A Personal Relationship with a Vanishing Beach
by Professor Bruce E. Johansen
I remember, at the age of about eight, in the late 1950s working my way with my parents and siblings through sea grass several feet high through sandy hills that swallowed our legs up a line of sand dunes south of Daytona, in eastern Florida. My grandparents lived west of a highway behind (west of) the dune hills that we crested on the grassy, sandy paths up, then down the dunes, onto a huge, flat beach.
At low tide, the beach stretched outward (east) more than a hundred yards, most of it firm sand packed hard by the ocean’s waves on a waterfront that was becoming well-known as the first site of stock-car racing. Later, as the beach became narrower and the popularity of stock-car racing grew, the track was moved inland, to what today is known as the site of the Daytona 500 and other races.
Condos March Up the Beach
We had a personal relationship with that beach as we grew and aged, and as we watched it change, a sign in time for that huge sandspit called Florida. At our age of six or eight, our grandparents lived in a single-family house south of Daytona which is now more than 100 years old. Today, it is one of a small number that has not been replaced by condos six to about 12 or more stories high. The ranks of sand dunes have been mostly pushed away to open land that, at the time, was considered more valuable. By the time I was about 18, a high school graduate in 1968, my parents owned a second-floor condo on the same route that we had raced through, on foot, as children.
The beach was shorter now at both high and low tides; at low tide, some parts of the beaches still provided room for fishing, but any cars that rode along the beach often found their tires swallowed by soft sand along the dunes and tall grass.The tall grass that remained on the few dunes along the beach was shrinking, too. (Because of its stock-car background, driving of cars was allowed on this beach long after it became illegal on others).
A Gut-punch from Hurricane Nicole
By the time I was about 50, in 2000, I was studying atmospheric sciences, and climate change, which was not widely discussed then, outside of scientific circles. My sister, two years my junior, seemed not to fully comprehend why, as we stood on a sea-front porch facing east, when I said that, in a few decades, our beloved beach would be swept away by storm tides as the land level sank. The collapse of our childhood fantasy beach took place in roughly ten years, with a gut-punch from Hurricane Nicole, in 2022.
Nicole was not much of a storm in the annals of hurricanes, as it moved slowly north-northwest along Florida’s east coast. Based solely on wind speed (as a Category One), it was barely a hurricane at all.
Nicole’s lack of forward motion as it as it moved parallel to the coast enhanced its erosion of sand. The storm lasted long enough for high tide to coincide with its on-shore flow. Photos in local newspapers showed ebbing floodwaters washing parts of aging condos grounds into the ocean.
The last video I saw of that beach showed the dune grass underwater, as parts of the condos crumbled into rising ocean. The counter-clockwise rotation of the storm drove the ocean up the beaches out of the east, eroding even more sand, flooding the basements and lower floors of many of the condos, which were aging by now. One of them collapsed, killing several residents who could not escape.
Relative Land Values Change
The damage from Nicole and other storms elsewhere in Florida was changing the relative value of land in many parts of Florida that had enjoyed a few feet of extra elevation relative to the beachfront. Liberty City, for example, began as public housing west of Miami, and almost 20 feet above the beaches on the ocean. As seas rose and land sank, land that had begun as the state’s first public housing development in 1937 was drawing real estate agents with plans to evict the area’s Black, low-income occupants.
Back on the beachfronts, rising rents and insurance costs are now driving people, most of them elderly, out of their ocean-view retirement homes. An ocean-front location, which once carried a considerable premium over inland locations that became more expensive, the new premium for a few dozen feet of elevation. In Miami and other sea-side major cities, streets and lower floors of very tall condos and office towers threatened to flood as stronger hurricanes move closer to shore over sinking land. On top of these problems (one that is not much discussed) has been sinking of the land itself.
“Climate Gentrification”
These have become the ironies of climate change in a place once called paradise. People caught up in this new form of eviction have come to call it “climate gentrification.” Before you buy an ocean-view condo on the East Coast, take a look at how much of it is subsiding.
The New York Times published a large map of this very phenomenon during February of this year, from Maine to Florida in January, 2024. The view is rather shocking. If you are in the mood, take a walk on the beaches that front on the ocean and imagine what it looked like 50 to 100 yards wider. The coast is crumbling into the ocean as we watch.
Bruce E. Johansen has written and published several books on this climate change during the past 25 years, the most recent of which will be Nationalism and Nature: War and Warming, due out in October from Springer publishers in Frankfurt, Germany.
I remember, at the age of about eight, in the late 1950s working my way with my parents and siblings through sea grass several feet high through sandy hills that swallowed our legs up a line of sand dunes south of Daytona, in eastern Florida. My grandparents lived west of a highway behind (west of) the dune hills that we crested on the grassy, sandy paths up, then down the dunes, onto a huge, flat beach.
At low tide, the beach stretched outward (east) more than a hundred yards, most of it firm sand packed hard by the ocean’s waves on a waterfront that was becoming well-known as the first site of stock-car racing. Later, as the beach became narrower and the popularity of stock-car racing grew, the track was moved inland, to what today is known as the site of the Daytona 500 and other races.
Condos March Up the Beach
We had a personal relationship with that beach as we grew and aged, and as we watched it change, a sign in time for that huge sandspit called Florida. At our age of six or eight, our grandparents lived in a single-family house south of Daytona which is now more than 100 years old. Today, it is one of a small number that has not been replaced by condos six to about 12 or more stories high. The ranks of sand dunes have been mostly pushed away to open land that, at the time, was considered more valuable. By the time I was about 18, a high school graduate in 1968, my parents owned a second-floor condo on the same route that we had raced through, on foot, as children.
The beach was shorter now at both high and low tides; at low tide, some parts of the beaches still provided room for fishing, but any cars that rode along the beach often found their tires swallowed by soft sand along the dunes and tall grass.The tall grass that remained on the few dunes along the beach was shrinking, too. (Because of its stock-car background, driving of cars was allowed on this beach long after it became illegal on others).
A Gut-punch from Hurricane Nicole
By the time I was about 50, in 2000, I was studying atmospheric sciences, and climate change, which was not widely discussed then, outside of scientific circles. My sister, two years my junior, seemed not to fully comprehend why, as we stood on a sea-front porch facing east, when I said that, in a few decades, our beloved beach would be swept away by storm tides as the land level sank. The collapse of our childhood fantasy beach took place in roughly ten years, with a gut-punch from Hurricane Nicole, in 2022.
Nicole was not much of a storm in the annals of hurricanes, as it moved slowly north-northwest along Florida’s east coast. Based solely on wind speed (as a Category One), it was barely a hurricane at all.
Nicole’s lack of forward motion as it as it moved parallel to the coast enhanced its erosion of sand. The storm lasted long enough for high tide to coincide with its on-shore flow. Photos in local newspapers showed ebbing floodwaters washing parts of aging condos grounds into the ocean.
The last video I saw of that beach showed the dune grass underwater, as parts of the condos crumbled into rising ocean. The counter-clockwise rotation of the storm drove the ocean up the beaches out of the east, eroding even more sand, flooding the basements and lower floors of many of the condos, which were aging by now. One of them collapsed, killing several residents who could not escape.
Relative Land Values Change
The damage from Nicole and other storms elsewhere in Florida was changing the relative value of land in many parts of Florida that had enjoyed a few feet of extra elevation relative to the beachfront. Liberty City, for example, began as public housing west of Miami, and almost 20 feet above the beaches on the ocean. As seas rose and land sank, land that had begun as the state’s first public housing development in 1937 was drawing real estate agents with plans to evict the area’s Black, low-income occupants.
Back on the beachfronts, rising rents and insurance costs are now driving people, most of them elderly, out of their ocean-view retirement homes. An ocean-front location, which once carried a considerable premium over inland locations that became more expensive, the new premium for a few dozen feet of elevation. In Miami and other sea-side major cities, streets and lower floors of very tall condos and office towers threatened to flood as stronger hurricanes move closer to shore over sinking land. On top of these problems (one that is not much discussed) has been sinking of the land itself.
“Climate Gentrification”
These have become the ironies of climate change in a place once called paradise. People caught up in this new form of eviction have come to call it “climate gentrification.” Before you buy an ocean-view condo on the East Coast, take a look at how much of it is subsiding.
The New York Times published a large map of this very phenomenon during February of this year, from Maine to Florida in January, 2024. The view is rather shocking. If you are in the mood, take a walk on the beaches that front on the ocean and imagine what it looked like 50 to 100 yards wider. The coast is crumbling into the ocean as we watch.
Bruce E. Johansen has written and published several books on this climate change during the past 25 years, the most recent of which will be Nationalism and Nature: War and Warming, due out in October from Springer publishers in Frankfurt, Germany.