You don’t have to convince Tom Morgan that sea-level rise is a real thing, not after he oversaw the sale of the family home.
Two months after he lost his mother in November, 2023, Morgan was at her house when what he descibed as “the worst flood I’ve ever seen in Portsmouth” occurred.
“We’d never seen the water come up like that before, it came up in the matter of an hour,” said Moore, who has lived in the city for four decades. “It burst through an old bulkhead door that was in poor condition. We had three-and-a-half feet of water in the basement in a manner of minutes. It took out electricity, furnace, the hot water heater.”
It cost $30,000 to replace everything, starting with the electric panel, all of which was moved out of the basement to the ground floor. “I didn’t put everything back in the same place because the ocean is going to continue to rise,” Moore said.
Upgrading technology with such things as on-demand water heater and heat pumps reduced the impact the move had on living space, but it was still a hassle. And this isn’t the end of it, either.
“One of the buyers asked me, ‘Is this going to flood again?’ And I said, ‘Of course,'” said Morgan, who works as a city planner and has plenty of experience of coastal areas facing rising seas because of climate change. Still, he is confident the house is safe for a while: “You could put five, six feet of water in the basement.”
I learned of Morgan’s story from Talia Sperduto, a Portsmouth Realtor who led a recent workshop for seacoast real-estate agents called Living With Water. Sponsored by the New Hampshire Coastal Adaptation Workgroup, its goal was to help the agents answer question from clients concerned about the interplay between the ocean and ocean-front property.
“Increasingly now, in the last year I would say, they’re starting to care about homes that are in flood zones and starting to care about FEMA flood zone maps in a way that they didn’t just two years ago,” Sperduto said.
It’s not a sudden realization of the realities of climate change driving this change, however; It’s money, specifically, the cost of home insurance in a flood zone.
When the National Flood Insurance Program was put on hold as part of the government shutdown and President Donald Trump’s erratic undoing of government functions, “that definitely impacted people. Being forced to go to private flood insurance made them a little more nervous,” said Sperduto.
We’re not like Florida, where fear of the ocean has made flood insurance almost impossible to buy in many areas, hurting home sales. The desire to have a home on the water is still strong, as is the Seacoast housing market, but Sperduto thinks concern about sea-level rise may be starting to affect interest.
“It’s not that no one’s shopping for the houses anymore, but when you have less people interested and less buyers, that means lower premiums,” she said, including an increase in time to to find a buyer. “I think the risk is just dwindling the pool of people who would be comfortable there.”
In years to come we’re going to be hearing more and more stories like this, of people’s financial and business decisions upended by climate change.
Home insurance against flooding in the east and wildfires in the west is the canary in the coal mine, but every business in the world was built on the idea that their surroundings would behave in certain ways.
Now that our surroundings are changing in nasty ways at lightning speed, all those business models are at risk. And water in the basement is just the beginning.