Domonique Tomlinson didn’t know much about the Shore Acres neighborhood in St. Petersburg, Florida, when she bought a home here four years ago, but she learned quickly. Just a few weeks after she moved into her single-story cottage, a flood overwhelmed her street’s drainage system and forced water into her home. The same thing happened again during Hurricane Idalia in 2023; she lost furniture and belongings worth thousands of dollars. Then there was just the everyday flood to contend with. It happened more times than she could count, when she had to wade through calf-high water on her street to get to her teaching job and wipe herself with Lysol when she got to work.
Tomlinson and her husband raced to install plywood flood panels and sandbags Wednesday as Shore Acres prepared for a historic storm surge from Category 4 Hurricane Helene. As she loaded a Peloton into her car, she said she was fed up with flooding over and over again.
The next night, Helene delivered the largest storm surge on record to Shore Acres, pushing water not only into Tomlinson’s home, but into the homes of neighbors who had never flooded. As she weathered the storm on higher ground in downtown St. Petersburg, she kept track of reports from her neighbors who stayed behind: The entire streetscape disappeared as saltwater seeped in through sandbags and flood panels, filling kitchens and living rooms.
“It’s just a very sad situation,” she told Grist. “We won’t rebuild, it’s not worth it.”
AP Photo/Mike Carlson
Even before Helene, Shore Acres looked like a victim of sea level rise and misguided development. The waterfront neighborhood started to flood several times a month, even when it wasn’t raining, and residents had some of the highest flood insurance rates in the country, with the median annual premium in the neighborhood reaching around $5,000. The city raced to mitigate the flooding, but almost every street in the neighborhood had at least one “For Sale” or “For Rent” sign on it.
But Helene appears to be the neighborhood’s coup: The hurricane dumped well over 6 feet of storm surge in Shore Acres on Thursday, the highest on record for the community. Based on early reports, the wall of water inundated hundreds of homes with 4 feet of water or more, dealing another hit to its already shaky real estate market. And as sea levels and flood insurance rates continue to rise throughout the eastern United States, from Florida to New England, Shore Acres may not be an outlier but a bellwether for future fragility in the real estate market and coastal economies more broadly.
Shore Acres is one of several areas along the coast of the United States built for a climate different from today’s: The area expanded in the 1950s on what one developer called “a pretty sorry piece of land” that exists from pine forest and swamp , and many of them sit only a few feet above sea level. The area has always seen occasional flooding during the highest tides, but now parts of it go under water several times a year as fall tides wash over bluffs and gurgle up through storm drains.
Even on sunny days, standing water is now a regular occurrence in the neighborhood. When cars drive too fast through flooded streets, they create wakes that can splash into driveways and damage other vehicles, or even run into houses.
Tracy Stockwell, who moved to the neighborhood from Atlanta last year, erected a series of signs and barricades in front of his home that read “Wake Stop” and “Slow Down, Watch Your Wake.” He said drivers splashed through standing water several times and flooded his home — something he didn’t know was possible when he bought it.
“The brokers didn’t disclose it,” he said as he prepared to ride out the storm on his second floor. “We knew that the street had flooded, but we had no idea of the history of the house.” Earlier this year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed a law requiring home sellers to disclose past flood insurance claims, but the law doesn’t go into effect until next month.
Jake Bittle/Grist
As neighborhood flooding worsens, residents have seen their flood insurance rates skyrocket under a new federal policy. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which administers the national flood insurance program that serves about 5 million American households, began rolling out this policy in 2022. The median cost of flood insurance in the neighborhood is about $2,000 a year, more than double the national rate, and could double again to about $5,000 as FEMA raises rates to phase in the new program. Many residents already pay much more than that.
Some neighbors were able to save money on insurance costs by elevating their homes above flood level on stilts. Federal regulations require a homeowner to do so if their home suffers damage equal to more than half its value. But elevating a home requires a lengthy permitting process and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars; in addition, FEMA’s new insurance pricing system offers a lower discount for this work than the old system did.
For people who can’t afford to upgrade or can’t keep up with rising insurance rates, the only option is to leave, and as of Wednesday, there were at least two dozen “For Sale” signs around the neighborhood.
Even so, some local boosters project confidence in the property market.
“I think people now understand that flooding is going to happen,” said Kevin Batdorf, a real estate agent and the head of the Shore Acres Civic Association. “Flooding in Shore Acres is well known. It is not something that is a secret. Some people have sold, and the houses are selling, because we live in a great neighborhood.” He went on to say that in the past the neighborhood has seen small sales after flood events, but that the market always calms down after a few months as new people move in.
But as Helene despaired, even those with deep ties to Shore Acres were unsure of their long-term future there. Tomlinson said she won’t rebuild, and Stockwell said he plans to at least consider selling his home. They imagined their neighbors would consider the same.
“That guy left, and that person left, and that person sold,” said David Witt, a furniture store manager, pointing to the houses on his street. He and his wife moved into his wife’s childhood home, which was raised several feet off the ground, a few years ago, and they came within an inch of flooding several times. They’re both attached to the house, Witt said as he lined his door with sandbags, but they’re not sure if they want to stay forever.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
There have been at least three other major floods in Shore Acres in the past 13 months, starting with last year’s Hurricane Idalia and continuing this year with a no-name winter storm and Hurricane Debbie in August. The flooding from Idalia damaged more than 1,200 homes in the neighborhood — nearly half of all its structures. The neighborhood was responsible for more than 80 percent of the damage that St. Petersburg suffered during this storm. Tracking a similar path to Idalia, Helene scraped up the Gulf Coast and made landfall in the Florida Panhandle, but brought a storm surge several feet higher.
The city of St. Petersburg has invested millions of dollars in the past year to mitigate its flooding problem, installing backflow preventers that prevent storm drains from overflowing onto streets when tides are high. It will soon begin construction on a $16 million pump station on the area’s lowest street, Connecticut Avenue, replicating a strategy used in Miami Beach and New Orleans with money from the state government.
Batdorf, the civic association leader, said residents are working with the city to expedite these improvements and expedite grant programs that help residents elevate their homes.
“There’s so much more the city can do,” he said, “and there are other communities that have solved the issue of flooding.” He said that despite the city’s progress in installing backflow preventers, the sunny day flooding issue has not gotten better. Furthermore, there is nothing that the city of St. Petersburg alone could not do to stop a storm as big as Helene. Mitigating such a surge would likely require a multibillion-dollar barrier of the kind the Army Corps of Engineers has considered building in Miami and New York City.
“They’ve always had flooding here,” Witt said, “but it’s never been this bad.”
