The hurricane season and affordable housing | Opinion
Wildfire and hurricane season began on June 1 and already, our state has had torrential rains which brought flooding in Miami the first weekend in June.
Although hurricanes are common, especially in a coastal state such as Florida, few can afford to push past this marker without concern. Due to climate change, storms are coming more frequently, and they are becoming deadlier. The ‘common’ can now be considered deadly, disastrous, and debilitating.
While the climate crisis is indisputable, its impacts on housing are inextricably linked. In fact, the climate crisis drives displacement by raising housing costs. One way this happens is the rising cost of insurance. A report by the Insurance Information Institute shows statewide premiums are up nearly 25% this year. Homeowners pay insurance premiums that continue to rise, and landlords shift those premium costs to their tenants.
In a special session last month, legislators tried to solve the insurance cost issue with little success because they didn’t address the root cause: the climate crisis, which continues to land hardest on the frontline communities who contribute to climate change the least.
Since a byproduct of hurricanes is displacement, it is reasonable to expect that this season will further deplete the already low pool of affordable housing. The people most likely to be displaced are women and children, persons living in poverty, immigrants and persons of limited financial means.
Additionally, persons whose homes and apartments are destroyed in a storm often have no reasonable timetable for when they’ll be able to return – and no feasible way to live comfortably while they wait to be relocated.
Given the effects of climate change and the impact of prior storms, many Floridians enter this hurricane season already vulnerable. There is not only a lack of affordable housing in Florida, but the region is among the most expensive in the country.
According to a Feb. 2022 Realtor.com report, the rental burden for a person seeking an apartment in Miami was 59.5% of their monthly income. In Tampa, the average rental burden is 45% and it is 37% in Orlando.
This hurricane season, the storm may seem like the first assault but that blow came much earlier through the policy inaction of state legislators.
Weathering this year’s hurricane season is more than just surviving the storm: it is finding a way to make whole the people most impacted by climate emergencies.
The UN Refugee Agency noted that “Hazards resulting from the increasing intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, such as abnormally heavy rainfall, prolonged droughts, desertification, environmental degradation, or sea-level rise and cyclones are already causing an average of more than 20 million people to leave their homes and move to other areas in their countries each year.”
Ultimately nothing will get better if our climate crisis goes unaddressed.
We need clean, affordable, renewable energy, weatherization for our homes, and for our state government to make a big shift away reliance on fossil fuels. This was a need before we entered the storm season, and it will be a concern long after this period has ended.
MacKenzie Marcelin is the Climate Justice Manager for Florida Rising, a grassroots organization that builds Independent political power in centers marginalized communities.
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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: The hurricane season brings fresh concerns about the dearth of affordable housing | Opinion
