File:Miami region sea level rise.gif

Map courtesy of NOAA

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration visualization maps show what rising sea levels will mean at a granular level

• https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060053793

May 2017

Via Josh Kurtz / E&E News

Migration Inland as Real Estate Speculation Shifts

Barrier Island Blues

"Oh, Miami Beach is going under, the sea level is coming up," Harewood said. "So now the rich people have to find a place to live. My property is 15 feet above sea level, theirs is what? Three under?

One of the great ironies of historic housing patterns in Miami is that for decades under Jim Crow, laws and zoning restricted black people to parts of the urban core, an older part of the community that sits on relatively higher ground along a limestone ridge that runs like a topographic stripe down the eastern coast of South Florida. Now, many of those neighborhoods, formerly redlined by lenders and in some places bound in by a literal color wall, have an amenity not yet in the real estate listings: They're on higher ground and are less likely to flood as seas rise...

No one can turn a blind eye to the projections everyone uses in South Florida: 2 feet of sea-level rise by 2060.

"Everybody I know that is a small owner of real estate that isn't within the billionaire class — average middle-class, upper-middle-class Miamians who have real estate on the beach — is in the process of selling their properties and moving to the mainland... Basically where the coral ridge is, just north of downtown and south of downtown, that's where anecdotally the most amount of speculative investment has been going in because historically that's been the highest ground."

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