(NewsNation) — One week since Hurricane Milton made landfall in Florida cleanup efforts are underway, and so is new construction.
New data shows tens of thousands of new properties have been built in high-risk flood areas despite the growing risk of destructive hurricanes.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has said hurricanes will not weaken the demand for homes on Florida’s Gulf Coast because there’s always going to be a demand to live in beautiful places.
More than 16 million people in Florida currently live in coastal counties and that number continues to go up despite the risks of hurricanes and flooding.
Climate modeling firm First Street Foundation told NewsNation that real estate developers have actually built 77,000 new properties in high-risk flood areas since 2019. That’s the highest number in the nation.
Nationally, close to 300,000 new properties were built in high-risk flood areas between 2019 and 2023, a number that has been concerning for disaster-risk experts who say that in many states, it would only take one good-sized hurricane to break the entire insurance system.
“We got to a situation in our country that, while we don’t lose as many lives in storms, our losses are rising because we have more people coming to the coast and we have therefore grown our exposure to these storms,” said Tracy Kijewski-Correa, a disaster-risk reduction specialist. “We have a climate that’s changing, that’s going to be, regrettably, the perfect storm.”
Kijewski-Correa said that while Helene was an outlier in terms of lives lost, the property damage from hurricanes could lead to some major changes. to insurance.
“That is probably going to require us to reimagine insurance, maybe in painful ways, and to start having more candid discussions about retreat,” she said. “Because there will be, for some families, very little possibility of ensuring or building to withstand what might be coming.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency recently looked at what are called severe, repetitive lost properties, a designation that covers homes that have severely flooded more than once. The agency found that there are 45,000 of those properties in the U.S. at the end of 2022, with about 3,100 of those in Florida alone.
Ratings for Morningstar DBRS said, in a report released this week, that it expects Hurricane Milton to be among the top five costliest natural catastrophes in the U.S., with insured losses approaching $60 billion.
Experts warn we are entering a difficult situation with the insurance industry across the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, saying we need to build better before storms hit to mitigate the toll of damage.