climate change rarely comes up. Instead, people attribute the water issues to destroyed marshlands and razed forests. “Places are flooding that have never flooded before due to filling wetlands and removing trees,” reads a common sentiment on the Horry County Rising Facebook page.
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