Watching “climate retreat” enter the public lexicon has been a little like watching the sea level rise. It’s gradual and almost theoretical most of the time, and then a king tide comes along to spotlight the new normal.

Sometimes that “king tide” is in the form of an actual king tide (Key West edition), sometimes it’s in the form of a hurricane (see the Bahamas and Puerto Rico?). Today we can thank a head-turning article by Jim Morrison in the Washington Post Magazine: “Climate Change Turns the Tide on Waterfront Living — Rising seas and worsening flooding are forcing many communities to plan their retreat from the coasts.”

We nominate the Post’s Jim Morrison for the Pulitzer for calling coastal retreat “the Voldemort of climate adaptation.”

The article begins in the slowly drowning city of Norfolk, Virginia, whose planning director tours the author around the affluent Larchmont District.

Hurricanes get the headlines, but on this street, it will be the repeated jabs of flooding day after day from climate change, with its rising tides and increasingly stronger storms, that will force the city to make tough choices. By 2040, projections by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science show, the river will overflow its banks and flood this street twice daily during high tides. Norfolk plans to protect the city with $1.8 billion in storm-surge barriers and flood walls, but those projects — if built — won’t stop the rising tides in Larchmont. The water will come. This is where Norfolk will eventually begin its retreat.

One defiant pink house remains, rising two stories on stilts. Another, damaged by a storm more than a decade ago, is a ramshackle, boarded-up shell with “No Trespassing” signs adorning its stilts. The owner won a long and expensive legal battle with the town, which tried to condemn the property. He has refused a $35,000 buyout offer. Instead, he’s waiting for the next big storm to knock the house down so he can collect up to $250,000 in federal flood insurance.

Not a sustainability best practice.

As for Nags Head:

… it has no plans to retreat. In fact, Nags Head removed the idea of retreat from its comprehensive plan years ago. Why? The town can afford to delay the inevitable, preserving a waterfront tax base by spending tens of millions of dollars rebuilding beaches. It’s working. Despite the devastation of three hurricanes in the past four years, property values in Dare County, home to Nags Head, Kill Devil Hills, Kitty Hawk and other destinations, have boomed to nearly $16 billion, 25 percent more than seven years ago.

The beach rebuilding, as we mentioned, is the “nourishment” process of pumping sand from underwater berms back to the beach, and needs to be repeated every few years — with the goal of keeping property values high.

Also not a best practice.

Speaking of best practices, the article contrasts the efforts of Norfolk and neighboring Virginia Beach to buy out and elevate properties with the experience of Valmeyer, Illinois, an entire town that underwent a managed retreat from the Mississippi River after the levees finally failed in 1993.

Managed Retreat seems more sensible, but relocation is prohibitively expensive and complicated. According to the Norfolk planning director, successful relocations…

follow similar models: They start while feet are still wet, they have relocation blueprints in hand or create them quickly, and they have a strong leader. Knobloch [an architect of the Valmeyer success], who has consulted with other towns looking to relocate, says that Valmeyer hit the rare sweet spot of available funding and political will. “If you look at our situation,” he says, “it was probably the only period in recent history where we could have done this, because at both the state and federal level, the people that were involved, both on the political side and on the side of the agencies, embraced this idea, and they had the resources to help make it happen.”

Managed retreat — the collective relocation of entire towns, as opposed to the individual dispersal of homeowners and businesses when wet feet can no longer be ignored — seems like an unlikely best practice as the water continues to rise. But a less-best practice is the likeliest, and probably most human, one — which is just to rebuild where you are. 

The first step to managed retreat will be a radical rethinking of federal, state and local policies and subsidies that distort the true risk of living in floodplains. Federal disaster and mitigation funds, for instance, provide little incentive to restrict rebuilding in these areas. That’s fine with cities and counties, because rebuilding in a risky area keeps their tax base intact in the short term. In the long term, though, it’s bad policy, says William Stiles of Wetlands Watch, a Norfolk-based nonprofit organization that works with local governments and other nonprofits on solutions to sea-level rise. “As seas rise, it costs more in public funds to maintain the streets, flood walls, sewer systems and EMT services than the properties generate in taxes,” he says. A study by Zillow and Climate Central last year found that after Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the housing growth rate in New Jersey was nearly three times higher in areas likely to flood once a decade than in safer areas. “Think about that,” Siders says. “More homes, more families at risk. And we’re going to reward that by giving states more money the next time they have a disaster.”

The article is a must-read throughout, and the ideas are here to stay… even after the tide returns to normal or, for instance, we get distracted by a pandemic.