Early hurricane season forecast suggests extremely high number of storms
Early forecasts for the Atlantic hurricane season suggest it could be extreme. The season begins in June and could bring 11 hurricanes, five of which are expected to be Category 3 or higher.
And now my rant
Any politician in the SE particularly Florida is not going to admit it, but those states regard hurricanes as an economic boost. A big one turns over the older housing stock and also the population. Old and frail people in nursing and assisted living homes are rarely big funders of campaigns and if voting laws are crafted carefully they do not vote. There has to be an illusion of giving a crap about the old folks in nursing and assisted facilities to give new retirees heading to the state some sort of rational that when they get old and sick there will be someone to take care of them. Across the board I here from retired folks who winter in Florida to make sure that they get medical work done up north before they head south as the hospitals are not great for those who dont have the money to go private.
Connected developers will grab the ruined buildings, cart them off with disaster money and build high rises to attract younger retirees and the cycle repeats over and over again. The fundamental problem is that the insurance companies are all pulling out of the state as they know the end cycle is near. Any building built prior to Hurricane Andrew rarely was inspected to the weak building codes in place. Much of it was in rural counties who had no inspectors. Post Andrew, stronger regs and inspections help with wind damage but cant do much about flooding and storm surge and if you look at the high rises being installing in Florida, they have two stories of non occupied space down low with the mechanical equipment on at least the second story. They tend to survive quite well initially but in a salty environment there is need to do ongoing maintenance and in most cases the management cut corners on this work until they can sell out to a condo board and eventually a high rise collapses due to under maintenance.
Babcock Ranch is brought up a lot as the ideal new Florida, grampa and grandpa with enough money to afford a trailer in a trailer park probably cannot afford the low end 400K to high end 900K plus costs for individual homes or 300K for a single unit of a muti-unit. Talk to anyone familiar with that area of Florida and it gets incredibly hot and stagnant for six months a year as its too far way from the coast to get any coastal breezes, that is how they could find land to develop from scratch as most regarded it as not worth developing. Grandma and Grandpa also probably do not like being isolated 20 miles from the shore. No mention of local taxes or special assessments. Not bad for a second home investment where the owner heads north during the summer not so good for someone to live there full time. Take a look at the Fort Myers area and you would have seen mobile and modular homes crammed in on narrow lots along coastal rivers that frequently were dredged or even dug so that what they dug out could be piled up to meet some minimum elevation. Those were the areas nailed by the hurricane and no doubt they will get redeveloped.
