That's a Real Beach of an Investment for Public Dollars

Remember this?
Why are we pouring tax money into re-building this?

As a species, and generally as a nation, we want what we want when we want it. 

Consequences be damned.

And so as another summer vacation season kicks off tomorrow and Chris Christie works overtime to convince we Philadelphia-area residents that the Jersey shore is open for  summer business, we continue to ignore the elephant in the room.

It would seem that we have learned little from Super-storm Sandy.

Sure, newspapers dutifully reported the folly of building on barrier islands as sea levels rise and budgets diminish.

Recalling them described as "high-speed real estate," this self-same blog joined the chorus of caution.

But despite the warnings, despite the science, despite the vague and empty promises of government officials who promised to "study" the issue, we tumble headlong once again into doing the same thing over and over -- providing for huge populations and public/private investment on unstable real estate -- and expecting a different result.

Let's face it, we like the beach.

And if the beach is popular with the public, using public money to fix it back up again so global warming can knock it back down again, is going to keep getting money from officials elected by that public.

After all, what is an election but a popularity contest?

But because the beleaguered staff here at the Digital Notebook's vast underground bunker revels in being an unheralded voice in the wilderness,

Oh yeah, re-building here makes PERFECT sense.

(and a summer season killjoy to boot) we'll take another swing using the latest developments since Sandy to suggest, however briefly, that "maybe we should try something different...."

In November, scientists writing in The New York Times issued the following warning:

As scientists who study sea level change and storm surge, we fear that Hurricane Sandy gave only a modest preview of the dangers to come, as we continue to power our global economy by burning fuels that pollute the air with heat-trapping gases.

This past summer, a disconcerting new scientific study by the climate scientist Michiel Schaeffer and colleagues — published in the journal Nature Climate Change — suggested that no matter how quickly we cut this pollution, we are unlikely to keep the seas from climbing less than five feet.

More than six million Americans live on land less than five feet above the local high tide.

Floods reaching five feet above the current high tide line will become increasingly common along the nation’s coastlines well before the seas climb by five feet. Over the last century, the nearly eight-inch rise of the world’s seas has already doubled the chance of “once in a century” floods for many seaside communities.

What to do?

I mean, what are the chances it could happen again right?
Actually, they're pretty good.

Well, actually, we did it, back in 1982 with a law liberals and conservatives agreed upon and Ronald Reagan
signed with a flourish.

"The law — the Coastal Barrier Resources Act — was intended to protect much of the American coastline, and it did so in a clever way that drew votes from the most conservative Republicans and the most liberal Democrats," The New York Times reported in April.

"The $75 billion in damages from Hurricane Sandy, coming only seven years after the $80 billion from Hurricane Katrina, told us this much: We need a plan.

"The climate is changing, the ocean is rising, more storms are coming, and millions of Americans are in harm’s way. The costs of making people whole after these storms are soaring," wrote Justin Gillis.

Gillis puts it better than I could hope to:

It should be obvious that the more people we move out of harm’s way in the reasonably near future, the better off we will ultimately be.

But we are doing the opposite, offering huge subsidies for coastal development. We proffer federally backed flood insurance at rates bearing no resemblance to the risks. Even more important, we go in after storms and write big checks so towns can put the roads, sewers and beach sand right back where they were.

We are, in other words, using the federal Treasury to shield people from the true risks that they are taking by building on the coasts. Coastal development has soared as a direct consequence, and this rush toward the sea is the biggest factor in the rising costs of storm bailouts.

Turns out one way to keep people from building on storm-prone
shorelines is to refuse to provide them with
federal flood insurance. Simple.

So what was so clever about that 1982 law, and how can we learn from it?

"The bill simply declared that on sensitive coastlines that were then undeveloped, any future development would have to occur without federal subsidies.

"In other words, no flood insurance and no fat checks after storms.

"The law did not prohibit anybody from building anything. And in fact, some development has occurred on lands in the redlined zone. But the law has mostly held, discouraging development along some 1.3 million acres of American coastline," Gillis wrote.

That sounds very American. Very independent. After all, we wouldn't want to be like those people who rely on "public assistance" would we? Oh the shame of it all. There are no Welfare Queens at the beach right?

Gillis suggests that we begin to "expand" those zones into the riskiest areas, the places that we keep pouring public money to re-build only to see it washed away with the latest truckload of sand?

Fat chance.

As ProPublica reported in March, the Federal Small Business Administration is approving loans for businesses that want to rebuild just as they were in areas that are just as flood-prone as they were before Sandy; in fact probably more so.

A WNYC and ProPublica analysis of federal data shows at least 10,500 home and business owners have been approved for $766 million in SBA disaster loans to rebuild in (the New York City metro) areas that the government now says could flood again in the next big storm.

The data, which shows loans approved through mid-February, was obtained via a Freedom of

Information Act request.

More loans could be going to flood-prone areas. The analysis did not cover Long Island or Connecticut.

The loans require borrowers to get flood insurance, which in turn could encourage some to rebuild properties to be more flood-resistant. However, for many owners there’s no requirement they raise their properties to the heights FEMA recommends.

The result: the federal government is helping people rebuild despite the risk that flooding will again destroy the properties.

The SBA says it’s not their job to assess whether it’s smart to build in flood-prone areas.

Don't you just love that "not-my-job-to-exercise-common-sense" mindset? It is not unique to government workers, but when it is exercised by government workers, it is usually we the people who pay the price.

Speaking of which, we're also paying to rebuild yacht clubs.

The biggest loan approved (in the New York Metro area) as of mid-February was a $1.5 million loan to the Fairfield Beach Club, a private beach and tennis club on the shore of the Long Island Sound in Connecticut.

The Fairfield Beach Club is getting the a $1.5 million
loan from SBA.

Great.

At least, argues Michele Byers in the May 21 edition of Philly.com, if we're going to pay to put these beaches back in place, we the public should have improved access to those beaches.

"It's time to make sure the taxpayers who foot the bill for beach improvements have access to those expensive strips of sand they're saving," she wrote.

Byers further reports:

"Public access must be a required part of all projects, before they can be considered for funding," said Tim Dillingham, executive director of the American Littoral Society, a coastal conservation group.

Dillingham added that federal guidelines for funding contain similar language to ensure that projects are public in nature, and not private.

The beaches, ocean, and tidal waterways belong to everyone. New Jersey should not miss this opportunity to make sure that all residents have meaningful access to the investments made with their tax dollars, and to catalyze the Shore's economic recovery.

So the public should have access to the Fairfield Beach Club right?

Yeah, good luck with that.

And good luck with tying public funding to good decisions about where houses and businesses should be re-built.

"Environmental groups like the National Wildlife Federation say the best flood protection are wetlands and to leave stretches of the coast undeveloped," wrote Robert Lewis and Al Shaw for ProPublica.

“Ideally we’re going to help people move away from the flood zone and not give them assistance to rebuild exactly as is,” said Joshua Saks, the federation’s legislative director. “But we recognize it’s a very personal decision, it’s a local decision.”

Umm, local decision? It's federal money. Your money. My money. Our money. 

Why is it that the government is inevitably the one entity you can count on to take on a risk that no commercial bank or insurance company would entertain for a New York minute?

Hell, they even admit it!

“It’s good government. I mean, basically it’s what the private sector won’t do,” James Rivera, associate administrator in the SBA’s Office of Disaster Assistance, told the reporters.

The Small Business Administration provides as much as $200,000 for damaged homes and $2 million for businesses. In rare cases, homeowners might qualify to have a portion of their mortgage refinanced with an SBA loan.

The loans carry low interest rates – as little as 1.7 percent for home loans and as low as 4 percent for business loans -- and can be repaid over 30 years.

13 houses at $200,000 could mean $2.6 million in loans.

As of mid-February, the SBA approved more than 21,500 disaster loans worth $1.5 billion for Sandy-related damage, according to a copy of the loan database WNYC and ProPublica obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. The SBA estimates it could ultimately approve as much as $2.5 billion worth of Sandy-related disaster loans.

There is no data yet on how many property owners who received a loan will actually rebuild and, of those, how many will raise their properties to withstand a future flood.

Of the loans made in New York City, 83 percent went to a property in areas FEMA says are at risk of flooding, the data shows. In New Jersey 71 percent went to a proposed flood zone.

So that's a $2.5 billion investment in locations which, the best science now tells us, are likely to be hit with storms as bad or worse than Sandy within the next 15 years.

And that's "good government?"

I think this is one of those times we'd prefer to see government run more like a business, a business not likely to throw money into the ocean.

But wait, it gets better.

Ask yourself this: How would we even know which places we should avoid when investing that public money?

Why accurate flood maps of course; maps that show where rising sea level is going to wash away the property in which we're so foolishly investing.

At least we're doing that right right?

Right?

Mmmmm, again, not so much.

Once more, ProPublica rains on our summer parade:

At the same time the SBA was approving disaster loans, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was releasing new “advisory” flood zone maps.

See if you can guess where FEMA maps show
New Jersey flooding in the future?
Hint: It's greenish in color.

Approved maps ultimately determine flood insurance rates and help builders decide how high to make their properties. The existing maps that govern building along the coast are from 1983.

The new preliminary maps show FEMA thinks far more properties throughout the region are at risk of flooding. FEMA also says many of those properties already in flood zones should be raised even higher to avoid future damage.

FEMA rushed to release the maps to ensure property owners had the data as they start to rebuild, said Michael Byrne, FEMA’s coordinating officer for New York operations.

“It’s the best science we’ve got. We certainly hope people will take it seriously,” Byrne said.

But the maps won’t become final for as long as three years. And it’s up to local governments to decide if they want to require higher elevations before then.

Would those be the same local governments elected by the people who built houses along the beach in the first place?

Right.

But not to worry, these are loans, so at least the government makes money back on that investment like a bank ... right?

Kind of.

ProPublica reports:

The default rate on disaster home loans is about 10 percent, and it’s about 20 percent for some business loans, according to the SBA. The administration estimates that it costs taxpayers 11 cents for every $1 of disaster loans.

“These loans do not come without risk to taxpayers,” said Pete Sepp, executive vice president for the National Taxpayers Union. “We need to have a policy that carefully considers whether rebuilding in flood prone areas makes sense and whether such building ought to be encouraged by government or at least abetted by government through the use of aid and loans.”

Not to worry, the federal government is on the job, feverishly issuing new, more accurate maps so that "carefully considered policy Mr. Sepp mentions can be based on hard facts.

Wait.

Did I say the federal government?

Uh oh.

As ProPublica reported Friday, maybe not so much:

Underfunding by Congress and President Obama will delay
the completion of the new, more accurate flood maps.

The maps, drawn by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, dictate the monthly premiums millions of American households pay for flood insurance. They are also designed to give homeowners and buyers the latest understanding of how likely their communities are to flood.

The government’s response to the rising need for accurate maps? It’s slashed funding for them. (Emphasis mine.)

Congress has cut funding for updating flood maps by more than half since 2010, from $221 million down to $100 million this year. And the president’s latest budget request would slash funding for mapping even further to $84 million — a drop of 62 percent over the last four years.

In a little-noticed written response to questions from a congressional hearing, FEMA estimated the cuts would delay its map program by three to five years. The program “will continue to make progress, but more homeowners will rely on flood hazard maps that are not current,” FEMA wrote.

The cuts have slowed efforts to update flood maps across the country.

Although today’s mapmakers can take advantage of technologies including lidar, or laser radar, and ADCIRC, a computer program that’s used to model hurricane storm surge; and although they can also incorporate more years of flooding data into their models, it may be years before we, the taxpayers who pay for them, can benefit.

Splendid.

Yet somehow we can afford to rebuild the boardwalk in Atlantic City.

And now, to complete the circle... again, ProPublica:

FEMA also funds its maps through the National Flood Insurance Program. It takes a small slice of homeowners’ flood insurance premiums, about $150 million in the 2013 fiscal year. But the flood insurance program is also in trouble, and income from the premiums is already stretched thin. The program has more than $20 billion in debt after paying out massive claims after Katrina and Sandy, and it took in only $3.6 billion in premiums last year.

Hope we're all ready for this....

As part of an overhaul to the insurance program last year, Congress authorized the government to spend $400 million a year for the next five years to update flood maps. But for the 2013 fiscal year, Congress has appropriated just a quarter of that. Sequestration has cut another $5 million, according to the Office of Management and Budget, leaving $95 million for flood mapping this year.

As one Toms River, N.J. told ProPublica reporter Theodoric Meyer, “There’s going to be another hurricane somewhere, there’s going to be another disaster,” he said. “If you’re cutting the flood mapping program, somebody’s going to get screwed.”

Yeah, and it's us taxpayers.

And if you've suffered all the way to the end of this long blog post; and you're thinking you could have read those last three sentences and learned everything you need to know about how we're responding to the very real and expensive threats the rise in sea level is washing in to us -- you'd be right.

And if you thought that response could be summed up in one word -- "stupidity" -- you'd be right too.

High Speed Real Estate

I spent my first 10 summers, for two weeks a year, on a barrier island.

After spending several summers in the house owned by my great-grandfather, my father's parents purchased a beach house of their own on Long Beach Island in, where else, Brant Beach.

The summer stints were shared with my late Uncle Charles and his family, although he eventually built a house across the street where he and his six children enjoyed the beach at their own convenience.

For two weeks every August, my family took up residence on Farragut Avenue. In later years my sister and I were each allowed to bring one friend.

There were a number of set activities to which I was deeply attached, as young children tend to be. Each day we went to the beach in the morning (no late sleeper my mother), returned for lunch, then went back.

(Heaven forbid if you had to use the bathroom. The walk back was four blocks, including crossing the highly traveled Long Beach Boulevard, which runs the length of the 18-mile long island.)

On one night we would walk down the beach to Lucy's Fudge in Ship Bottom; one night we would got to the amusement park in Beach Haven; one night we would play miniature golf. Like clockwork.

My grandparent's house (now jointly owned
by my cousins) is the brown house at center.
My cousin Jim found this picture on a random
street cam. It seems wet but otherwise undamaged.

Even still, I recall with a puzzling fondness, nights sweating in sunburned pain on scratchy sheets in the upstairs hot box of a bedroom; the seagulls, cawing on top of the utility poles, waking you up too early in the morning; or sitting on the rusting glider on the front porch, with the sun-cracked vinyl cushions cutting at the back of my knees because my legs were too short to reach the porch itself.

These are strong memories and form a solid core of my personality. I will always prefer the sea over the mountains, despite just as many hours hiking in the Hudson Highlands with my parents.

My father, whose blog I sometimes quote here, is even more attached. He and his late brother Charles spent every summer on LBI, escaping polio their parents thought, and re-invented themselves.

My father, the awkward younger brother in Westfield, N.J., a town where everyone knew everybody and everybody knew and admired my uncle, became an accomplished sailor and learned how to be at peace when alone, and depending only on himself when in the fens of Barnegat Bay.

In the introduction to his book of short stories and poems, "The People Along the Sand," my father quotes the Robert Frost poem from which he took the title:

The people along the sand
all turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day. 

The beach, he writes, is a place of transition, a place of "edges," a place where you feel like you can reinvent yourself.

All of which is true, and all of which is why we flock to the beach when we want to relax.

I say all this so as to cushion what I want to say next. I know the deep emotional attachment to the beach that so many of us ave.

I know you can take my strong memories, and multiply them by millions and generations, and you get a bond that even logic cannot always break.

But int he wake of Sandy, logic demands the answer to a question. Should we break that bond for our own good and for the good of future taxpayers?

Barrier islands are the Autobahn of geology.

My thinking on barrier islands was forever changed by a National Geographic article I read years ago. In it, a geologist called barrier islands "high speed real estate."

The phrase has stuck with me. In geologic terms at least, barrier islands are the Ferrari of land types and the eastern seaboard of the U.S., home to more barrier islands than any other place, is the earth's geological Autobahn.

Here is what the U.S. Geologic Survey wrote several years ago in a report called "Coasts in Crisis" that sums up this difference most people do not recognize:

"We think of land as stable and treat it as a permanent asset. For most land, this premise is reasonable because land generally changes very slowly. Although tectonic and geologic processes, such as continental drift and erosion, are always at work, they usually result in very gradual changes that are barely noticeable during a human lifetime.

Although not as unstable as beaches created by lava flows,

barrier islands are a poor real estate bet, where permanence

is an assumed asset.

Coasts, however, are not static; they are dynamic. They quickly change shape and location in response to natural forces and human activities. These forces and activities continually push and pull at coasts -- sometimes in the same direction, but often in opposite directions. As a result, the shape of the coast-line changes. Sand and other materials are moved onto and off of beaches by currents and waves. Seasonal movement of coastal materials creates broad summer beaches followed by narrow winter beaches in an annual cycle. During major storms, huge waves and storm surges can move large amounts of coastal sediments and can flood vast areas in a matter of hours.

Barrier islands are not permanent. This will happen again.

On a larger scale, the coast itself moves as it tries to achieve equilibrium with the forces acting on it. Barrier islands and offshore sand bars move landward and along the coast, driven by longshore currents. Headlands are eroded back, moving the coast inland. Sediment is deposited on river deltas, extending the coast out into the water. Coastlines also move in response to changes in sea level; even if the land remains stationary, a rise in sea level will move the coastline inland.

Then there is the problem of how we react to this reality. 

Which is to say we don't. We ignore it.

Despite its speed, coastal changes seem slow within the time frame of our lifetime, and so we act to preserve the places that were special to us without the realization that they were ever only the way we remember them for a short while, and that memory has no more validity than its current state.

Our desire to be close to the water usually does not end well.

As USGS put it: "Because we treat the coast just like all other land -- as a stable platform on which we can safely and easily build -- some of our actions directly conflict with the dynamic nature of coasts."

And there are more of us along them every day, which means more impact on a fragile eco-system and more people in harm's way when the inevitable change comes, sometimes violently.

Again the USGS:

Conflicts between people and nature have always existed along the coasts. The increasing desirability and accessibility of coasts as places to work and live have intensified these conflicts greatly over the past 50 years. The 1990 census shows that 25 of the 30 coastal States have had dramatic population increases since 1980; the largest increases were in Alaska (36 percent), Florida (31 percent), and California (24 percent). Coastal areas across the United States now have population densities five times the Nation's average.

75% of Americans live near a coast.

Currently, 50 percent of the Nation lives within 75 kilometers of a coast; this number is projected to increase to 75 percent by the year 2010. (This shows you how old this report is.) 

As the coastal population grows, so does the need for additional facilities for transportation, recreation, potable water, and waste disposal. Pollution is already severe near large coastal urban areas and has hurt recreation activities and the fishing industry.

In other words, not only does this trend to the sea move in contravention to common sense, it also endangers an industry that is designed to meet a basic need of humanity -- food.

And the results of over-developed coastal development are no different than  salting a farm field. It poisons the ocean's nurseries.

Does this make sense in the long term?

The economic counter-balance to this concern is supposed to be tourism.

N.J. Gov. Chris Christie 

Question is, do we need tourism to survive?

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who also grew up along the shore and evidently has a strong attachment to his memories, has vowed to rebuild the shore just as it was. 

That's an understandable thing for a politician with higher aspirations to say to a shell-shocked public, reassuring and comforting to those who lost everything in what, from an objective standpoint, is a questionable investment.

And, when you think about it, it is an investment being made by all American taxpayers, many of whom are not solvent enough to own a property at the shore or to spend two weeks a summer there.

For without federal and state money to re-build eroded beaches, without federal backing of flood insurance, would these properties be so valuable?

Why should taxpayers subsidize this poor investment?

How is this different than subsidizing housing or medical care from the poor, which we constantly complain we can no longer afford? 

Who deserves the taxpayers' help more? Those who can't find jobs and are stuck in poverty's cycle; those in schools without supplies or qualified teachers; or those who purchase a second home at the shore, which they rent out during the summer to cover their costs?

They congratulate themselves on their expertise, their ability to afford the investment. But they are not paying the true costs. We all are. 

Are the jobs created by tourism paying as well as those that would be created by investing that federal money in emerging green industry? Or our crumbling infrastructure?

Why are we preserving the frosting while letting the cake collapse?

Consider: It is taxpayers, including the ones from Montana and Iowa, who help to cover flooding damage losses from storms like this. 

Why? 

Because the private sector is too smart to take the risk.

Insurance companies crunched the numbers and concluded they would lose money trying to cover flood damage and losses at the shore.

Why?

Because it is going to keep happening, over and over. Whether you believe in climate change or not; even if sea levels did not rise, coastal areas, particularly barrier islands from Florida to Maine, will continue to flood. And, apparently, we all will continue to pay to bail them out.

Why are we paying to cover this bad risk, this bad investment? Gov. Romney likes to talk about Obama's bad investment in Solyndra.

After all, the market has already made it clear that an investment in barrier island real estate is a sure loser -- unless -- the government promises to cover your inevitable losses.

Long Beach, N.J. Does this really make sense?

It pains me to say this and no, it will not keep me from going to the shore whenever I can. But this is an emotional argument, not a practical or fiscally responsible one.

We are subsidizing an unsustainable lifestyle and that is not a good use of scant public funds. But don't expect any elected official to point this out.

After all, how could he or she win election when 75 percent of the nation lives within 75 miles of the coast for a reason? They like the coast.

As for the science of barrier islands, I don't expect you to take my word for it.

Below I have attached parts of a tutorial about how barrier islands work titled, conveniently, "How Barrier Islands Work," by Craig Freudenrich, Ph.D.

It is not complete, go to the link to read the whole thing, but a piecemeal collection of the parts I consider most relevant to this discussion.

Barrier islands are fragile, constantly changing ecosystems that are important for coastal geology and ecology. 

• Development has posed dangers to these ecosystems and has also increased the risk of property damage every year from hurricanes and Nor'easters.

• Barrier islands serve two main functions. First, they protect the coastlines from severe storm damage. Second, they harbor several habitats that are refuges for wildlife.

• Salt marsh -- a low-lying area on the sound-side of a barrier island. Salt marshes are generally divided into high and low marsh areas. High marsh areas get flooded twice each month with the spring tides, while low marsh areas get flooded twice daily with the high tides. Cord grasses stabilize the salt marsh area, which are one of the most ecologically productive areas (amount of vegetation per acre) on Earth. In fact, the salt marsh ecosystems of the islands and the coast help to purify runoffs from mainland streams and rivers.

Barrier islands are constantly changing. They are influenced by the following conditions:

• Waves - Waves continually deposit and remove sediments from the ocean side of the island.
• Currents - Longshore currents that are caused by waves hitting the island at an angle can move the sand from one end of the island to another. For example, the offshore currents along the east coast of the United States tend to remove sand from the northern ends of barrier islands and deposit it at the southern ends.
• Tides - The tides move sediments into the salt marshes and eventually fill them in. Thus, the sound sides of barrier islands tend to build up as the ocean sides erode.
• Winds - Winds blow sediments from the beaches to help form dunes and into the marshes, which contributes to their build-up.
• Sea level changes - Rising sea levels tend to push barrier islands toward the mainland.
• Storms - Hurricanes and other storms have the most dramatic effects on barrier islands by creating overwash areas and eroding beaches as well as other portions of barrier islands.

The impact of storms on barrier islands depend upon qualities of the storm (storm surge, waves) and upon the elevation of the barrier island at landfall. To quantify the impact of storm damage, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has devised a "hazard scale" as follows:

Photo by Susan Burke Mangano

Sandy deposited so much sand into Ocean City,

N.J. it was easily and Impact 3 or Impact 4

hurricane.

• Impact 1 - Wave erosion is confined to beach area. The eroded sands will be replenished in a few weeks to months and no significant change occurs in the system.
• Impact 2 - Waves erode the dune and cause the dune to retreat. This is a semi-permanent or permanent change to the system.
• Impact 3 - Wave action exceeds the dune's elevation, destroys the dune and pushes sediment from the dune landward (approximately 300 yards/100 m), thereby creating overwash. This change in the system pushes the barrier island landward. 
• (As the photos and video that accompany my article in today's Mercury shows, one of which is shown above, this is what Sandy did to Ocean City, N.J.)
• Impact 4 - The storm surge completely covers the barrier island, destroys the dune system and pushes sediments landward (approximately 0.6 miles/1 km). This is a permanent change to the barrier island or portions of it.

Using taxpayer money to replenish beaches is a waste

when you consider the impact lasts for a few years at best.

Sand erosion by longshore currents and wave actions can dramatically change a beach.

To preserve the beach, humans must re-nourish it with sand dredged from other sources, a process known as beach nourishment. Beach nourishment is an expensive undertaking, often costing millions of dollars.

At best, beach nourishment is an expensive, temporary effort to halt the inevitable shifting sands of barrier islands.

(Freudenrich then provides an example with which many of you may be familiar.):

Ocean City, Maryland

Ocean City, which is located at the southern end of Fenwick Island along Maryland's eastern shore, has been a popular beach resort for a long time. 

In the 1920s, several large hotels were built there, and by the 1950s, development boomed dramatically and lasted almost 30 years. 

In the 1970s, ecological concerns about the island were raised, and laws were enacted to halt dredging of channels and filling in wetlands.

A hurricane opened the Ocean City Inlet in 1933 (the inlet separates Fenwick Island from Assateague Island to the south). To keep the channel navigable to the mainland, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed two rock jetties. 

Although the jetties stabilized the inlet, they altered the normal north-to-south sand transport by the longshore currents. The result is that sand built up behind the north jetty and the sand below the south jetty was quickly eroded. 

Jetty's interfere with ocean beach building and
add sand on one place, causing its loss in another.

The accelerated erosion has shifted Assateague Island almost one-half mile (.8 km) inland. In a very short time, human interventions have permanently altered the barrier island profile."

So to summarize.

We love the beach.

Each year, more and more people move closer to it.

As a result, even if barrier islands were not moving so fast, more people closer to where hurricanes hit means more loss of life and property, and more tax money to repair and replace what has been lost.

But of course, making such use of public resources unsustainable is the fact that barrier islands do move -- fast.

Should taxpayers be subsidizing this impractical investment? No.

Will any politician ever speak these words? No.