Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 261

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Disposable City: Miami's Future on the Shores of Climate Catastrophe," by Mario Alejandro Ariza.

South Florida is a quirk: of climate, of culture, of excess, but, most importantly, of geology. Under the park being named after Ferré lies limestone, rock made from the hard calcium exoskeletons of ancient creatures. Long ago, organic acids and ghost shrimp ate holes into this rock. Now water—both salt and fresh—moves through those holes.

Welcome to Miami real estate, a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry, a breakneck boom-and-bust business buoyed by endless infusions of foreign capital, an economic sector whose taxable value funds a big chunk of municipal government services, and the nexus of a long and dangerous con against the rising tide.

“The big mistake that people make when they’re thinking about Miami’s real estate market, especially at the upper end, is that they treat it as a housing market. It’s not a housing market. It’s a commodity market,” Nehamas explains. Basically, investors look at high-end real estate here as a good place to park capital instead of as places to live. This means the prices of luxury homes and condos in the city are strongly influenced by the relative strength of the dollar to foreign currency. 

When the dollar is high, condo prices in Miami suffer, because sophisticated international investors go hunting for assets in places where their native currency (be that rubles, pesos, or reales) will go farther. Miami’s real estate market booms, however, when the dollar is relatively weak, and international investors can take advantage of the favorable exchange rate. Because many of these investors are making huge gains once they sell their investments and convert their holdings in dollars back into their local currencies, they demonstrate less concern for housing market downturns than residential homebuyers do. Depending on exchange rates, these investors could still see large profits, even if the local real estate market started integrating climate predictions more effectively. Some investors don’t even care if they see a profit—they are just looking to park their money in a place where their home government can’t get its hands on it.

In this town, it used to be activist versus developer, but now there’s a new player called Mother Nature, and she’s coming no matter what.

The limestone soil beneath the region is ludicrously porous. Slightly more than 20 percent of Miami-Dade County is barely four feet above sea level.6 The billions of dollars it will take to successfully adapt an urban region of seven million people to frequent, unstoppable sunny-day flooding are nowhere in sight. If you expect to survive into the middle of the twenty-first century, you just might get to watch Miami die. But not before the changing climate stretches the city’s already yawning gap between rich and poor past its breaking point.

Jimena tells me that her mother and her niece crossed over around the same time as her ex-husband and children but haven’t been as lucky. “They were going to deport my mother, but then they let her go. But they took my niece. She was traveling with my mother and they had all their papers and belongings stolen in Mexico. We haven’t heard from her for nine days. My sister, her mother, is trying to get her back and we think she’s in New York somewhere.” 

“How old is your niece?” I ask, barely keeping the quaver out of my voice. 

“She’s eight.” Jimena replies. “We hope to get her back soon.” 

I keep it together long enough to thank Jimena and wish the rest of her family luck. It is now close to noon. Araujo and the rest of the volunteers from the Circle of Protection are packing up for the day, and I thank her for the work she is doing before getting into my car. I make it to the stoplight in front of Monarch Gardens before I break out crying, hard fucking sobs alone in my vehicle somewhere out in West Broward, thinking of Jimena’s niece, lost in the bowels of a state apparatus intent on denying her humanity, chaff for an ethnonationalist, protoauthoritarian machine trying to make an example of children so as to dissuade others from coming to my adopted country.

Migration can involve active choice, whereas displacement springs from necessity. This is an important distinction to draw, because whether Miami’s population ends up being displaced or migrating in response to climatic conditions depends entirely on the weather. If The Big One hits, we can imagine a scenario similar to that which played out in the Gulf States before Katrina, where those with means fled, leaving behind those without. If Miami is spared a major hurricane, the outflow may be more moderately paced, driven primarily by younger persons seeking economic opportunity unavailable to them in a city driven to penury by its efforts to contend with the rising sea.