Rhode Island Senator Says Florida Is ‘First and Worst’ Place When It Comes to Climate Change Damaging Property Values • Florida Phoenix
Florida and the rest of the country face a “crash” in real estate prices if government leaders do not address climate change, warned Democratic U.S. Senator from Rhode Island Sheldon Whitehouse this weekend in St. Petersburg.
This is the solution to the property insurance crisis currently affecting Florida (and more and more states across the country), said Whitehouse, because it is the only way to prevent exploding insurance costs from leading to a mortgage crisis and ultimately a collapse in property values.
“That’s the word used by Freddie Mac’s chief economist,” Whitehouse said, referring to the government-sponsored agency tasked with developing the secondary mortgage market.
“Florida is the worst and the first state in terms of the impact of climate change on property insurance rates, but I’m from Rhode Island – I know a preview of an upcoming attraction when I see one. This will affect all coastal areas of the United States.”
“It’s really important for us to understand what’s going on in Florida,” he told reporters at the end of an hour-long roundtable discussion at a community center in Shore Acres, a low-lying section of northeast St. Petersburg where the Tampa Bay area experiences extreme flooding even during normal rainfall.
“It’s really important to get things right in Florida, and the most important lesson is that you can’t solve your property insurance problem unless you solve the climate problem. When the government denies the climate problem, it hurts you, and we need to correct that.”
Whitehouse also visited Miami and Orlando this weekend to hear from community members, homeowners and local and state lawmakers grappling with the issue.
“The days are hotter, the summers are longer. In the summer we often don’t cool down anymore, at night the temperatures drop below 27 degrees,” said Democratic U.S. Representative Kathy Castor from the Tampa Bay Area.
“But now the scientific data confirms our experience with increasing numbers of floods and more severe tropical storms. So it’s no wonder that this increasing risk is also reflected in our property insurance.”
Eradicating “climate change”
Because of its low-lying topography and more than 8,400 miles of coastline, large parts of the state and its coastal population are at risk from sea level rise, according to the Florida Climate Center.
But just four months ago, Governor Ron DeSantis signed a law that removed the word “climate change” from Florida’s statutes and restructured the state’s fossil-fuel-based energy policy to eliminate references to climate change as a priority in energy policy decisions.
DeSantis has supported programs designed to make Florida more resilient to the effects of climate change. He has allocated billions of dollars to combat rising sea levels and coastal flooding, said Susan Glickman of the CLEO Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to combating global warming. But she said the state’s efforts are inadequate to the problem, using the metaphor of an overflowing sink.
“It’s like going to the bathroom,” she said. “You take the towels off the hook. You mop the floor, and you never turn off the faucet,” she said. “Similar to Governor DeSantis, they’ve given out $2.5 billion or more worth of towels, and we’re doing vulnerability assessments. … But you can’t turn off the faucet, and that’s because of the outsized influence that comes primarily from the investor-owned utilities that cover 75% of the state.”
Glickman and Castor pointed out how disproportionately Florida’s energy companies rely on natural gas for power generation. The state gets 75 percent of its energy from natural gas, which is more than any other state in the country, according to an official with the Florida Electric Power Coordinating Group told the Florida Public Service Commission.
‘Reality’
“The reality in Florida is that we are not just seeing climate change. We are already experiencing it,” said Dawn Shirreffs, director of the Environmental Defense Fund for Florida and a panelist.
“And that’s not just affecting our weather, it’s affecting our wallets.” She pointed out that last summer’s record heat led to record-high electricity prices, along with rising home insurance premiums. Florida has some of the highest home insurance premiums in the country, with homeowners paying an average of $3,340, according to the Insurance Information Institute.
Shirreffs pointed to Florida’s vulnerability to Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the state’s insurer of last resort, which was originally designed to handle about 150,000 policies but now has 1.25 million policies.
“We need to understand that there are real ethical questions about whether some residents should subsidize the risk for others who have chosen to live in very vulnerable places,” she said. “There are also residents who have no choice but to live in very vulnerable places. … We need to make sure we really look at how we put people in vulnerable places and how everyone pays for it.”
In his role as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Whitehouse has spoken with Citizens CEO Tim Cerio several times over the past year to address his concerns about Citizens’ financial viability and whether the company might need a federal bailout should a major storm shut down Florida, he said. In response to a question from the Phoenix on Saturday, Whitehouse said most of his concerns had been addressed.
“We are pleased with their responsiveness,” he said. “They spent a lot of time with the staff of the Budget Committee and provided documents, and I would like to commend them for that.”
“The problem is they’re in a very, very difficult situation. And there are scenarios where their ability to pay claims is exhausted and they’re forced to do statewide assessments that may not arrive in time to help homeowners, or that become so politically toxic or unaffordable for the rest of Florida that that mechanism collapses. So it’s not a good situation that they’re in, but I want to commend them for the way they’ve answered our questions.”
Climate gentrification
St. Petersburg City Council member Brandi Gabbard, a real estate agent and chair of the Tampa Bay Regional Resiliency Coalition, said the region needs help from the government when it comes to flood insurance, citing the lack of mitigation credits in Risk Rating 2.0, the National Flood Insurance Program’s pricing model that will be phased in from 2021 to 2023.
Gabbard said if the city cannot offer residents incentives to lower their fees, homeowners could be forced to sell their units to investors for rent, making the units less affordable for the community.
“We are displacing people from the neighborhoods where they have lived for generations,” she said.
“We’re talking about thousands and thousands of homes. These are our residents. These are people who have lived here for generations. If we push them out of these neighborhoods, all that’s left is the downtown area. Then there are areas that have traditionally been affordable, traditionally low- and middle-income neighborhoods, traditionally areas where there are a lot of people of color.
“And now we’re pushing wealth and coastal neighborhoods into these areas and causing increased gentrification. It’s going to completely change our city if we don’t have a vision for how to protect our coastal neighborhoods.”
St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch and Democratic state representatives from Pinellas County, Lindsay Cross and Darryl Rouson, also spoke during the discussion.
