And In Florida, Nothing - Fundamentally Nothing - Is Changing
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Southwest Florida has lost nearly half its wetlands, said Eric Draper, the executive director of Audubon Florida. When a storm strikes, he said, there is no way to easily deal with all that water if the land has become paved with rooftops and parking lots and roads.
And yet every month, sun lovers from the Northeast, the Midwest, Europe and Latin America pour into the state. Many of the new residents are more affluent, which speaks to the growing income gap and higher cost of living in Florida. People still clamor to live on the coast or near the beach, paying top dollar to live in these increasingly vulnerable areas, including the Florida Keys, which were hit hard during Hurricane Irma. And for all the growing sophistication of alerting people to monster storms, as the states population grows, so do the difficulties of evacuating 21 million people from a long peninsula with only two major highways heading north.
When do we cross this point that the homes along the coast are no longer valuable because theyre really losing their marketability? wondered Cary Glickstein, the mayor of Delray Beach in South Florida. We are certainly not there yet. We are not even close to it.
Real estate still reigns supreme. There is simply too much money in it, and the spoils funnel into government at every level. High-rises today swallow up whole neighborhoods. Perched along Biscayne Bay and ending at the river, the Brickell neighborhood of Miami is now a canyon of towering condos. A raging storm surge coursed through its streets during Hurricane Irma. New luxury buildings reach for the sky on Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale.
Floridas west coast and Orlando have ushered in their own building boom. And low-lying Tampa, which some risk assessors call the most vulnerable city in the state to the lashing of a serious hurricane, promotes its robust growth as a reason to settle there.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/us/florida-flood-irma-growth-.html