Rebuilding on a storm-ruined mobile home: A case study in Seminole County, Florida, according to a retired construction worker
Scientists say that the damage from Hurricane Ian will cost billions of dollars and that the US can expect more storms like it as the planet warms up. The risks of increasingly wild weather make it imperative for cities and states to protect people and property.
To say nothing of the cost of human suffering is something I am talking about. That’s almost incomprehensible. For now, it’s also impossible to know. Much of the area is impassable.
The roads and bridges have been put to waste. Our article states that on barrier islands homes and businesses are made of wood and broken concrete.
Lessons can be learned to rebuild wisely after big storms. It may not be a good idea to replace homes on low lying land in areas that need to be prepared for storm surge.
“There’s no point in repeating the same mistakes in exactly the same way,” said Auroop R. Ganguly, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern University. When it comes to rebuilding, he said, “there is a tendency for people to look in the rearview mirror” and assume that what we built before is still tenable.
Local officials and housing advocates are worried about what the destroyed housing stock will mean for people with low wages or fixed incomes. In interviews, some people said staying in water-ravaged homes is their only option.
“Cities will rebuild,” said Edward Murray, a housing expert and associate director of the Metropolitan Center at Florida International University. What about the poor communities? What do you think about individuals?
The drone photos from the coast of Southwest Florida show the aftermath of Hurricane Ian: mobile home parks blown to smithereens. At the community of 178 mobile homes, there looks to be a giant taking a weedwhacker. Roofing, siding, skirting, walls, and carports flung about in a frightful mess, no longer recognizable as human dwellings.
A military Veteran and retired construction Worker sat in the garage of his damaged rental home in Winter Springs, a city with a lot of strip malls and subdivisions in Seminole County. With foot-high water marks in his home, there was no way he could move back in. Mr. McLain, who lives on social security and disability benefits, figured there were few options but to live in his car for a while. “I’m not running to go live in the Hilton, you know what I’m saying?” he said. I am totally screwed.
In the middle of a three hour drive southwest, in one of the state’s poorer counties, a woman stood on a pool deck crying. The Peace River had rained on her neighborhood. It submerged her backyard and house where water from the river continued to seep in, days after the storm passed.
“It’s all gone,” said Ms. Hampton, who had property insurance but, like many Floridians, not flood insurance. In 1998 she purchased her one-story ranch-style home for $44,000. Her only source of income is a disability check and she will live with a relative nearby. “We lost everything.”
Brandes, the state legislator, said that if rates continue to rise by 30% or more, some Florida residents may end up paying more for insurance than they do for their mortgage.
Insurance companies operating in Florida say they have been forced to raise rates to cover the costs of handling lawsuits. “We’re all paying for that frivolous litigation,” said Lisa Miller, a former deputy Florida insurance commissioner who now works as an insurance industry consultant in Tallahassee.
Six insurance carriers have declared insolvency this year alone. They have stopped writing policies or dropped customers. As a result, the number of policyholders on the state-backed insurer of last resort, Citizens Property Insurance, has ballooned.
The senator whose district includes the area avoided the worst of Ian believes that it is not possible to be the most hurricane prone and most litigious state.
The First Street analysis, which covers the next 30 years – or the typical life of a home mortgage – shows Florida and the Gulf Coast will continue to have the largest magnitude of financial loss from hurricane damage. But the future holds a significant uptick in damage for regions that previously have tended to be safer from the most devastating storms.
Roof Litigation In Florida: Competition, Public Interest, and the Economy of the U.S. in the Era of Rapid Urbanization
A contractor contacts a homeowner with possible damage to their roof, and this is what leads to the lawsuits. The homeowner signs what’s called an assignment of benefits agreement, which allows the contractor to handle the insurance claim. The insurance company can deny the claim, dispute the amount, or file a suit against the contractor even if they do not know that the person is the insured.
Attorneys fees are larger than the size of the claim. The III estimated that excess litigation cost Florida’s policyholders over 1.5 billion dollars. The number of lawsuits has risen even higher over the past two years.
The population growth in Florida is a factor. No state in the eastern U.S. is growing as rapidly as Florida. All of the areas affected by Ian have their fastest growing metro areas.
Smaller companies are not able to build the kind of capital reserves that large companies can. They rely on their own form of insurance called Reinsurance to pay claims in the event of major costly events.
Citizens, the state-backed insurer, recently crossed the 1 million policyholder mark – more than double its number of policies two years ago – as a result of private insurers raising costs or dropping customers.
Gasparilla, a Hurricane-Scattered Mobile Estate. The Impact of Hurricane Andrew and Public Insurance on the Insurance Claims Against Hurricanes
It is too early to know exactly how much the claims will cost. One analytics firm estimated that wind and storm surge losses would be between $28 and $47 billion. The total loss to private insurers has been estimated at between $60 billion and $63 billion.
The state legislature held a special session in May in which legislators passed a bill addressing some of the issues with roofs and attorneys’ fees. Afterward, some Democrats complained that the bill did not do enough to provide immediate relief to homeowners.
The May session “treated the flu when the property insurance market had stage-4 cancer,” said Brandes, a Republican, who added that he hoped another session could be convened before January.
He said that it was the right time to make some really tough decisions. “You’re going to have to do some things that historically have just not been on the table, but have to be on the table in order to save this market going forward.”
A man in his 70s has a beer in his hands and is looking at the ruination that was once his home. His decapitated mobile home is in Gasparilla Mobile Estates, about 30 miles north of Ft Myers. The name comes from the famed barrier island just offshore.
After Hurricane Andrew struck the area in 1994, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development revised its wind criteria for mobile homes. The industry started referring to them as manufactured housing. And they became more expensive.
The wind was so strong. Borren, a retired construction worker from Massachusetts, said that he never saw anything as strong as it was. “They claim it was stronger than Charley. I believe it now.”
Before Ian, the hurricane of record on this stretch of coastline was Charley in 2004—also a Category 4 with 150 mph winds. But he saved Gasparilla. Life went on.
John Borren’s Trailer Falls in Love with Key West: A New Story of a Florida Homeowner’s Problem and the Loss of Their Mobile Park
Borren would take his wife on a journey to the island, where they collected shells and shark’s teeth. They owned their 1972 trailer free and clear. The rent on their lot was only $580 a month. On a monthly social security check of $2,500 they got by on their little piece of paradise.
“This trailer’s been here for 40 years. I mean, it’s a ’72 trailer. They won’t pay me, I put thousands of dollars in it. Few people had insurance. They lost everything.”
“They would rather see a mobile park gone,” Ayotte says. They view it as a problem in the community. They don’t see that as a source of affordable housing. They want to get rid of it.
But tell that to retirees on fixed incomes like John Borren, low-wage earners and farmworkers who cannot afford to live anyplace else in a booming real estate market like Florida’s. Folks from up north are streaming into the state to enjoy the mild summers, year-round sunshine and sugar-sand beaches.
Gladys Cook, Director of Resilience and Disaster Recovery at the Florida Housing Coalition, says that the pressure on affordable housing in Florida is extremely high. In the last couple of years, construction costs have gone up 30 percent.
“They’re ugly and square and look a lot better as beer cans, but they don’t belong here, so I fell in love with Key West.” said the singer/songwriter who came to love Key West.
How Well Does Your Neighborhood During a Hurricane? “Hiy Denny, How Are You?” Asks Murphy in Parkhill Estates
Ask the residents of Parkhill Estates. It’s a 55+ community of 176 homes where folks like to play shuffleboard, poker, and bridge, and cruise the curved streets in fleets of golf carts.
“Hey Denny, how are you?” asked Bob Murphy to a retiree in a baseball cap. Murphy is the genial president of the residents’ co-op that owns the park. He’s driving around catching up with his neighbors.
Parent, a retired gas company worker from Zanesville, Ohio, says the storm destroyed all the older homes in the area. Over a hundred new homes were brought in after Charley. Ian was not the best but the hundred new homes all held up.
“The structures themselves seem to be pretty durable compared with this hurricane,” says Murphy, who winters in Punta Gorda and spends summers at his home in Cincinnati. “Ninety-nine percent of the structures are still standing. There’s siding that’s off and roof damage. The skirting came off of a number of ’em. But for most part they held up pretty well.”
Murphy doesn’t feel old enough to go through another major storm like Charley and Ian. He hopes his mobile home holds, but if it doesn’t, “I won’t come back.”
Citizens: A Network of Insurance Companies for People Who Cannot Find Private Insurance. Lee County, Florida, a coastal area with a low renter income
(In Florida, like the rest of the country, flood insurance is sold separately from homeowner’s insurance; the vast majority of flood coverage is sold or underwritten by the federal government.)
Citizens is a state mandated company that is supposed to help homeowners who can’t find private insurance. Citizens is funded by premiums but if it needs more money to pay out claims, it adds a surcharge to the private insurance bills of homeowners around the state.
Most of the big national insurance companies stopped writing policies in Florida since Andrew. The network of smaller insurance companies was formed in their place. There is more to the companies that set them apart from other insurers.
People from colder states have been attracted to the expansive sandy beaches. They call Michigan home, but spend much of the year in Florida.
Lee County isn’t as upscale as many of Florida’s coastal areas. It’s a county in which 28% of renters are low-income or paying at least 40% of their income to rent, according to a 2022 report from the Shimberg Center for Housing Studies.
Brad Cozza: An investor’s perspective on the impact of hurricane-ian flooding on Florida’s waterfront real estate market (the Sampsons’ story)
The home is still standing, despite being owned by the Sampsons. But in October, one month after Ian hit, their neighborhood was a mess, with hollowed-out remnants of homes up and down their block.
We don’t know exactly how much the double lot sold for, but we do know who is on the street behind us. “It’s very fast, oh boy,” he said. “I’m afraid … we’re going to lose all that beauty that we all shared.”
Florida’s real estate industry was responsible for 25% of the state’s gross state product in 2021, according to a report. More than 300,000 people move to the Sunshine State each year.
Brad Cozza, who owns real estate brokerage in southwest Florida, said new out-of-state investors – from Wall Street hedge funds to major hotel chains – are already looking at new investments in the region.
Since Hurricane Ian, Cozza’s firm has been involved in acquiring 39 properties. One of his clients bought a damaged waterfront home in Cape Coral, across the bridge from Fort Myers, for $670,000. After renovations, Cozza expects it to sell for almost $1 million.
“You’re going to see values jump, and you’re seeing a lot of new players in the area that would not have been in this area before the storm,” Cozza said.
This, Cozza said, is just plain market dynamics. Many homeowners did not have flood insurance, so they can’t afford to rebuild – and that’s an opportunity investors are seizing.
It’s cheaper to make houses better able to survive disasters than to build new structures, says the director of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University.
Older houses are more affordable than new ones. Even new building is going to be more costly when you wipe out an older housing stock.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/21/1143088346/on-floridas-gulf-coast-developers-eye-properties-ravaged-by-hurricane-ian
Planning to Build a Community of Homes in Fort Myers Beach, Fla., Following a Hurricane and Enforcing a High-rise Apartment Complex
Federal disaster recovery money can help homeowners rebuild. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, gives millions of dollars in aid to the states after hurricanes because they want to help lower-income homeowners.
But Meyer expects it will take one or two years before that money is available in Florida, since the state first needs to submit a funding plan to HUD for approval. Until then, she said, local officials can encourage homeowners not to sell out of desperation, and instead, “find a way to have them hold onto their property and rebuild their property and remain in the home.”
Zoning for single family homes can also help maintain the housing stock for lower-income residents, Meyer said, by preventing larger high-end complexes.
Green spoke at the Local Planning Agency’s meeting in December about his work for the town of Fort Myers Beach. He said he doesn’t expect local zoning regulations in the town to change significantly in the coming months.
Green said that there are some duplexes, some triplexes, and some quads in Fort Myers Beach over the years. There are single- family homes for most of the time.
Joanne Semmer, who has lived near Fort Myers Beach for more than 50 years, has been trying to stop one such project. She lives a mile away from the town’s commercial fishing docks and works on the waterfront for an environmental nonprofit organization.
In 2020, Semmer and her brother sued Lee County after the county rezoned to allow a high-rise apartment complex across the street from her home. An administrative judge ruled in Semmer’s favor, on the grounds that the development would increase hurricane evacuation times.
First Street Foundation Managing Director Jamie Rhome: Hurricanes during the Quietest Part of the Atlantic Hurricane Season in 2021 and 2020
A lot of people who live in areas that are prone to hurricanes began to notice that this summer had been quiet. On average, there are 14 storms each year in the Atlantic between June 1 and December 1.
What was going on, many wondered? Did this mean there would be a welcome respite from recent years of record-breaking storms? After all, there were a whopping 21 total storms in 2021. And, in 2020, there were so many storms that forecasters ran out of letters in the alphabet to name them.
“It was actually, kind of, fear and dread,” says Jamie Rhome, the acting director of the National Hurricane Center, thinking back on the quietest part of the Atlantic hurricane season. “I felt like people were letting their guard down.”
That dread was justified. At the end of September, two storms had hit the United States, killing more than 150 people.
It was one of the most damaging and deadly hurricanes in modern history. It was the third-most expensive hurricane season to date, according to estimates by the reinsurance company Munich Re, with total losses of about $110 billion.
Hurricanes are changing as the planet warms, with stronger hurricanes bringing more flooding rain, pushing farther inland after they make landfall and tracking farther north.
Flooding was the main cause of death and destruction from both Hurricane Ian and Hurricane Fiona. Extreme rain caused much of the inland flooding from Ian. Rhome said that a warming climate can produce more rain.
Storm surge, also known as the wall of ocean water, is the main source of flooding. The more powerful the storm, the more water it pushes inland. “A rising sea level makes the storm surge worse,” says Rhome.
Matthew Eby, CEO of First Street Foundation, said in a press release today that there will be unavoidable financial impacts and devastation that have not yet been priced into the market.
First Street Foundation also debuted a new online tool that lets users see how vulnerable a particular property is to hurricane winds now and over the next three decades. It adds to First Street’s Risk Factor tool on its website, which already allows users to search addresses to generate reports on its exposure to floods, fire, and extreme heat. It’s a helpful tool, especially considering a lot of flood maps are outdated, and these kinds of climate-related risks aren’t often disclosed to homeowners and potential buyers.
“We had half the story that comes from hurricanes with our flood model,” Eby said. “The other half of the story with hurricanes is the tremendous amount of wind force they have.”
“The odds of it being a major hurricane when it makes landfall are almost 50-50 now,” Eby told CNN. Even after initial landfall, stronger and more indistinguishable storms can persist for more than a few days, dumping huge amounts of rain and bringing high wind speeds to areas that are not prepared for them.
The way the coastline bends inward has spared the area around the Georgia-South Carolina border from the worst hurricanes. Most major hurricanes that strengthen in the Gulf of Mexico or warm waters of the Caribbean will hit another coast first – usually Florida.
Charleston was hit hard by Hurricane Matthew in 2016; though the storm was just a category 1, its storm surge was significant for the South Carolina coast, pushing water levels 3 to 5 feet above normal. It has not had a devastating storm since Hurricane Hugo struck the city in 1989 as a category 4 storm with 140 mph winds and became the costliest disaster on record.
The increase in hurricane wind speeds for Florida “will be fairly mild compared to the increases in the mid-Atlantic states and New England,” Emanuel told CNN. “In Miami, 100 mph wind is serious but not devastating because they’re used to it.”
The problem with many hurricane models used by the government, insurance companies and banks to assess risk is that they’re out of date and lack sufficient historical data, according to Emanuel.
“This is a big deal for the insurance companies, and they’ve woken up recently to this,” Emanuel said. The climate has made their data useless because the estimates of risk are 50 years out of date.
Eby said that they are hopeful that the data can illuminate risk for them to make the right decisions. They can use that data to make smart decisions. That’s really the hope.”
The aftermath of hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Harvey, Irma and Maria: two storms at the same time
Lin and her colleagues also found another sobering trend. It is not likely that two damaging storms will hit the same place in a couple of days, although such disasters have become more likely over time.
When sequential storms do happen, it’s deadly, like when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast in 2005 or when Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria hit Puerto Rico, Florida and Texas in quick succession in 2017.
The government’s emergency response could be overwhelmed by it. Millions of people were left waiting for food and shelter when the Federal Emergency Management Agency couldn’t respond to three major storms at the same time.