Florida town’s climate reckoning: Storms so costly, homeowners may be forced out
| ENGLEWOOD, FLA.
In Englewood, Florida, people say each hurricane has its own personality.
But recent storms are forcing many homeowners into the same corner. The finances of insurance and disaster recovery will make it hard for many to keep their homes – and stave off developers eyeing the coastline.
Why We Wrote This
As a warming climate fuels more intense storms, repair and prevention bring overwhelming costs. If people are forced to move, the character of communities could change forever.
It’s a scenario that researchers worry will be repeated across the country, as flooding and other natural disasters increase with a warming climate.
Englewood is full of retirees and service-industry workers, living in generational houses and small rental units, bound to their neighbors and the waterways that form the community’s veins.
Bill Dunson, who lives there part time, says Englewood will change.
“They haven’t wanted to sell out,” he says. “Because if you sell out, what are you going to do with the money? Where can you go? They got such a good thing here, right? But now they’re going to be forced to.”
Gene Jeffers is living in a camper while his home is repaired. Soon, he says, cash buyers will scoop up nearby ruined homes, and his lot will be too valuable – and too vulnerable – to keep.
“I love this house, but it don’t love me no more,” he says.
Hurricanes, people here say, are like unicorns. Each has its own personality, its own legacy.
Ian, which barreled onto shore in September 2022, was about wind; ferocious gusts that blew apart houses and snapped the tops off oak trees and prompted residents of this working-class city to rally around a new slogan: #EnglewoodStrong.
Last fall, Helene brought flooding rains as it traveled up the coast, pushing ocean water into Tampa Bay and the neighborhoods of St. Petersburg, about an hour’s drive north and a world away from this former fishing village.
Why We Wrote This
As a warming climate fuels more intense storms, repair and prevention bring overwhelming costs. If people are forced to move, the character of communities could change forever.
But it was the next storm, Milton, with its surge that spilled over roads and houses, carrying away belongings and leaving soggy floor joists and ruined drywall, that many here worry could change their community for good.
This is not because repeated storms make people want to leave Englewood, population around 20,000. Even with the water damage and the mold and the recognition that the wealthiest part of town is on a barrier island that should never be expected to stay put, many in Englewood still see their city as a gem; an Old Florida holdout in one of the fastest-growing regions in the country.
But the finances of insurance and disaster recovery after Milton are making it hard for many to imagine how they will keep their homes – and how they will continue to stave off the developers that have bought, built, and sold much of the Gulf of Mexico coastline.
It is an inflection point that researchers worry will be repeated across the country, as flooding and other natural disasters increase with a warming climate. A slew of studies show that these events tend to amplify housing disparity and income inequality. A Brookings Institution 2023 report documented the rent increases that accompany natural disasters – as much as 12%, researchers found, for communities with multiple disaster events between 2000 and 2020.
Also last year, researchers from the University of San Diego, in California, and the nonprofit group Resources for the Future published an article in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management that detailed how wealthier homeowners tended to buy up property in Florida communities recovering from hurricanes, creating lasting demographic changes.
Many housing advocates point out that federal disaster relief is slow to arrive, when it trickles down to homeowners at all. And policies created in the name of long-term resilience – flood zone building requirements, for instance – are creating a bifurcated system. On the one hand are people – or private equity firms – with the cash to pay for hugely expensive home upgrades, such as rebuilding on stilts, or who can afford to self-insure and repair their properties. On the other are people like Gene Jeffers, sitting in a lawn chair on his driveway, his ruined house to his right, a vacation camper on loan from Habitat for Humanity South Sarasota County to his left.
“I lost my roof with Ian, my furniture with Helene,” Mr. Jeffers says, still giving the easy smile that has endeared him to his neighbors for decades. “Milton took the house.”
Homeowners face ‘impossible situation’
Much of the national discourse about climate resilience on the U.S. coastlines revolves around how and whether insurance companies or governments should support wealthy homeowners who chose – despite the warnings of climate scientists, who predict stronger storms and higher sea levels – to buy on the water. But cities like Englewood highlight a different reality. It is home to retirees and service-industry workers, living in generational houses and small rental units, on fixed incomes and often paycheck to paycheck. They are tightly bound to their neighbors and the waterways that form the veins of this community.
Mr. Jeffers’ in-laws bought his low-slung green home across the street from Lemon Bay in 1972. He moved in in 1997, after retiring from an Indiana factory job. At that time, Englewood was still mostly a town of mullet fishers and service workers employed by the higher-end resort communities to the north and south.
He expects he’ll be gone within two years. By then, Mr. Jeffers imagines, cash buyers will have scooped up the ruined homes across the street, and his lot is going to be too valuable – and too vulnerable to storms – to keep.
“I love this house, but it don’t love me no more,” he says, and shrugs.
He ticks off the reasons.
He expects the ferocious storms to continue, rebuilding is expensive, and there’s no way he can afford homeowners insurance. He’s checked, and it would cost him nearly $1,000 a month. Taxes have gone up. And when asked about flood insurance, he just laughs. Even if he could afford the thousands each year that it would cost, there’s no way he could bring his home up to code in the way the National Flood Insurance Program requires.
Indeed, something called the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s “50% rule” is the talk of the town here. It’s the subject of frustration at municipal meetings. It’s what diners talk about at The Waverly restaurant, whose beachside water view is now blocked by a multiple-story pile of sand, which had washed over this key during the storm and has been collected here.
The rule prohibits repairs or improvements to a structure of more than 50% of its market value – just the structure, not the property – unless it is brought into compliance with flood regulations. In other words, if the damage to a small ranch house worth about $100,000 is more than $50,000, homeowners are not covered unless they pay to bring the home into flood plain building compliance, which in this part of coastal Florida often requires raising the house onto stilts, costing as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The idea behind the policy was to keep federal money from being wasted. But in reality, the rule “places people in an impossible position,” says Zoe Middleton, associate director for Just Climate Resilience at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “They’re forcing change without funding adaptation.”
Mr. Jeffers doesn’t know when he will be able to finish enough repairs to move back inside. The local Habitat for Humanity secured him a trailer after CEO Christina McCauley called up friends at a local business, SWFL Camping Rentals. Now, she’s helping him find construction materials. He needs everything: two-by-fours, cabinets, drywall.
Supporting people through disaster recovery is not directly her organization’s mission, Ms. McCauley acknowledges, but it is what neighbors do.
In the meantime, Mr. Jeffers put up the Christmas decorations that his neighbors expect, stringing some 5,000 lights around inflatable snowmen and reindeer. Another 10,000 lights were ruined by the storm.
“I’ve got to spread the joy,” he says.
Storms usher in stark questions
In the days and weeks after Milton, the #EnglewoodStrong hashtag started populating again online. The Chamber of Commerce fundraised for local businesses. Neighbors reached out to help clear debris from homes. Restaurants that weren’t destroyed held benefits to support other restaurants’ workers.
Pam Brobst has lived in Englewood for 45 years, ever since she moved here with her late husband, whose father was a mullet fisher. She loves this community – the way people gather at beach establishments to listen to live music, even when it isn’t very good; that neighbors know each others’ names and phone numbers; and how the feral cats come to her door because they know she will feed them.
When Milton came, she piled everything in her home on cabinets and tables, put plastic coverings on her bed and sandbags by the door, evacuated, and prayed for the best. When she returned, the debris still left over from Helene was covering her yard – but her home was spared. She was relieved, but teared up thinking about neighbors not as lucky, still living in hotels on FEMA emergency money.
“I don’t know what they’ll do,” she says. “I just don’t know.”
The answer, says Bill Dunson, walking past piles of rubble along Beach Road, where he has been spending half the year for decades, is that people will be forced to leave and the community will change.
The median property value in Englewood, $340,000, is about 20% less than Florida’s average, according to Bankrate.com. But that’s still more than what many people here can afford.
Statistics about cash buyers – the ones Mr. Jeffers believes will buy ruined houses on his street – are hard to pin down for Englewood. The National Association of Realtors says that nearby Fort Myers and Naples have some of the highest percentages of cash buyers in the country – at 58.9% and 52.2%, respectively.
“If you come back in five or 10 years, there will be condos here,” Dr. Dunson says, pointing to a trailer park perched with a view of the glimmering Gulf of Mexico. The homes there were shredded by the storm surge.
For years, he says, the community has protected itself against development, keeping height restrictions in place, voting down offers to buy out modest homes.
“People who are here have jealously guarded their property,” he says. “They haven’t wanted to sell out. Because if you sell out, what are you going to do with the money? Where can you go? They got such a good thing here, right? But now they’re going to be forced to.”
This sliver of a neighborhood is on a barrier island called Manasota Key, where Milton’s storm surge was so powerful that it cut a new inlet. Older condo structures are crumpled; trash cans and even dumpsters lie where they were swept. In early December, signs planted along the street offered cleaning services, demolition services, and repairs. Some proclaimed, “We buy houses for cash.”
On Dr. Dunson’s lot, across the street from the Gulf and on the mangrove-thick banks of Lemon Bay, many of his plants were killed by the salt water that flushed over his yard. He isn’t bitter, though. It may be that only plants that can tolerate saltwater incursion will survive here, he says.
He spent years as a biology professor at Pennsylvania State University. He knows he lives on a barrier island. Nature moves, changes, and adapts. And humans must as well.
“If you allow people to live out here, you need to have them build structures that are not damaged so easily,” he says. “Because if the government is going to stand behind and pay for at least some of the damage, it’s got to say that.”
He points out a Norfolk Island pine nearby; a tree that comes from the Western Pacific but is unusually resistant to hurricanes. It may lose limbs during a storm, but rarely topples.
People used to argue over whether this tree was invasive, he says, and whether it should be here. Some people cut them down to keep space for native Florida species. But because of its resilience during storms, it has provided needed habitat for osprey and eagles, who are now competing over its nesting space.
“Decisions in ecology,” he says, “as in politics and religion and everything else, are very rarely black and white.”
