A few years ago, Miami-Dade — backed by the promise of millions in government grants — launched a program to buy out properties that had repeatedly flooded. It seemed the start of a landmark adaptation to climate change — “retreat” from land most at risk from rising sea levels.
Three years later, the county hasn’t bought any of the ten properties originally targeted and the state is withdrawing the money.
The program is a small one but the county’s failure to follow through is significant, an indicator of the emerging approach to handling high-risk property as sea rise increases flooding threats. For land once deemed too risky to save, the driving strategy is not retreat, it’s redevelopment that likely will put even more people in flood zones.
Take one problem property in Biscayne Gardens, a parcel bordered by water on two sides and flooded so frequently over the years that a real estate listing described the 1940s bungalow there as a “total tear down.” Though on the county’s buyout list, it wound up sold to a developer for less cash than the county was offering. The developer then turned around and asked the county for a density increase to build townhomes instead.
The county’s response? Thumbs up.
Miami-Dade later defended its decision, citing a pressing need for more housing and the promise from the developer — but no specific plan — to “floodproof” a new 11-unit building on a high-risk site. The small project may signal the future of coastal development in the era of sea rise, especially for communities like Miami-Dade that rely on constantly rising property values to keep the economic engine turning.
The county hasn’t ruled out retreat entirely, but unlike some coastal communities — most notably, the Florida Keys — Miami-Dade leaders are now leaning toward new, more resilient buildings over buyouts. They see retreat playing a smaller role in the community’s adaptation to climate change.
“Living with water does not necessarily mean you move. There may be situations where you choose to move or another set of situations require it, but flooding itself is an episodic event. It happens and it recedes,” said Jim Murley, the county’s chief resilience officer. “We can’t ever conceivably reduce flooding to zero, it would be very expensive.”
In the end, Miami-Dade never got the chance to do the “pilot program” of buyouts like it planned.
In June, Florida’s Department of Economic Opportunity, which oversees the federal buyout program, yanked back the unused cash from Miami-Dade, along with several other municipalities in the state.
That move also left homeowners desperate to sell their flooded homes, like Marvin Ramsey, in the lurch.
After decades of scooping catfish from the nearby canal out of his yard and home, the 2019 buyout program felt like a godsend for Ramsey, a 63-year-old retiree who spent his whole life in South Florida. He said the county told him his Biscayne Gardens house floods more than nearly any other home in Miami-Dade, and he was eager to put his name on the list of willing sellers for this program.
When Irma swamped his house in 2017, it wasn’t the first time he had to find somewhere else to live while flood damage was fixed. For the last three years, he and his wife have been renting a place in north Miami Dade. Their home has flooded at least three times since Irma, with the most recent flood in June of this year after a tropical storm swung by, he said. Meanwhile, home prices shot up nearby.
Ramsey doesn’t want to sell his home to someone else or see a developer tear it down. He loves his neighborhood and wants to stay, and if he has to abandon his property, he wants it to be used to help soak up excess floodwater for the rest of the community.
When Ramsey got the official notification in August that the program was defunded, he was angry. He sees lost years where he could have tried to fix his home, or elevate it high enough to stop future floods.
“If I’d done something back in 2018 I could have beat the skyrocketing prices,” he said. “Now I’m in a pickle, either a new house or moving to a new place. Or guess what, I’ll end up selling to a developer and they’ll put a two-story house on it. They’ll be fine but it won’t help the neighborhood or anything.”
“I’m in a no-win situation.”
Developer vs. the county
Hurricane Irma did a number on Michael Clark’s home, that 1946 bungalow in the Biscayne Gardens neighborhood of north Miami-Dade. It caved in the roof, collapsed floors and fried electrical systems.
The devastation was a new low for a triangular property that, bordered by canals on two sides, had regularly flooded for many years. So Clark was interested when he heard about Miami-Dade’s home buyout program, especially after the county said it could offer him $432,210 for the property — one and a half times its pre-Irma value.
That was in September 2019. All was quiet until early 2021, when Clark passed away. His estate instead sold the property to a developer, Ljubomir Ivanov, in May for $399,000.
At the point when that property went on the market, Miami-Dade was still waiting to kick-start the buyout program Clark had signed up for two years early. The county said it didn’t finalize the grant agreement with the state until October 2021, months after Clark died and his property went up for public sale.
One month later, Ivanov hired a law firm to apply for a density increase on the property. He wants to build a housing complex there, replacing the single-bedroom home with 11 units.
The request went through multiple levels of government review in a nearly yearlong process, yet the property’s history of damaging floods only came up a couple of times.
Murley, the county’s chief resilience officer, wrote in a memo that flooding had been a concern at the property in the past and mentioned the buyout property, as well as property survey results that showed the lot was less than a foot higher than king tide elevations in some spots.
He also noted that redeveloping to the newest building standards would not be enough to protect the property from future sea level rise-driven flooding. Murley recommended that flood risks be addressed at the property before allowing more intense development.
“Many existing codes such as the County Flood Criteria and the building code do not account for historic and future sea level rise,” he wrote. “Therefore, complying with existing code requirements for site elevation, drainage, and finished floor elevations will not be sufficient to protect the site and all supporting infrastructure against flooding risks amplified by on-going sea level rise over the lifetime of any development.”
A member of the county’s Planning Advisory Board echoed the same concerns at a March meeting to consider the project.
Ivanov’s lawyer, Mickey Marrero of law firm Bercow Radell Fernandez Larkin + Tapanes, told the board that the new development would be built to the newest building code standards and said he was confident that would protect it from future flooding.
“Our client was aware of the potential flooding concerns… they’re comfortable that they’re able to develop the property in a way that is resilient and flood-proofed to not have any issues,” he said.
A member of the board, Lynette Cardoch, challenged Marrero on exactly what he meant by “floodproof,” but Marrero had no specific answer. He could not say how high the new building would be built or what other protections the developer would use.
“I find it offensive that you say you’re going to floodproof something and you can’t tell me what you’re going to do,” said Cardoch, the director of resilience and adaptation at consulting firm Moffat & Nichol. “That’s a really bad thing to tell people who’re gonna buy something you tell them is floodproof and it’s not.”
Cardoch voted against allowing denser development on the property, but she was the only one. In August, the application crossed its final hurdle and won a green light from Miami-Dade County.
Neither Ivanov, the property owner, or Marrero, his lawyer, responded to requests for comment.
The news upset some neighbors in Biscayne Gardens, an unincorporated community. Maria Perilli said she saw the home on this property demolished, trees removed and fill added, without any permits she could find online. She reported it to the county environmental regulator but hasn’t heard anything.
“It’s unfair that they are awarding this private developer with an increased density when there’s already permit violations on this property. That sets a really bad precedent of how we should operate in this county,” she said. “That gives us a clue that this developer will not take into account the environment or the safety of the people who will live there.”
State yanks back the money
Why did it take so long to buy property from owners who wanted to sell?
Miami-Dade received the grant money for the program in October 2021. At that point, the state’s Department of Economic Opportunity said Miami-Dade had until October 2023 to buy and demolish the properties. But in June, eight months later, DEO sent a new letter to the county. It was taking back unused cash, which in Miami-Dade’s case, was all of it.
“In a handful of communities, including yours, counties and cities have yet to acquire any eligible properties from willing sellers and are therefore unlikely to complete the deliverables in the grant’s timeline,” wrote Ryan Butler, director of DEO’s office of long-term resiliency.
Butler explained that the state could lose the federal cash altogether if it isn’t spent, and DEO intended to reuse the money to help people repair Irma-damaged homes in Miami-Dade instead, under a program known as Rebuild Florida.
“We recognize that your grant performance is not for a lack of effort,” he wrote.
Loren Parra, spokesperson for Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, said in a statement that the county started work immediately when the grant agreement was finalized in October, but eight months wasn’t enough time to buy the willing properties still on the list.
While the details were being worked out, four properties, including Clark’s, were sold to new private owners. Another dropped off the list, leaving five interested buyers.
“Upon execution of the grant agreement, Miami-Dade County moved to establish the necessary funding accounts, initiate title work, environmental status review and required other activities. The County had also moved on additional activities such as appraisals, demolition, and contractor selection, however, it was not feasible to close on target properties within the first 8 months of a two-year grant cycle,” Parra wrote.
Despite hearing that it lost the funding in June, Miami-Dade didn’t reach out to homeowners until early August. Instead of informing residents that the program was over, county officials asked who was still interested in a buyout. Five said yes, according to Parra.
Two weeks later, after the Herald questioned whether homeowners had been told that the program was over, Miami-Dade sent letters to homeowners letting them know the program had been terminated.
Murley said the county would still try to work with the willing sellers.
“We have a responsibility to work with them and see if there aren’t other ways we can help them with the situation they’re in,” he said. “It may not be buyouts in the short run.”
The state’s Deputy Secretary of Community Development, Ben Melnick, told the Herald that Florida wasn’t writing off future buyout programs when it took the nearly $14 million in unused funds from across the state and applied them to the Rebuild Florida program.
“We’re still very much interested in the voluntary home buyout program and assisting our local partners,” he said. “We’re of course focused on the overall goal of helping to return to safe and sanitary conditions as quickly as possible.”
County’s strategy moving forward
Without an immediate halt to greenhouse gas production, Miami-Dade can expect about two feet of sea level rise by 2060. That’s enough to expose about 15,000 homes worth nearly $9 billion dollars to at least occasional property flooding, according to an analysis by nonprofit climate data group Climate Central.
The county’s 106-page sea level rise strategy, the first in the state, was unveiled last year. It outlines a few options for dealing with future flooding. They boil down to one of two camps, build higher or retreat from the water.
The document rarely touches on the option known in climate change circles as retreat or managed relocation. It’s clear why. Government buyouts are politically unpopular, and the concept that not all of Miami-Dade will be inhabitable forever is still a third-rail topic for many politicians, developers and business leaders, despite the clear scientific reality.
The more palatable approach, especially for the multibillion-dollar real estate and development industries in South Florida, is a variation on the traditional cycle of razing and rebuilding.
The county’s strategy, as shown in its recent proposal to raise the minimum elevation of roads, homes and canals, is to construct more buildings, more roads and more homes — but higher and stronger. The potential problem there is that stricter standards have yet to be introduced, or approved, by the county commission. So new buildings and homes may go up without a real understanding of how they will weather the inevitable increase in sea rise.
In the specific case of the Biscayne Gardens property snapped up by a developer, county resilience officer Murley said that the county had no opportunity to buy it before the developer did, and they couldn’t halt development there just because it was once on a list for a government buyout.
Contrary to his written comments, Murley said that redevelopment would make the property safer and reduce flood risks.
“In a redevelopment situation... the structure that’s going to be built is much different than the structure that was a repetitive loss,” he said. “There are many things that will make that structure much more resilient to flooding than what was there before.”
He said the county is undaunted by the state’s decision to take back the cash for its buyout program. Miami-Dade will continue to apply for buyout money in the future, Murley said, although none of the latest grant applications the county has submitted to the state or federal government include property purchases.
“I continue to think that a willing seller buyout program would be important for the county to have experience with,” he said. “It’s one of the many things we want to have available as we move into the decades of dealing with all the things we will see with climate change.”
This story was originally published September 18, 2022 5:30 AM.
