I honestly found this video kind of frustrating. The guy constantly talks about affordability completely avoiding the elephant in the room: the land these houses are built on is usually already...
I honestly found this video kind of frustrating. The guy constantly talks about affordability completely avoiding the elephant in the room: the land these houses are built on is usually already worth millions of dollars by itself. The only people affording these houses are already multi-millionaires or people who are inheriting them. He finally starts talking about the obvious solution to these houses falling apart at the end and he basically brushes it off and ignores that the real thing to examine is our knowledge of environmental science.
The actual experiment is cool and interesting, but it feels like bending over backward to say that the research will have any affect on the average person who is increasingly unable to afford any house, let alone beachfront property.
IMO your frustration is misplaced, and I suspect it's based on a misunderstanding about what kinds of beach/waterfront properties are actually available for sale out there. "Usually" is not the...
IMO your frustration is misplaced, and I suspect it's based on a misunderstanding about what kinds of beach/waterfront properties are actually available for sale out there.
the land these houses are built on is usually already worth millions of dollars by itself
"Usually" is not the same as "always", and there are still plenty of beach/waterfront (storm surge affected) properties in lower income, non-touristy parts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida that are being sold for below $500k. E.g. $399,900 in Corpus Christi TX, $395,000 in Gulf Shores AL, $460,000 in Perdido Key FL, etc.
p.s. The reason I know about that sort of property is because I lived in Florida, where relatively cheap beach/waterfront properties like that are for sale all over the state. And the reason for the sheer amount of those properties in Florida, in particular, but also elsewhere in the Southern US is because of all the canals, artificial inlets, and artificial islands being built along the coastline these days. So instead of one line of extremely exclusive and extremely high value beachfront properties, like you're probably imagining, you can have an entire city full of smaller waterfront properties, all still connected to the ocean. E.g. See Cape Coral FL, for a perfect example of this style of canal/inlet building. And also worth noting, a significant portion of those properties are <$500k, BTW.
Well said. One other thing I would add is that a lot of these lessons apply to homes that are nowhere near the beach. Like I definitely get the feeling of 'why should I care about this, this only...
Well said. One other thing I would add is that a lot of these lessons apply to homes that are nowhere near the beach. Like I definitely get the feeling of 'why should I care about this, this only applies to multimillion-dollar beachfront homes', but that is simply not true. These storms are becoming more powerful, and reaching inland further and further with these massive storm surges and flooding issues. I lived through Ian (the storm mentioned at the beginning of the video). My area got 20-30 inches of rain in less than a week. Houses miles away from the beach were affected despite not being anywhere near those multimillion-dollar beachfront homes. People forget that Florida has a shit ton of lakes and rivers and canals and other waterways that all got absolutely bombarded with water. If you live in a low-lying area next to a big lake or river, it doesn't matter how close or far you are from the beach if your lake goes up by 2 feet, your $250k home is just as vulnerable as the $900k home a block away.
One quick tidbit that I didn't even learn about until Milton in 2024 but that feels somewhat related to all this: some areas near rivers actually see their peak flooding days or even weeks AFTER the actual storm. Like a week or two after Milton, the areas around the St. Johns River were at their peak levels, meaning residents there had to deal with more flooding than during the actual time of the storm. And again this is miles and miles inland, nowhere near the coast. And these people were dealing with flooding of like 10+ feet in some places because all that water that dropped everywhere eventually made its way to the river (to eventually flow out into the ocean). So yeah, big impacts despite not being anywhere near the coast. So studies about buildings being built slightly higher up (like in the video) would definitely apply to those homes as well.
And speaking of learning from storms, every big storm is researched like crazy in Florida for obvious reasons (I'm sure other places too, I'm just more familiar with Florida). I wrote a paper in grad school about the effects of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and basically it boiled down to 'we learned a shit ton of lessons from that storm and now build our houses completely differently as a result'. Andrew was more about wind than flooding (highest recorded wind speed at the time for a hurricane) so a lot of the lessons were things like the types of tie-downs to use to hold your roof and walls together. Now with Ian (and Milton which was 2 years later and surprisingly similar in trajectory and impact), it does not surprise me that we are studying the affects of storm surges and flooding since those were big factors in those two recent storms. Every storm is worth analyzing because there are tons of things you don't even think about that can have drastic ramifications on how people are impacted in future storms. There's the obvious building construction practices like in this video, but also things like how the emergency information was disseminated, the politics of how aid was applied, the specific wording used in key messaging before the impact. These postmortems are the reasons states call a state of emergency before the actual storm lands, why most people know to have a hurricane kit ready (or what a hurricane kit even is), and why building codes are the way they are in impact-prone areas.
I honestly found this video kind of frustrating. The guy constantly talks about affordability completely avoiding the elephant in the room: the land these houses are built on is usually already worth millions of dollars by itself. The only people affording these houses are already multi-millionaires or people who are inheriting them. He finally starts talking about the obvious solution to these houses falling apart at the end and he basically brushes it off and ignores that the real thing to examine is our knowledge of environmental science.
The actual experiment is cool and interesting, but it feels like bending over backward to say that the research will have any affect on the average person who is increasingly unable to afford any house, let alone beachfront property.
IMO your frustration is misplaced, and I suspect it's based on a misunderstanding about what kinds of beach/waterfront properties are actually available for sale out there.
"Usually" is not the same as "always", and there are still plenty of beach/waterfront (storm surge affected) properties in lower income, non-touristy parts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida that are being sold for below $500k. E.g. $399,900 in Corpus Christi TX, $395,000 in Gulf Shores AL, $460,000 in Perdido Key FL, etc.
p.s. The reason I know about that sort of property is because I lived in Florida, where relatively cheap beach/waterfront properties like that are for sale all over the state. And the reason for the sheer amount of those properties in Florida, in particular, but also elsewhere in the Southern US is because of all the canals, artificial inlets, and artificial islands being built along the coastline these days. So instead of one line of extremely exclusive and extremely high value beachfront properties, like you're probably imagining, you can have an entire city full of smaller waterfront properties, all still connected to the ocean. E.g. See Cape Coral FL, for a perfect example of this style of canal/inlet building. And also worth noting, a significant portion of those properties are <$500k, BTW.
Well said. One other thing I would add is that a lot of these lessons apply to homes that are nowhere near the beach. Like I definitely get the feeling of 'why should I care about this, this only applies to multimillion-dollar beachfront homes', but that is simply not true. These storms are becoming more powerful, and reaching inland further and further with these massive storm surges and flooding issues. I lived through Ian (the storm mentioned at the beginning of the video). My area got 20-30 inches of rain in less than a week. Houses miles away from the beach were affected despite not being anywhere near those multimillion-dollar beachfront homes. People forget that Florida has a shit ton of lakes and rivers and canals and other waterways that all got absolutely bombarded with water. If you live in a low-lying area next to a big lake or river, it doesn't matter how close or far you are from the beach if your lake goes up by 2 feet, your $250k home is just as vulnerable as the $900k home a block away.
One quick tidbit that I didn't even learn about until Milton in 2024 but that feels somewhat related to all this: some areas near rivers actually see their peak flooding days or even weeks AFTER the actual storm. Like a week or two after Milton, the areas around the St. Johns River were at their peak levels, meaning residents there had to deal with more flooding than during the actual time of the storm. And again this is miles and miles inland, nowhere near the coast. And these people were dealing with flooding of like 10+ feet in some places because all that water that dropped everywhere eventually made its way to the river (to eventually flow out into the ocean). So yeah, big impacts despite not being anywhere near the coast. So studies about buildings being built slightly higher up (like in the video) would definitely apply to those homes as well.
And speaking of learning from storms, every big storm is researched like crazy in Florida for obvious reasons (I'm sure other places too, I'm just more familiar with Florida). I wrote a paper in grad school about the effects of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and basically it boiled down to 'we learned a shit ton of lessons from that storm and now build our houses completely differently as a result'. Andrew was more about wind than flooding (highest recorded wind speed at the time for a hurricane) so a lot of the lessons were things like the types of tie-downs to use to hold your roof and walls together. Now with Ian (and Milton which was 2 years later and surprisingly similar in trajectory and impact), it does not surprise me that we are studying the affects of storm surges and flooding since those were big factors in those two recent storms. Every storm is worth analyzing because there are tons of things you don't even think about that can have drastic ramifications on how people are impacted in future storms. There's the obvious building construction practices like in this video, but also things like how the emergency information was disseminated, the politics of how aid was applied, the specific wording used in key messaging before the impact. These postmortems are the reasons states call a state of emergency before the actual storm lands, why most people know to have a hurricane kit ready (or what a hurricane kit even is), and why building codes are the way they are in impact-prone areas.