Hurricane Ian and its impact on Flordia's migration

[twister244]

When it comes to climate change, Florida has so many slow moving problems happening all at once. It's why I would never ever spend a penny on any property down there.

Yes, this is a one-time event. But it's encapsulating trends in Hurricanes with a changing climate - They are getting stronger.... faster. Also, there's some evidence that they are moving slower as they make landfall. Today is a great example of that. It's one thing to have a cat 4/5 make landfall while moving through at 20-25 mph speed. It's a whole other story when the thing is barely crawling in at 5 mph where you are in the front-right quadrant getting the worst of all worlds. That's exactly what happened to Cape Coral today.

Do I think this one storm will suddenly stop domestic migration from up North? No. But it may give some people a bit of pause. The problems will start to compound if we see more storms like this every year. But that's not it either....... You have sea level rise. In people's mind's, they think it's something that will happen in the future, when completely ignoring the 1/2/3 mm of rise happening every year. This is going to cause increasing problems for drinking water, salt water intrusion, etc. Yes, the Surfside collapse was due to neglect, but saltwater was getting into the building's foundation (from what I recall reading), causing destructive erosion. What will happen if another building were to come down because of neglect? Was Surfside a one-off, or the beginning of a pattern that may reveal itself over the coming years? If there was one old condo tower with neglect, are there others?

Point is - Ian by itself isn't going to reverse any trends, but it is part of a path we are on where slowly things will likely reverse over a very long period of time. How the economics on the ground respond to this, and on what timescale remains to be seen.

Just my two cents.