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Beachfront Changes - A Pessimistic View

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - The 2004 hurricane season will be remembered as one of the worst ever as it smashed the beach-front hotels and swept away sands up and down Florida and across the Gulf of Mexico.

But what it will not do - despite the costly destruction - is change the way the federal government rewards and even encourages beach-front development, Oliver Houck, a leading environmental lawyer, told The Associated Press in an interview.

“We just can’t do it because the politics of being on the beach are just too strong. That’s where people want to be,” said Houch, who teaches at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Houck continued: “Each development is development on welfare, and the folks on welfare are the richest folks in the United States and that says exactly why it won’t change.”

The extraordinary cost of paying for people to live on the beach and on barrier islands is hurting the country and the environment, he said.

“It’s like going and living in the middle of the ocean and then asking the government to dry you out,” he said. “The whole thing is nuts and it’s practically immutable.”

But others are more optimistic about the prospect for change.

“Things change rapidly, and I think that if we get a few more hurricane seasons like the one we’ve had people will really re-evaluate,” said David Helvarg, president of the ocean advocacy group Blue Frontier Campaign.

Houck takes Grand Isle, the barrier island in south Louisiana, as an example of the excessive amount of money poured into coastal development.

He estimates that about $800 million in states and federal money has been invested into the community - or about $1.2 million per permanent residence and $439000 per vacation home - in the past five decades, despite its being battered by storm surge from eleven tropical storms and hurricanes since 1956. That money has paid for disaster relief, flood insurance, highway and bridge construction, a fresh water system, mortgage deductions and second-home mortgage deductions.

With oceanfront property across the Gulf selling for up to $500,000 an acre, and often more, most of what goes into the coast benefits the wealthy, he said.

“We’ve turned these places into playgrounds for the rich and we’re paying their bills,” he said. “Just stop giving them money to be there and you’d slow the race.”

In the past two decades coastal states have tried to slow coastal development - in part to save lines, stop coastal erosion and cut down on payments - but a strong property rights movement and federal subsidies have undermined that effort, Houck said.

“Coastal policies may be trying to sound the retreat, but federal monies are sounding the the y’all-come-we’ll pay-for-it, and the result is no contest,” Houck wrote in a recent essay for the University of Colorado Law Review.

Hurting the cause to get people off the coast, Houck contends, was a 1992 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court called Lucas vs. South Carolina Coastal Council. The case focused on whether the state had the right to restrict development on the Isle of Palms, a barrier island.

The case became a flash-point between the property rights movement and environmentalists - with the latter losing.

Writing the majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia ruled that the state’s attempt to restrict development on the island as a “taking”, because of the loss in economic value to the property.

The ruling has hampered the ability of states to regulate growth along the coast, Houck argues.

Deepening Houck’s pessimism that change will come about is the fact that recent major studies - the Pew Oceans Commission Report and U.S Ocean Commission on Ocean Policy - were silent on coastal development.

“They had dozens of recommendations, and none of them say the obvious: Stop subsiding coastal development,” Houck said.

Besides investing in coastal roads, bridges and water treatment plants that act as incentives for development, Houck takes issue with the federal flood insurance program.

“We subsidize premiums that no private insurer would accept, and after each storm we pay again through the nose,” Houck wrote in a recent article.

Helvarg said the National Flood Insurance Program is the “biggest national exposure after Medicare” with $711 billion in property insured under it. But with about 40 percent of that risk in hurricane-battered Florida, the nation may soon want to do something about it, he said.

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