Dream of a Rodanthe beach house ends with a short sale and, soon, demolition

The National Park Service has purchased a pair of crumbling oceanfront homes on the northern end of Rodanthe, a move that could be the first step toward removing more homes in that erosion-threatened part of the Outer Banks.

The homes have East Beacon Road addresses, but any visitor to the Cape Hatteras National Seashore will find them sitting in the middle of the beach strand just past the end of East Beacon Road or East Point Drive. They are two of about a dozen homes in Rodanthe that sit seaward of the dune line.

In the next 30 to 45 days, the Park Service will start demolishing the homes, David Hallac, superintendent of the Park Service’s Cape Hatteras National Seashore, told The News & Observer. The land where they stood will be turned into a beach access. And Hallac believes these two houses could be the beginning of a broader effort in the area.

“There are a number of homes that are if not threatened, imminently threatened,” Hallac said. “When I say that, I mean that the structures or the houses are frequently surrounded by water and in some cases the houses may not be able to be lived in. So there are a number of additional structures that would likely be suited for this type of mitigation in the future.”

The National Park Service bought the houses using the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which is generated from the federal government’s leasing of land for oil and gas exploration. The federal government uses the money to purchase land that helps the Park Service achieve its management goals.

Erin Seekamp, the director of N.C. State University’s Coastal Resilience and Sustainability Initiative, told The News & Observer there’s irony to using the Land and Water Conservation Fund rather than taxpayer money to pay for the mitigation project.

“Basically we’re using the economic benefits of oil and gas leasing to be able to offset some of the carbon impacts that are accelerating sea-level rise by using those funds to purchase these houses,” Seekamp said.

Since 2020, five homes have collapsed into the ocean around Rodanthe. To Hallac and the Park Service, those pose a threat to the ecology of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore and to the people who want to visit it.

Septic tanks that crack open from the abandoned homes leach human waste into the water. Pieces of siding and roof and nails wash dozens of miles up and down the coast, especially if the wreckage is left to linger.

A May study prepared for Dare County found that the beach in Rodanthe is eroding at rates of about 10 feet per year. That study also found that the dune line there provides “little to no storm protection.”

Buying properties threatened by that erosion helps owners escape a situation that offers no simple answers, Hallac said. But the goal is really to protect the seashore and the wildlife living there from the impacts of any future collapses.

“The owners do end up selling their homes and being able to walk away from a difficult situation but the purpose really is to remove that structure, to remove those impacts to the resources and the visitors and finally, and this is a tremendous benefit, to make the area a public access site following the restoration of the beach area,” Hallac said.

Headaches at Mermaid’s Kiss

Erick Saks has loved the Outer Banks since he visited them as a child. He and his wife, Vanessa, took frequent trips there when they were stationed at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia. They were married in Duck.

So when the Sakses retired from the military, they decided to use a chunk of their savings to buy a house on the Outer Banks. They found the home at 23292 East Beacon Road and purchased it for $360,000 in October 2021.

“I have that connection, and I wanted to own part of it,” Erick Saks told The News & Observer. “You know how it is when you own land or own something, you’re more likely to go there because you’ve got it. I saw it as a reason that we would make several trips out there per year and it just didn’t work out that way at all.”

They knew that buying an oceanfront home carried some risk, but believed there was enough sand on the beach to protect the house.

The section of Rodanthe that is increasingly threatened used to receive sand replenishment in order to protect N.C. 12, the critical Outer Banks road that runs from Hatteras to Corolla. But with the completion last year of the Jug Handle Bridge, the N.C. Department of Transportation isn’t expecting to nourish or provide sandbags in the area any longer.

So the problems arrived quickly.

Within months of the Sakses’ purchase, their home’s septic field washed out.

“Once the septic system goes out, it’s considered uninhabitable. You can’t have anybody there, you can’t be sending things out to sea,” Saks said.

That dashed not only the family’s plans to have a vacation home in the place they loved, but also to operate a vacation rental.

Saks spent between $20,000 and $30,000 to make the necessary repairs to the septic system. Acquiring the required permits, working with contractors and the actual repairs took about six months.

Within 24 hours of the newly installed system receiving its necessary approvals, it washed out again.

“That was absolutely devastating,” Saks said.

Next, they considered moving the house.

But Saks quickly found out that purchasing an adjacent lot would cost about $250,000. Moving the house would cost about $50,000 more, then hooking it up to utilities would cost about $50,000 more.

“I was looking at it and I was like we might go down this path, but if we do we’re getting dangerously beyond my comfort point,” Saks said.

Additionally, Saks said, the beach had lost about 10 feet of sand in the less than two years he owned the house. And the tide line was steadily moving up the beach, starting to threaten the vegetated dune line that sits west of his home and protects dozens of other Rodanthe houses.

Dare County explored the possibility of using state disaster relief money to buy out homes threatened by rapidly encroaching tides. Ultimately, the county learned it would be difficult to qualify, in large measure because virtually none of the homes in the area are primary residences.

Hallac and the Park Service developed the idea of using federal money to mitigate the threat posed by the homes and approached Saks and his neighbors, Carly and Daniel Kerlakian of Cincinnati, about the buyout.

The homes needed to be appraised — Saks thought his offer was low, but that was because the house didn’t have an operating septic system, something the appraisers considered even if the homes were going to be torn down.

He ended up accepting $260,000 for the property, $100,000 less than he paid before even considering all of the repairs. His advice to homeowners who may be eligible for a similar buyout in the future is to take it when you can, before the elements cause damage to the home that might send its value plummeting.

Removing more houses?

Since word about the East Beacon Road sales started to spread, Hallac and the Park Service have heard from about a half dozen other owners offering to sell their homes.

That’s exciting to Hallac, who along with the N.C. Division of Coastal Management co-chairs a working group that meets regularly to discuss homes threatened by tides and is trying to figure out how local, state and federal governments can work together to remove some of their threat.

By buying the two East Beacon Road houses, Hallac hopes he is creating a process that allows the Park Service to remove more tide-threatened homes from Rodanthe’s northern end. Whether the program works will become clear after the houses are demolished and the beach is restored.

“If all that goes well, then I think we will know that this is a tool that we should consider using in the future and a program that we should consider scaling up,” Hallac said.

What exactly a scaled-up program could look like remains unclear. It’s also not clear that the National Park Service would be the only party either buying or moving homes, with Dare County and the Division of Coastal Management both actively involved in discussions about the Rodanthe homes.

Acting before a home is uninhabitable or surrounded by tides would be ideal, Hallac said, because that would mean less pollution and storm debris impacting the seashore.

“In the future, I think the goal is to mitigate the impacts of the threatened oceanfront structure before it’s standing in the water, before it becomes imminently threatened,” Hallac said.

Seekamp, the N.C. State professor, also called for real estate agents to take more responsibility in selling homes, particularly to buyers who might not understand how quickly coastal dynamics can put a home at risk.

“Awareness is super low and a lot of responsibility has to come down to the real estate market. That education that needs to occur when people are purchasing properties at this point,” Seekamp said, adding there also need to be efforts to tell tourists they’re in places where septic tanks could be failing.

Danny Couch, who represents Hatteras Island on the Dare County Board of Commissioners, said the Beacon Road effort represents a good starting point to address the problems in northern Rodanthe.

The area makes sense for the mitigation projects, Couch said, because the federal government already has such a large footprint in the area with the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. Still, Couch said, local and state governments will have a role to play moving forward.

“We cannot buy our way out of this because there’s not enough money for the Park Service to do that. ... It’s a multifaceted problem that’s going to take multifaceted solutions,” Couch said.

When Saks visited the home to move some belongings out in September, he realized that a structure he had once considered well-braced against the elements was showing signs of wear. The tides rushing underneath the house had started to peel a staircase and balcony, and the structure is beginning to lean.

To remove things from the house, Saks and some friends jerry rigged a pulley system they could use to send things past the high tide line.

“I love the Outer Banks. I have only fond memories except for this one chapter and I hated the fact that I started to think of that area negatively when in the past it’s been only joy for me. So it was relieving to close this chapter and move on and now I can go back to fond memories,” Saks said.

The Saks family only stayed in the house two or three times. They rented it only a handful more. Saks said he’s unsure if he’ll ever own another beach house.

This story was produced with financial support from the Hartfield Foundation and 1Earth Fund, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work.