美国国家公共电台 NPR Foreign Investors Shrug Off Miami's Rising Sea Levels

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ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

The editorial boards of the Miami Herald¹, Palm Beach Post and South Florida Sun Sentinel are working together to issue a warning with help from WLRN public media. They want people to take the threat of sea level rise seriously. Freelance reporter Roben Farzad grew up in Miami. And he says it's a message that isn't reaching foreign investors³.

ROBEN FARZAD, BYLINE⁴: A decade ago amid the foreclosure crisis, Miami's skyline was marred⁵ by half-empty buildings and idled cranes. Billboards⁶ advertised lawyers who could get back condo deposits. An outright⁷ real estate depression was staved off by foreign investors. Armed with cash, some snapped up homes without visiting even once. Even as the buying frenzy⁸ has lately taken a breather, the place has never felt this prosperous and vertical⁹. But there's a gurgling anxiety at sea level. Locals are increasingly finding even inland streets flooded during high tide. Here's CBS 4 Miami on a watery¹⁰ mess downtown.

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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Police are reminding you that what looks like a puddle¹¹ may be much deeper. If you look in the center of your screen, there are a couple of cars that are stuck in the water almost halfway¹² submerged.

FARZAD: Donna Shalala, a former Clinton administration official and president of the University of Miami, is running for U.S. Congress in Miami. She says that sea level rise tops constituent¹³ concerns.

DONNA SHALALA: What we do with existing buildings, what kind of retrofitting we do, what kind of pressure we're prepared to put on our national government is extremely important.

FARZAD: Already Miami Beach is eyeing $500 million in infrastructure¹⁴ upgrades, installing 80 new pumps over a decade to redirect water back to the ocean. The flooding is so bad that an octopus¹⁵ was spotted¹⁶ in a South Beach parking garage. According to the journal Ocean & Coastal¹⁷ Management, Miami Beach saw tide-induced flooding soar 400 percent between 2006 and 2013.

SHALALA: Look; I own an apartment down on Miami Beach that's right on the water. I really could not get hurricane and flood insurance. I mean, there's just no question.

FARZAD: Zillow estimates that by the end of the century, nearly half a million Miami homes could be submerged. That's tops in the country. But while folks at ground level fret¹⁸ about wearing plastic bags around their feet, sea level rise hasn't seemed to faze foreign investors whose luxury apartments tower high above the floodwaters. The Miami Herald's Nicholas Nehamas won a Pulitzer Prize for covering the rush of offshore¹⁹ money in the skyline.

NICHOLAS NEHAMAS: Foreign investors think they're going to sell before climate change affects the price of their units. It's a case of the segment of the market most driving the market being divorced from reality.

FARZAD: Russian investors covet²⁰ high-rises in a stretch of North Miami Beach, so much so that the place has been nicknamed Little Moscow. That's where you'll find the Porsche Design tower, a swank high-rise that literally²¹ resembles a Porsche piston²² shooting up from the shoreline. Residents can drive their cars on wide elevators and right into their apartments, each of which has an adjacent garage. Broker²³ Peter Zalewski advises many foreign buyers in the area.

PETER ZALEWSKI: Many of the people at least I deal with - and I'm not dealing²⁴ with, like, the family of four and a dog. I'm dealing with, like, the investor². They're going to be in and out. And their horizon is typically three, five, seven years. So by the time the - you know, the big one comes or something like that, chances are they're going to be dead or they would have churned it out of their position multiple times over. So it's kind of an issue if you're worried about 10, 20 years from now. It's not an issue right now if you're looking to sort of capitalize on current market trends. It's a trader mentality²⁵.

FARZAD: Back to the perennial²⁶ threat of a cataclysmic storm. Last year, South Florida dodged²⁷ a bullet when Category 5 Hurricane Irma weakened substantially on landfall. Even so, the diminished storm transformed high-rise corridors into rivers and threw yachts up within a few yards of lobbies. High tide or low tide, hurricane season officially starts on June 1. For NPR News, I'm Roben Farzad.

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