Coastline Real Estate—An ever Bigger Gamble

 Sandy will turn out to be much worse than Katrina in terms of economic and personal dislocation after hitting dead-on the U.S.’s most important gateway city. And the storm’s fury is just another reminder of what’s in store for coastal real estate in coming decades—likely more destruction and devastation. I say this as an owner of a beach house on Long Island’s south shore that sits barely 300 yards from the ocean.

Drawn to the water’s edge, we’ve built homes, hotels, resorts and other businesses in places posing increasing danger. Fly over Florida and you get a bird’s eye view of how development has clustered along the attractive coastlines. Seven years after Katrina’s costly lesson, the Gulf Coast has been re-largely rebuilt despite what happened. Now in New York we see areas previously thought out of harm’s way to be highly vulnerable—like the hospital row along First Avenue near the East River and the entire financial district for that matter. People had scoffed at Al Gore’s film, which predicted severe flooding of lower Manhattan caused by rising oceans and ever less freakish severe storms. But can they afford to scoff anymore?