![]() “Yes, you can build cement fortresses 18 or 25 feet off the ground that will withstand 155-mile-an-hour winds like this,” Ruppert said. FEMA guidelines require homeowners in areas vulnerable to flooding to build new homes higher off the ground.īut some experts say even those requirements may not be enough - and they work only up to a point. “We do a lot of damage.”įloridians have to follow stricter building codes developed after Hurricane Andrew slammed into south Florida in 1992, destroying more than 50,000 homes and causing about $26 billion in damage. “You know, we just live and we do and we buy this,” she said. “At what point would it make more sense to take all that effort and money and invest it someplace safer?” “If sea level rise is never going to end, we need to start considering at what point is the risk too high?” said Thomas Ruppert, a coastal planning specialist at Florida Sea Grant, a publicly funded research program that works to conserve Florida’s coast. According to the Urban Land Institute, a global nonprofit research group, the city has 40,000 remaining single-family lots - and growth is happening so fast that the city could be built out in 11 years. More than 50,000 people moved to Cape Coral between 20. “Cape Coral is literally straitjacketed by the sins of the grandfathers: the ‘Mad Men’ of the ’50s selling lots, never really thinking beyond Grandma and Grandpa wanting to retire.”Īnd people are still coming. “Four hundred miles of canals on a river with rising sea levels - it’s been a selling point of Cape Coral for its entire existence, but it’s also the flaw,” Vuic said. It also had the makings of an environmental disaster. The result - thousands of acres of individual lots with no downtown or commercial tax base - turned out to be an urban planning headache. “They got Northern retirees to buy into the Florida dream for the price of cigarette money,” said Jason Vuic, a historian and author of “The Swamp Peddlers: How Lot Sellers, Land Scammers, and Retirees Built Modern Florida and Transformed the American Dream.” Developers, in essence, would build what they wanted.ĭuring the last half-century, Cape Coral has become a utopia for the everyman, offering blue- and white-collar retirees from the Northeast and the Midwest - and increasingly, working families and immigrants - an affordable sliver of sunny Florida on the water. ![]() Until the 1970s, the state of Florida had no zoning or planning restrictions only municipalities could plan and zone. It sounded far-fetched, but the bet paid off. “Tropic beauty” and “luxurious waterfront living,” a 1969 promotional ad pitched, “for as little as $20 down and $20 monthly.” They touted the lots as Florida’s “Waterfront Wonderland.” The surge that flooded the city was widespread but not, in most cases, catastrophic enough to raze all the older 1960s- and 1970s-era homes and force homeowners to obtain permits to put up newer structures higher off the ground.īut in 1957 a pair of marketing hucksters from Baltimore who dabbled in anti-baldness tonics bought 1,724 acres at the cape’s southwestern tip and proceeded to tear up the wetlands, dredge out nearly 400 miles of canals and carve hundreds of fingers of land into grids of quarter-acre lots. There is no question that Cape Coral will rebuild. A recent analysis of flood data found that the city has more than 90,000 properties at substantial risk of flooding, more than Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston or New York.įive years ago, a Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment for Cape Coral warned that, in a worst-case scenario, much of the city could be underwater by 2200. coastline are at risk - and no city has a greater percentage of homes in peril than this rapidly developing Florida metropolis of 200,000 where the Caloosahatchee River empties into the Gulf of Mexico. For decades, scientists, environmentalists, geographers and city planners have warned that large swaths of the U.S. “Look,” he said, pointing to the sparkling water beneath his tattered dock canopy, “you can’t think that the water there is gonna rise that high to come over here.”īut flooding was not unexpected. “This has never happened before!” Soto said as he stepped through his mud-streaked living room to his patio, adding that he plans to rebuild, no matter what he recoups from insurance policies. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |