[softcactus]

Human brains are funny. Obviously the absurd part of all of this is people (literally) building their houses on the edge of the ocean and expecting this to not happen.

However because it's all we know, it seems that the real absurdity would be the government designating these sites as 'no-build' zones-- or at least FEMA washing their hands of any damage that should happen to these sites.

This should be a wakeup call that many aspects of our current way of life are unsustainable, not that it's just standard operating procedure to rebuild from the ground up every 20 years only for everything to be washed away again.

[tpmoney]

I would wager a majority of the final costs are from damages to houses not "on the edge of the ocean". Hurricane damages stretch for miles inland. Heck pick any east coast state and check out the areas covered by flood warnings and watches. They're hours from the coast in places. If it was only the houses on the edge of the ocean, this would be relatively cheap.

[softcactus]

That's a good point, I decided to do some napkin math:

Sanibel Island has 7,821 housing units at an average density of 454.6 per square mile.

Median sales price of the homes in 2021 was $1.64M, average price was similar.

So a rough approximation of the value of the homes on the island alone is $12Bn. I am not sure how you would translate that into damage costs, but in a scenario of total destruction then $12B would be lost.

I have no real evidence other than visiting Ft Myers and Naples a few times, but I can tell you there is (was) a lot of very valuable property right next to the ocean. I don't doubt that if you look at the total distribution of damages that there is a long tail of less severe damage as you go inland, but the conservative estimates from my napkin math shows that it's likely a significant number (over ten billion) occurred just from properties on the small stretch of coastline.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanibel,_Florida https://sanibelrealestateguide.com/average-price-homes/

[tpmoney]

Insurance isn't going to pay out on value though, it's going to pay out on replacement costs. A home that's $5M because it sits on the waterfront would be $750K 5 miles inland, but they will cost roughly the same to replace.

For example, here is one house for sale on the water in Naples (https://www.trulia.com/p/fl/naples/2331-crayton-rd-naples-fl...). 3 beds, 2 baths, 2k sqft on a little over 0.25 acres. $3.5M

Just 7 miles away is this house (https://www.trulia.com/p/fl/naples/5241-hunter-blvd-naples-f...), 4 beds, 2 baths, 2.25k sqft on 0.25 acres. $625K.

I sincerely doubt the cost to replace the first home is 6x the second. And then there's this one (https://www.trulia.com/p/fl/sebring/2124-gardenview-rd-sebri...), which is about as far from the coast as you can reasonably be in that part of florida, going for a mere $240k, and I doubt it's significantly more or less to replace than either of the previous two.