{"id":1405,"date":"2020-02-13T15:05:03","date_gmt":"2020-02-13T21:05:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/staging\/1734\/?p=1405"},"modified":"2020-02-13T15:05:03","modified_gmt":"2020-02-13T21:05:03","slug":"costly-coastal-arrogance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/costly-coastal-arrogance\/","title":{"rendered":"Costly Coastal Arrogance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In the days shortly after World War II, writes Gilbert M. Gaul<\/a> in The Geography of Risk<\/a><\/em>, Morris Shapiro<\/a> and his family were busy building their own version of Levittown<\/a>, the famed suburban tract housing development of Long Island, on a barrier island in southern New Jersey known as Long Beach Island<\/a>. The place had largely been the preserve of fishing villages in earlier years, but Shapiro had a vision, one he passed along to his son, Herbert, in due time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shapiro drained and built on what we now call wetlands, but\nin the 1940s, environmental values were a weak reed for resisting the onslaught\nof developers who believed in the next big real estate trend and the\nwillingness of small villages to grow with them. And so, Morris persuaded Herbert\nto buy land around Barnegat\nBay<\/a>, and the few hunters and watermen who understood the value of salt marsh\nin preserving wildlife habitat were pushed aside. The suburbanization of the\nJersey Shore soon took hold. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nature heals its own wounds when the landscape is healthy,\nbut damage to the built environment can be another matter altogether. Gaul details\nthe impacts of the Ash\nWednesday storm<\/a> that struck the New Jersey coast in the spring of 1962,\nproviding the nation with its first television-era glimpse of disasters yet to come\nand the high costs of having compromised the protective dunes and wetlands and\ninstalled thousands of bungalows on a narrow, highly vulnerable strip of land\nalong the sea. \u201cNearly all the 5,361 homes on Long Beach Island . . . were damaged,\u201d\nGaul tells us, \u201cincluding 1,000 that were severely impaired and 600 that were\ndestroyed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As always, the immediate focus was on rebuilding, with urgent\nreminders from legislators and others of the economic value of shoreline\ndevelopment (but not its costs). In the face of that Category 5 juggernaut, Gov.\nRichard Hughes<\/a> bravely proposed a six-month moratorium on new development, supported\nby the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers<\/a>,\nand a ban on rebuilding along a 100-foot buffer along the beach. Looking back,\nit seems visionary for its time in anticipating the problems that would otherwise\nfollow, and it attracted precisely the blowback we have come to expect. Federal\nsupport for rebuilding came from the Kennedy administration, and the long drift\ntoward increased federal responsibility for recovery was underway. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gaul goes on to detail the long tale of Jim\nMancini<\/a>, both developer and mayor of Long Beach Island, and cheerleader in\nchief for the coastal towns and what they saw as their inevitable growth. Still,\ngovernors and environmental officials in New Jersey were periodically game for\na new try at restraining a situation where local officials controlled building\nand zoning while state taxpayers provided millions of dollars to repair storm damage\nand infrastructure. Gov.\nBrendan Byrne<\/a> was next in 1979, starting with a conference on the future of\nthe New Jersey shore, followed by initiatives from the state Department of Environmental Protection<\/a>\nand the introduction of the Dune and Shorefront Protection Act in the legislature.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Predictably, the mayors rebelled, led by Mancini, who organized\n1,500 protesters to attend a July 1980 hearing at the St. Francis Community Center in\nBrant Beach<\/a>. Robert\nHollenbeck<\/a>, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, essentially\npresided over an ambush in which he was repeatedly shouted down by angry\nhomeowners. Once again, the opportunity to take a creative regulatory approach\nto controlling shoreline damage was driven into wholesale political retreat. By\nthe time Superstorm\nSandy<\/a> delivered its legendary hit in October 2012, it was all over but the\nshouting. The administration of Gov. Chris Christie<\/a> was\nnot about to seriously challenge the home rule prerogatives that dominate the\npolitically fragmented landscape of New Jersey township government. The tough questions\nwould have to wait.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Gaul outlines in New Jersey, of course, has occurred in\nother forms in other places from the Carolinas to Florida to Texas over the subsequent\ndecades. Gaul takes us to all these locations as the book progresses. What we\nhave seen, time and again, are the costly consequences of a pattern of coastal development\nthat has placed increasing quantities of homes and properties in harm\u2019s way,\nthen begged or even demanded that states and the federal government rescue the storm-damaged\ncommunities even as they fight bitterly against regulatory measures aimed at\nreducing future costs by restricting unwise development. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, by now there are many residents caught in the middle.\nBut surely, it is not impossible to sympathize with their plight and be willing\nto assist those who seek alternatives, while refusing to continue subsidizing\nunwise new development or bailing out those who refuse to accept the reality of\nthe risks they have assumed. What is clear is that tough decisions await, and\nthe public does not have endless resources. Wiser development and rebuilding decisions\nare imperative. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not surprisingly, Gaul, a veteran Pulitzer Prize-winning\nauthor and reporter, is a New Jersey native. But he is also an astute historian\nand researcher who writes with a well-informed passion that brings us, in the\nend, to the fateful season of 2017\u2014the year of Hurricanes Harvey<\/a>, Irma<\/a>, and Maria<\/a>\u2014and then 2018,\nwhen all looked calm on the meteorological front until Florence<\/a> took its\ntoll in North Carolina, followed by Category 5 Michael<\/a> in the\nFlorida Panhandle. Climate change, inducing hurricanes that become slow-moving\nrain bombs that flood cities like Houston, is still \u201cnot a thing\u201d in the Trump\nWhite House. Neither, for the most part, are buyouts of repetitively flooded\nhomes, even as the nation desperately needs to find ways to live more\nresiliently in the face of the risks it has embedded on its coastal landscapes.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the costs keep climbing, and it is not impossible to\nimagine a serious political reckoning under a different administration with a\nmore realistic handle on the stakes involved, which run into the trillions of\ndollars. It is not impossible, for instance, to imagine a $250 billion disaster\nif a catastrophic hurricane took direct aim at one of Florida\u2019s major cities. For\nthat reason alone, Gaul\u2019s book may be worth a read. We need to improve the quality\nand depth of the conversation around issues with such drastic fiscal impact. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jim Schwab<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the days shortly after World War II, writes Gilbert M. Gaul in The Geography of Risk, Morris Shapiro and his family were busy building their own version of Levittown, the famed suburban tract housing development of Long Island, on a barrier island in southern New Jersey known as Long Beach Island. The place had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13,179,1471,81,14,109,555,178,329,609,563,358,222,1,50,357,878],"tags":[1480,1476,1485,1484,154,181,1474,1108,1106,1107,1482,1481,1473,1477,1478,1475,1479,58,816,1483,1472,279],"class_list":["post-1405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-climate-2","category-coastal-management","category-disaster-2","category-disasters","category-environment","category-floodplain-management-2","category-government","category-housing","category-natural-hazards","category-politics","category-public-policy","category-resilience-2","category-uncategorized","category-urban-planning","category-water","category-weather","tag-ash-wednesday-storm","tag-barnegat-bay","tag-barrier-islands","tag-brendan-byrne","tag-climate-change","tag-coastal","tag-gilbert-m-gaul","tag-hurricane-harvey","tag-hurricane-irma","tag-hurricane-maria","tag-hurricane-michael","tag-hurricane-sandy","tag-hurricanes","tag-jersey-shore","tag-jim-mancini","tag-long-beach-island","tag-morris-shapiro","tag-new-jersey","tag-north-carolina","tag-richard-hughes","tag-risk","tag-sea-level-rise"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1405"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1407,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1405\/revisions\/1407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}