The New Bicoastal
My head is back on Staten Island all of a sudden. I want to be careful in what I say because for the most part, we were very well treated on Staten Island and we tried to be good citizens who engaged with the community for the three years we lived there. I don’t think those were our favorite times for many reasons, some which are intertwined with the Borough and some that had nothing whatsoever to do with SI, but just happened to coincide with our time there. We have one of those layered, quasi-3D maps of Staten Island, given to us by my sister, Kathy. I refuse to throw it out since it is one of the nicer pieces of memorabilia I have from those days and it has a place in our bedroom hallway, albeit not a particularly prominent place. But the reason my head is back on that spit of land that happens to constitute the highest outcropping of land on the eastern seaboard (that would be Todt Hill at 401 feet in elevation) is that my son and I co-own a house in St. George, Staten Island. This house is where Roger and his wife, Valene have lived for the past seven years. It’s too long ago now to remember what went into his thinking about choosing Staten Island on which to live, but I’m sure it had something to do with my work on the New York Wheel in those days, but it was also because Staten Island was probably the most affordable area that was still reasonably close to Manhattan. But then, there’s a reason for that.
They moved to Staten Island a year before Kim and I moved there and have stayed there for three years since we left. There are lots and lots of reasons for all of that, but I think its safe to say that they are getting to the point of being very ready to move on from good old SI. Our plan is to sell the house in early 2022 to take advantage of the strong property market all over the country, including Staten Island. But all the best plans of mice and men oft go astray, as they say. You may recall that a decade ago, in October, 2012, Superstorm Sandy hit the New York area and severely damaged several areas but none worse than Staten Island. There was a 14 foot storm surge in New York Harbor when the FEMA 500-year flood levels were set for coastal construction at 8 feet (subsequently modified by FEMA after the cow had fled the barn to 11 feet). The storm washed a tanker up on shore on the north part of the island, and the Arthur Kill, separating Staten Island from Bayonne, New Jersey, was awash with tug boat debris. But on the ocean-facing south shore, a vast amount of the shore communities had been built too close to the water and underwent catastrophic damage and 23 souls were lost. The remediation effort was extensive with many homeowners dealing with tremendous water damage.
So, on Wednesday of last, during a cold snap in the New York area, for reasons having to do with the plans Roger and Valene have to move from Staten Island at some point in 2022, during a time when we had decided to do some minor renovations of the house to prepare it for sale, they were away from their home when they got a call from a neighbor telling them that there was water flowing out the front door. This was not a Sandy storm surge, but rather a case of burst water and heating pipes due to the cold. In the best of times, burst pipes are no treat, but when you are out of town (or in my case, across the country) its a nightmare. Roger rushed back to the house to discover that the house was falling down around him (at least the inside of the house, as in the water-logged ceiling that had fallen down around him in the living room, the kitchen and pretty much everywhere). As a first-time homeowner, Roger has had a challenging relationship with this house, but nothing could have prepared him for this.
He had the good sense to call the Roto-Rooter damage remediation people who came over and gave him an estimate. To say that he was in shock about what loss remediation can cost is an understatement. I spoke to them and even I was at a loss after owning seventeen homes in my adult life. Nevertheless, I swallowed hard and agreed to pay the $40k required to “stop the bleeding” as the temperature was dropping to dangerously freezing levels. I do not want to prolong the agony of this story for Roger, me and even you, so I will just say that we have some work to do to renovate the house a bit more than we had planned. Luckily, I remembered a friend on SI who had done some renovation for us a few times in the past. I had forgotten that her experience with Sandy probably made her the most experienced person I could have ever found to address the problem. And the good news was that she said it wasn’t so bad (of course, her superstorm reference point is not a standard I ever hoped to be compared with). The biggest replacement problem involves flooring and ceilings with some kitchen cabinet replacement also likely. In the words of many famous people who have come before me, it is what it is.
The really interesting issue came up when I was forced to find a new insurance carrier for the property to satisfy the mortgage holder on the house. After being told last month by Chubb and Aon and just about every carrier I had ever heard of that they were unwilling to underwrite my property policy on my hilltop here in San Diego due to wildfire risks which they can no longer tolerate, Chubb and Aon and several other carriers told me that they were unwilling to underwrite my property on Staten Island due to coastal flooding risk. Now, in the same way that I was eventually able to get coverage from Farmers Insurance for my hilltop, I was eventually able to get a State Farm policy on the Staten Island property.
It suddenly occurred to me that Global Climate Change is no longer a concept that might impact my or my kid’s future. It is now already something that is affecting our lives here and now. It happens to be showing itself in its natural weak spot, the casualty loss experience and insurers’ unwillingness to sit still and take the losses in the neck the way they have been in the last few years of increasing natural disaster property losses. While I have averted the immediate problem by getting coverage, it seems only a matter of time before coverage is either out of reach (in terms of premium cost) or simply out of reach as in not available. I suppose we can governmentally mandate coverage, but that would be a very ironic solution to a problem that Republicans don’t want to acknowledge. I wonder how that will jive with all that libertarian sensibility.
In some ways, the new bicoastal is an interesting blend. Here on the hilltop I live in a liberal blue state, but my local district is about as red as it could be. And yet on Staten Island, the house sits in the bluest of blue states and an area of the north shore of Staten Island that is strongly blue, but in the only Borough that counts itself as strictly Republican. The point is that Global Climate Change knows no political gerrymandered districts, it plans to spank us all and apparently much sooner than we thought it would.