Washington Post - Jim Morrison
Rising seas and worsening flooding are forcing many communities to plan their retreat from the coasts
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William Stiles of the group Wetlands Watch inspects a collapsed water retaining wall in Norfolk, Va. (Photos by Parker Michels-Boyce for The Washington Post)
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On Richmond Crescent in Norfolk, Va., more than a dozen
homes rise in varying heights, forming a streetscape bar graph tracing
the past decade’s increasing threat of flooding from an inlet of the
Lafayette River. A green house with a prominent front porch is a modest
four feet off the ground. Two doors down, a 70-year-old cottage has been
newly raised 11 feet on blocks, at a cost of $154,000, nearly all of it
federal and state money. On the corner, a one-story white-brick ranch
looms about seven feet up, matching the height of the sage-colored brick
house next door. A few homes still on ground level hunker among the
high and dry houses looking down their proverbial noses at them.George
Homewood, Norfolk’s planning director, has chosen the city’s affluent
Larchmont neighborhood for our walking tour on this unseasonably warm
December day.
He pauses in the middle of Richmond Crescent, where
repeated tidal flooding has cracked and buckled the asphalt, and
wetlands grasses fringe the street. Nodding toward a new house that
towers 12 feet above sea level, he poses the hard questions that cities
and counties are only beginning to acknowledge as waters along the U.S.
coasts continue their inevitable invasion. Will the city be better off
if people live in that house for another 30 to 50 years but are unable
to get in or out during high tides or lingering storms? How long, he
asks, does the city maintain the street? Or keep the storm-water and
sewer systems operating? What happens years from now, when emergency
services can’t get to these homes because the street has flooded? “At
some point, the investment in infrastructure can’t be sustained,” he
says. “That’s the bottom line.”
Hurricanes get the headlines, but on this
street, it will be the repeated jabs of flooding day after day from
climate change, with its rising tides and increasingly stronger storms,
that will force the city to make tough choices. By 2040, projections by
the Virginia Institute of Marine Science show, the river will overflow
its banks and flood this street twice daily during high tides. Norfolk
plans to protect the city with $1.8 billion in storm-surge barriers and
flood walls, but those projects — if built — won’t stop the rising tides
in Larchmont. The water will come. This is where Norfolk will
eventually begin its retreat.The city doesn’t use that politically
explosive term, the Voldemort of climate adaptation. Planners here and
elsewhere refer to it as the “r-word.”
They’re happy to talk about the
other r-word — resilience, which includes projects like sea walls,
retention ponds, rebuilding wetlands and improved storm-water capacity.
Retreat signals surrender, while resilience screams reassurance: Don’t
worry. Stay. We’ll protect you. That medicine goes down easier. It has
been embraced by dozens of cities and states that have added resilience
officers. Norfolk’s Vision 2100
plan,
widely praised for envisioning a city withdrawing from some
neighborhoods by making only “judicious” investments in protecting homes
from rising waters, uses the word “retreat” only once, and then to say
that the city will not retreat but will emphasize “living with the
water.”
The idea — for now — is not to force residents to abandon
neighborhoods like Larchmont, but to have them gradually decide to leave
as the inconvenience of staying grows. “I would like to abdicate as
much to the marketplace as possible so that we’re not actually making
the hard decisions that impact people, but we’re finding ways to
encourage people to make smart decisions for themselves,” Homewood says.
“We’re not saying that happens on a dime, but over time as that happens
with more and more property, then we begin to have that managed
retreat.”
At its core, managed retreat is about getting people to leave a place called home. Though the
coronavirus
pandemic is the focus of our anxiety today, climate change is
continuing unabated in the meantime. As it advances, bringing rising sea
levels, increasingly devastating storms and more disastrous flooding,
communities across the nation will be contending with the question
confronting Norfolk: How do you unravel the allure of living on the
waterfront?
In recent decades, more and more Americans have moved to the
coasts. Managing the inevitable retreat is studded with legal,
financial and political sinkholes, a puzzle that will take decades to
piece together. And the time to start doing that, experts say, is now.
“Relocation is so difficult that you need to start planning for it long
in advance,” says A.R. Siders of the Disaster Research Center at the
University of Delaware’s Biden School of Public Policy and
Administration. “We need to start learning how to do this.”
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Above from left: Joe and Sarah Kennedy in front of their home on Richmond Crescent in Norfolk; a lot for sale on the same street, which floods.
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Norfolk’s
small steps prodding people to move out of harm’s way are rare among
local governments. Too rare, say researchers and climate crisis
advocates. Rather than discussing retreat, most threatened communities
are studying and, in some cases, building billion-dollar projects to
protect against coming encroachments. The Center for Climate Integrity,
an environmental advocacy group, last year issued a study concluding
that by 2040, building sea walls for U.S. coastal cities with more than
25,000 residents will require at least $42 billion. Expand that to
include communities of fewer than 25,000 and the cost skyrockets to $400
billion. That’s nearly the price of building the 47,000 miles of the
interstate highway system, which took four decades and cost more than
$500 billion in today’s dollars.
Researchers say those numbers are
conservative because they consider only sea walls, not other ways to
mitigate flood risk, including buying out homeowners and improving
storm-water systems.There won’t be enough money to protect every
endangered place. The Army Corps of Engineers, for instance, has a $98
billion backlog of authorized construction projects yet receives annual
construction appropriations of only about $2 billion, according to a
Congressional Research Service report. Andy Keeler, the head of public
policy at the Coastal Studies Institute and an economics professor at
East Carolina University, worries that resilience efforts create a
negative spiral of people believing their risks are lower than they are
and remaining in threatened areas they should be abandoning. This means
that their property values continue to rise, which reinforces economic
and political arguments for spending more money on resilience efforts.
“How do we make the transition from protecting ourselves to leaving?”
asks Keeler. “The big question is time. When is the time to stop
investing in protection and start shifting the resources over to people
leaving?”Ann Phillips, a retired rear admiral who is the special
assistant for coastal adaptation and protection for Virginia Gov. Ralph
Northam, says that cities and counties have legitimate concerns about
discussing retreat. They fear losing some of their tax base. They don’t
want to scare away business development. She is concerned about the
social justice aspects of managed retreat. Homeowners in a wealthy
neighborhood like Larchmont have more resources and options than those
in Ingleside, a mixed-income neighborhood that is also threatened but
hasn’t been the beneficiary of home-raising funds. As flooding becomes
more frequent in such places, the population transitions from homeowners
to renters and the neighborhood deteriorates. “The challenge is, how do
you get these people options before you get to the collapse?”
Phillips
asks as we take a morning walk through Ingleside. She is working on a
master plan for Virginia that defines the threat and deals with the
various challenges. What happens, for instance, to struggling rural
counties that won’t have the means to either armor in place or leave?
Finding a way to create incentives for the watermen and farmers and
others who have lived on their land for centuries will be a challenge.
“As a nation, we should be looking at this risk to our future and
evaluating it from a national perspective, and I don’t see that
happening,” Phillips says, echoing others I interviewed.Part of the
reason that conversation hasn’t happened is the magnitude and complexity
of the potential retreat in the United States. More than 126 million
people, about 40 percent of the U.S. population, live in coastal
counties that produce more than $8.3 trillion in goods and services,
according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
A 2019
study found that sea-level rise of six feet by 2100 could displace 13
million people, including more than 2.5 million refugees from Miami
alone. Another study examining maps of flooding along rivers concluded
that 41 million Americans live within the reach of a 100-year-flood with
a potential for $1.2 trillion worth of damage. “There is no local,
state or federal managed retreat plan or strategy,” says Rob Moore,
senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s
just a theoretical construct. The reality facing communities is that we
need to move very rapidly from this being theory to being practice, and
it’s very difficult to make that happen.”Beyond the financial, legal and
logistical barriers to retreat are the psychological barriers of
planning for the long term. “One of the challenges that these early
conversations about retreat have run into is that we’re so focused on
loss rather than focusing on what can be gained,” says Miyuki Hino, a
researcher in the environment, ecology and energy program at the
University of North Carolina, “whether it’s the new park, a safer
community, reduced spending by local governments and by the federal
government.”
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A vehicle drives through a flooded street in the upscale Larchmont neighborhood of Norfolk.
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The
first step to managed retreat will be a radical rethinking of federal,
state and local policies and subsidies that distort the true risk of
living in floodplains. Federal disaster and mitigation funds, for
instance, provide little incentive to restrict rebuilding in these
areas. That’s fine with cities and counties, because rebuilding in a
risky area keeps their tax base intact in the short term. In the long
term, though, it’s bad policy, says William Stiles of Wetlands Watch, a
Norfolk-based nonprofit organization that works with local governments
and other nonprofits on solutions to sea-level rise.
“As seas rise, it
costs more in public funds to maintain the streets, flood walls, sewer
systems and EMT services than the properties generate in taxes,” he
says. A study by Zillow and Climate Central last year found that after
Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the housing growth rate in New Jersey was
nearly three times higher in areas likely to flood once a decade than in
safer areas. “Think about that,” Siders says. “More homes, more
families at risk. And we’re going to reward that by giving states more
money the next time they have a disaster.”
In 21 states, buyers and
builders aren’t warned that they’re moving into a flood zone. “I can go
on Carfax and find out about the car I’m going to buy, but if I’m going
to take out a 30-year mortgage and tie up myself financially, in some
states I can’t find out if the house has been damaged,” says Siders.
“Home buyers are being tricked into buying properties that they would
not otherwise buy.”
On that stretch of Richmond Crescent in
Norfolk, Joe Kennedy and his wife figured they got a bargain on
waterfront property when they moved in to their $380,000 yellow house at
No. 1240 in May 2017, reassured by the sellers that flooding would be a
minor inconvenience for maybe 10 days a year. Kennedy, who works in
commercial real estate, soon discovered otherwise. The sellers
transferred their grandfathered federal flood insurance policy to him,
and when he got the documents, he learned that the house had suffered
flood damage in 2003, 2009 and 2011, totaling more than $32,000 in
payouts. Why didn’t he know that? Norfolk has more than 1,000 properties
that suffered repeated damage underwritten by federal insurance, but a
1974 federal law forbids disclosing those addresses.
Projected rise in sea level for 2100
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Sources: NOAA, City of Norfolk, OpenStreetMap, Meghan Kelly for THE WASHINGTON POST
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Kennedy
has two children younger than 2 and a third on the way. His wife works
at a hospital. They need to get in and out regularly on a street that
already floods. They’re about to refinance to a 30-year mortgage. Does
Kennedy think the house will be habitable in 30 years? “My wife and I
ask this question to each other all the time, because we’re planting our
flag here in Norfolk,” he says. The couple are considering their
options. If they could sell and not lose money, they would. They may
build an addition and raise the house. If they do that, it won’t be with
public help.
Norfolk has spent $5 million of federal and state funds in
the past decade to raise about 50 homes. In January the city received
$3.2 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to raise 11
more, but after that, it will stop elevating houses in floodplains. If
they sell, Kennedy says, he will inform buyers of the flood risk. That’s
not what many others do. A recent nationwide study found that 3.8
million properties in floodplains may be overvalued by $34 billion
because buyers would pay less if they knew about the houses’
vulnerability. Failing to properly price the risk also means there is
continued development in floodplains, making future retreat harder. “The
decisions we make today are going to be very influential in 30, 40, 50
years — the way we design cities and communities and where we put
infrastructure,” says Hino, a co-author of the study. “Once we’ve put it
there, it is really, really hard to remove it.”
Lack of
information isn’t the only barrier to promoting retreat. The National
Flood Insurance Program, a political punching bag $20 billion in debt
that Congress repeatedly promises to reform and then doesn’t, sets risk
based on flood projections that are decades out of date. For example,
some areas that flooded during Hurricane Sandy in 2012 had maps that had
not been updated since 1983. The program subsidizes rebuilding in
increasingly risky areas. Critics — and there are many — say taxpayers
in West Virginia are helping to pay for people to live on the waterfront
in Virginia. Between 1978 and May 2018, more than 36,000 properties
insured by the NFIP filed repeated claims for damage, according to
updated statistics from an earlier NRDC study.
On average, the
properties flooded five times; some flooded more than 30 times. The
damage claims for single-family homes worth less than $250,000 exceeded
their value. Owners received average payments of $149,980 for homes with
an average value of $114,764. Since 2000, according to the study, the
NFIP has spent $46.6 billion to repair and rebuild properties, but just
$804 million to buy out homeowners willing to relocate. “Many of those
homeowners would like nothing more than to never file another flood
insurance damage claim. They would like to get out of this cycle of
flood, rebuild, repeat,” says Moore of the NRDC. “But the flood
insurance program isn’t in that business. The flood insurance program is
in the rebuild-your-home business. What it won’t do is help you
actually move somewhere safer.”
Moving out of harm’s way saves
lives and money. The Great Flood of 1993, when the Mississippi and
Missouri rivers and their tributaries overflowed their banks, killed 50
people and caused $15 billion in damages across nine Midwestern states.
An Army Corps of Engineers study later found that to reduce the damage
would have required more than $6 billion in levee improvements, but
voluntary buyouts to remove structures from harm’s way would have cost
only $209 million.
Joshua Behr and Carol Considine, researchers at Old
Dominion University, modeled the effect of a hurricane on a vulnerable
Portsmouth, Va., neighborhood and concluded that if the city invested $1
million annually in voluntary buyouts over 31 years and transformed the
area into green space for floodwater retention, it would save about $40
million. (The only problem: The cash-strapped city doesn’t have the
money.) Similarly, Louisiana has a plan, described as a first step, to
buy thousands of threatened homes along the coast, many owned by poor
and elderly residents who stayed after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It’s
an about-face from a plan just three years ago that championed staying
in place. “People often think of retreat as the opposite of resilience,”
Hino says. “Actually, in many cases, the most resilient thing we can do
is to get out of the way.”
Figuring out how to get out of the
way and pay for it will take time. Examples of moving large numbers of
people are rare globally and nonexistent in the United States. Japan has
relocated 145,000 homes in the years since 2011, when a tsunami washed
over the northwest coast of Honshu, by forbidding rebuilding in
endangered areas. “Japan tells us it can be done if the motivation is
there,” says Nicholas Pinter, director of the Center for Watershed
Sciences at the University of California at Davis. Still, he concedes,
the lessons it offers “are grim. It takes the death of 16,000 to 20,000
people to motivate that kind of massive social change.”
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Erinn Brogren, right, walks with sons Hudson, center, and James, left, along a flooded section of Richmond Crescent in Norfolk.
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On
the morning of Aug. 1, 1993, Dennis Knobloch, the mayor of Valmeyer,
Ill., stood in a cemetery on a hill overlooking the town, helplessly
watching as the levees that had protected the village for four decades
failed when the Mississippi River crested at more than 49 feet, almost
20 feet above flood stage. A wall of water roared through Valmeyer,
swallowing homes, rising five feet up the living room walls of
Knobloch’s house.
A year later, I joined Knobloch as he wheeled
his black pickup over rutted ground being graded on a limestone bluff
high above the flood plain. “We’re actually on a street right now,” he
told me. “To the left will be the downtown business area.” After two
devastating bouts of flooding, the town’s 350 families had voted to
rebuild on this higher ground a mile and a half east of the old town.
When Knobloch first spoke to FEMA and suggested moving the town, he was
told it would take about a decade. He refused to accept that timeline,
lobbying Congress and state and federal officials. By January 1994, the
first ground had been broken.
Today, Valmeyer is thriving. The old
town had 900 people. The new one has 1,300 and is growing by the day. A
white water tower stands sentinel over winding streets radiating from a
town center. A handsome red brick school on South Cedar Bluff Drive and
a village hall on nearby Knobloch Boulevard form the heart of the new
community.
Valmeyer is a model — on a small scale — of managed
retreat. But it’s also an illustration of the rare combination of people
and circumstances that need to come together to make it happen.
Knobloch says the total cost for moving 225 families, businesses and
churches was about $70 million — $30 million for infrastructure and the
new school and $40 million more to buy out homeowners and businesses.
The move wasn’t without losses. Local businesses couldn’t wait for
residents to populate higher ground, he says, and many set up shop in
nearby towns.
Successful relocations, Pinter says, follow similar
models: They start while feet are still wet, they have relocation
blueprints in hand or create them quickly, and they have a strong
leader. Knobloch, who has consulted with other towns looking to
relocate, says that Valmeyer hit the rare sweet spot of available
funding and political will. “If you look at our situation,” he says, “it
was probably the only period in recent history where we could have done
this, because at both the state and federal level, the people that were
involved, both on the political side and on the side of the agencies,
embraced this idea, and they had the resources to help make it happen.”
Propelling
the Valmeyer relocation was post-disaster funding by the state and FEMA
to pay residents for their homes. Twenty-five years later, buyouts
remain a key retreat tool, although a recent study showed that they had
gone down even as the threat from flooding has risen. They are expensive
and the process takes years, often discouraging people who want to
sell. A study by Hino, Siders and others published last year of 43,000
FEMA buyouts between 1989 and 2017 found they disproportionately
benefited wealthy urban communities that have the staff to cut through
the paperwork and apply for federal money. Rural communities, which have
fewer resources overall to deal with the climate crisis, were less
likely to apply. And purchases were piecemeal, a few properties in an
average county, unlikely to effectively restore wetlands that help
mitigate storm surge and flood damage.
There are a few locally
funded buyout programs in the United States. Since 1999, Charlotte — an
example of an inland city with a network of creeks and streams that
overflow their banks when it rains — has spent $64 million to remove 460
structures and replace them with grasslands. And New Jersey’s Blue
Acres program has spent $375 million to buy about 1,000 of the 346,000
homes destroyed or damaged by Hurricane Sandy, most of them threatened
by river flooding.
No Driving Beyond This
Point” admonishes the sign on East Seagull Drive on the southern end of
Nags Head, N.C. It’s an unnecessary remnant of days past. The signpost
is half buried. The street has disappeared beneath five feet of drifted
sand. All but two of the eight homes that once stood on the surf side of
Seagull Drive have been demolished, bought and removed by the town at a
cost of $1.5 million. One defiant pink house remains, rising two
stories on stilts. Another, damaged by a storm more than a decade ago,
is a ramshackle, boarded-up shell with “No Trespassing” signs adorning
its stilts. The owner won a long and expensive legal battle with the
town, which tried to condemn the property. He has refused a $35,000
buyout offer. Instead, he’s waiting for the next big storm to knock the
house down so he can collect up to $250,000 in federal flood insurance.
For
the town, whose population of 2,900 balloons to as many as 40,000 on
summer weekends, rising seas are an existential threat, eroding some
portions of the beach by as much as six feet annually. But it has no
plans to retreat. In fact, Nags Head removed the idea of retreat from
its comprehensive plan years ago. Why? The town can afford to delay the
inevitable, preserving a waterfront tax base by spending tens of
millions of dollars rebuilding beaches. It’s working. Despite the
devastation of three hurricanes in the past four years, property values
in Dare County, home to Nags Head, Kill Devil Hills, Kitty Hawk and
other destinations, have boomed to nearly $16 billion, 25 percent more
than seven years ago.
Nags Head levies a special tax on beach
properties to rebuild the beach. In 2011, the town spent $36 million to
replenish the sand on 10 miles of beach. When Hurricane Matthew swept
away about a third of that sand in 2016, the town rebuilt again at a
cost of $43 million, $16 million of which came from FEMA. Western
Carolina University researchers who compile a database on rebuilding
beaches say that nearly $503 million has been spent in the past 15 years
in North Carolina.
Nags Head Mayor Ben Cahoon says the town will
continue to replenish for the foreseeable future, planning to spend $10
million or more every six to eight years. “Retreat in the abstract
makes perfectly good sense, but it gets more complicated when you
consider what if it’s just one of the most gorgeous places to live?” he
says, sitting in a conference room at the town hall. “What happens if
you make a retreat decision? What does that look like? It’s not an
instant thing. You’re not going to buy out rows and rows of
multimillion-dollar houses at one time and say, now we’ve retreated from
the beach.” In his view, not rebuilding the beaches means a house here
or there will be lost, creating a patchwork of vacancies over decades.
Septic tanks will be exposed. Streets will surrender to the tides.
“That, in fact, is what retreat would look like,” Cahoon says. “That’s
not a sustainable solution either.”
Keeler, of the Coastal
Studies Institute, says rebuilding beaches may make sense in the short
term, but it’s not sustainable, like other protections. It sets up towns
like Nags Head for a catastrophe. “If you keep nourishing [the beach],
then people are going to keep investing, and if people keep investing,
you’re going to keep nourishing right up to the crash,” he says. “You
may be there longer, but the losses will be a lot bigger and the
disruption will be a lot greater, especially if it takes place after a
mondo hurricane.”
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After two devastating bouts of flooding, residents of Valmeyer, Ill., decided to relocate the town to higher ground in the early 1990s. Today, Valmeyer is thriving. The old town had 900 people. The new one has 1,300 and is growing by the day. (Whitney Curtis for The Washington Post)
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For
cities like Norfolk, which is more than a billion dollars in debt,
buyout options are limited. Norfolk has spent $650,000 to buy four homes
and return those parcels to nature, but the city has more than 1,000
properties at risk, a number that will grow as the water rises. Next
door, Virginia Beach shifted from focusing on elevating homes to
buyouts, with an initial $1.5 million investment and a $500,000 annual
budget. The city’s new study on sea-level rise identified 2,500
vulnerable properties for buyouts. “We have to get creative,” says Erin
Sutton, the director of the Virginia Beach emergency management office.
“The federal government is not creative. The way for us to do that is to
start a program and see how it goes and hopefully continue to fund it.”
Norfolk
is working with Wetlands Watch to explore buyouts using the transfer of
development rights through a program with a third-party nonprofit land
trust. Under the city’s zoning ordinance, developers looking to build on
higher ground need a certain number of “resilience points.” In its
simplest form, the developer pays the land trust and gets resilience
points in return. The land trust uses the money to buy a property that
has flooded at least twice within a decade. The homeowner gets a tax
credit. The developer gets to build new properties. And the city gets
threatened parcels removed and returned to nature. And the marketplace
drives the transactions, not government.
That’s similar to a
program Keeler has been championing, using buyouts but renting the
property back to the homeowner until a certain date or until certain
triggers — damage to the home, sea-level rise or a street becoming
impassable a certain number of days within a year — come into play.
Managing retreat through buyout programs, Keeler says, offers the
promise of controlling the transition rather than facing what New
Orleans endured after Katrina, with more than 40,000 abandoned homes.
“There are no magic bullets. We’re hoping for a set of public policies
that create a situation where people can avoid the worst consequences,”
Keeler says. “I’m optimistic that if we’re smart, that a century from
now, we can have relocated a lot of population that would have been at
horrible risk if they stayed.”
A wipeout from a hurricane or a
lingering storm is what George Homewood wants to avoid for Norfolk
neighborhoods. But he also recognizes that property rights mean the city
can’t force people to leave. “Somebody who has more resources than I
have and is willing to put them at risk to enjoy looking out over water,
that’s a choice they get to make,” he says.
On Richmond
Crescent, Brian McDonald has made that choice. He sits in his dining
room overlooking the Lafayette River as the setting sun highlights
whitecaps propelled by a north wind. He bought the 80-year-old house
next door, lived there for three years, sold it for a small profit, then
carved out this lot and built his palace, 12 feet above sea level. A
recent appraisal put his home’s value at more than $500,000. The
flooding isn’t that bad, he says. He knows the water will come — there
was a mark from Hurricane Isabel in his old house — but he doesn’t feel
threatened. He’s in the best school district in Norfolk for his two
children. He’s along the Elizabeth River biking and walking trail. And
he pays only $500 a year in flood insurance. “Sure,” he says, “there
were hesitations, but I think the good outweighs the bad. I mean look at
this sunset. I don’t feel threatened at all by the water.”
He’s
never heard of the city’s 2100 plan. “They’re gonna let the water come
into Larchmont?” he asks, incredulous. “I don’t believe that. This is
their tax base. You’re not going to let your taxpayers’ houses fall into
the river.” He adds, laughing: “My house might be on the market next
year now that you told me that. But who’s to say what’s going to happen
80 years from now?”
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A flooded segment of Richmond Crescent after high tide.
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