Climate Change Putting Hamptons Real Estate At Major Risks

With climate change still a major worldwide talking point of concern, a popular New York area destination, typically for the wealthy, is now being put on high alert with questionable remedies.

Quoting Bloomberg with a story by Polly Mosendz and Eric Roston, “If you happened to be in Montauk, N.Y., when the trucks started rolling in this summer, you’d get a sense of how much sand $171,000 buys. Load after load tumbled onto Ditch Plains Beach, one of the Atlantic Coast’s better surfing spots, carved along one of the richest stretches of the Hamptons. It’s a short walk from an exclusive trailer park where hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb and other wealthy surfers store their beach gear.

The local government funded the sand infusion after winter nor’easters and an early summer tropical storm narrowed the beach and exposed the dense layer of hardpan beneath the sand. For three days before the Fourth of July weekend, dump trucks and tractor trailers dropped roughly 100 loads along a few hundred yards of waterfront. Soon the freshly graded beach was packed with surfers and tourists.

The delivery was one of several this year to beaches in the town of East Hampton, at a cost approaching $1 million, to help restore what’s been carried off by currents and storms in a perpetual ebb and flow intensified by the rising seas. The realities of climate change mean this beach renovation is clearly a temporary fix. It’s also a small preview of things to come, except the federal government will largely be funding any subsequent infusions of sand.

Over the next three decades the U.S. will spend at least $1.5 billion to help shore up about 80 miles of Long Island waterfront as part of the ongoing Fire Island to Montauk Point project, or FIMP. Under the direction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, hundreds of millions of dollars will be invested in dredges that pump offshore sand back onto beaches—much more efficient than the trucks, at hundreds of times the scale. Thousands of residences, many of them beachfront homes, will be lifted off their foundations onto stilts.

What’s happening on beaches in the Hamptons and nearby is no last-minute maneuver. The spending is merely the latest turn in an eight-decade drama between humans and nature—storm destruction and restoration, lobbying and lawsuits—that’s creating one of the most ambitious running battles against climate change in U.S. history. Of all places, it’s the Hamptons and nearby beaches that will be the biggest test bed for the elaborate policies and defensive measures needed in vulnerable beach communities around the world, even those that aren’t home to millionaires and billionaires. That makes the Hamptons both a climate laboratory and the face of an existential question: How long can, and should, governments deploy a mountain of cash against the implacable rise of warming seas?”

To dig deeper into the answer to this question and for this full, very in-depth report of this dire situation, which includes beautifully detailed graphical representations, see more information in the news notes.