Anyone exploring Louisiana’s coastline knows climate change and rising sea levels are real. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Pelican State has lost 1,900 square miles of coastland since 1932. It continues to lose the equivalent of a football field every 100 minutes.
Thousands of Louisianians are being forced from their homes due to rising ocean water and skyrocketing property insurance rates. The federal government has offered various kinds of assistance to these beleaguered people, including Flood Mitigation Assistance grants to enable some homeowners to elevate their houses above the ever-encroaching water.
Unfortunately, the feds can’t fix all our climate problems, as a recent story in the Baton Rouge Advocate illustrates.
Advocate reporter Alex Lubben recently wrote an informative story about Isle de Jean Charles, an island community off the Louisiana coast. A casualty of the rising sea level, the island shrank from 35 square miles to a single square mile in recent years.
Most of the Jean Charles population are members of the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation, and many moved to the newly created community of New Isle, located forty miles inland. A $48 million grant enabled 37 new homes to be built at New Isle for these “climate refugees,” and the grant also paid for the New Isle dwellers’ homeowners insurance for five years.
A happy ending, right?
Unfortunately, many of the grant beneficiaries are unable to pay their property taxes and insurance. One New Isle resident said he planned to sell his truck to pay $4,000 in back taxes on his new home.
Let’s do the math on this federal do-good project. Grant administrators spent $46,600,000 to build 37 homes–more than a million dollars per home. The Jean Charles islanders got the homes for free but many can’t afford to maintain them.
It would have been cheaper for the federal government to have given every Jean Charles household a million dollars and let them build or buy their own homes. But that model won’t work either.
According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, 330,000 Louisiana homes will be at risk of chronic flooding by 2045 (as reported in the Advocate story). That’s a fifth of all Louisiana households. Will the feds give all these homeowners a million bucks each to obtain new lodging? Not likely.
Disaster looms for thousands of Louisiana homeowners who live on the Gulf Coast, and the cost to move all these people inland is prohibitive. This a problem that the federal government can’t fix.
One thing seems clear. In the coming years, only rich people will be able to live on the Gulf Coast, people rich enough to pay skyrocketing property insurance. If you’re not rich, don’t move there.
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| Photo credit: Times-Picayune and Ted Jackson |
