The costs of living near the shore, with all the beauty and all the hazards, are finally settling out where they should be, in the federal government’s plan to gradually adjust flood insurance premiums to more rational levels.
It’s a harsh reality that many people who own coastal and other flood-zone properties in Hawaii bought in an earlier era, when the oceanfront was not exclusively the province of the very rich. This is especially true in once-rural areas along Oahu’s Windward coast and stretches of neighbor island shorelines.
Not all property values in Hawaii’s flood zone have skyrocketed to the same extent, but properties on the beachfront certainly are out of reach for all but the wealthy.
A painful rise in premiums is a severe problem for those who hold Hawaii’s nearly 14,000 flood insurance policies. Some are due to see bills triple or increase by even larger factors, but the taxpayer can no longer afford the subsidies that have made insurance more affordable.
And now that climate change is already being noted in coastal wave patterns that have eroded coastal lands, the risk of flooding has risen along with the cost of insuring against it.
In recent decades, most of those costs have been offset through federal subsidies provided via the National Flood Insurance Program. Congress created that some 50 years ago to fill a void left by the private insurance industry, which was increasingly unwilling to write the policies.
Now the private sector is looking to re-enter the market, because federal subsidies are on the wane and insurers will be better able to compete.
In 2012, Congress passed a law to extricate the government from the fiscal drain of the flood insurance subsidies, which have dug a $24 billion hole in federal coffers.
Last week, President Barack Obama signed new legislation aimed at phasing in the premium increases rather than hitting property owners with the full increase at once.
The law calls for rates to rise by up to 18 percent annually on owner-occupied homes; owners of flood-zone businesses and second homes will face increases of 25 percent a year. This will buy time to allow owners to weigh their cost burden and whether they will be able to keep the property.
Who would buy it from them? Undoubtedly it will be people who can manage annual insurance tabs in the tens of thousands.
But this also means there should be less of a barrier to improving public policy on shoreline development. Those who can shoulder the risk of flood damage protection also should be held accountable to a higher standard of construction and to more realistic setback requirements than are now imposed — on Oahu in particular.
The statewide requirement for coastal structures is that they be set back 40 feet from the shoreline, and in areas of rapid erosion that is far too thin a margin.
Maui and Kauai counties have increased setback requirements, but erosion is accelerating and experts in the field fear even those steps may not be enough.
For a state that should be intimately familiar with the natural ebb and flow of the sea, Hawaii has tried in vain to manage erosion and flooding with seawalls and other devices rather than work within realistic parameters.
Living by the water’s edge is expensive, but too little has been invested in one of the true costs: allowing enough frontage between the sea and structures.
That is not a cost that should be passed off to taxpayers in the form of unaffordable insurance subsidies. It’s time to face up to this fact.
