I read about you eating that burger on Twitter, so, your fault
Climate Change and the Arrival of the Baseless House
Like most of you, I have spent the last two months quarantined. I’m a bit embarrassed to say it, but just as nobility fled the cities during the plagues of the Middle Ages, we’ve been lucky enough to escape densely populated Boston, a hotpot for the pandemic, and spend our days along the shore in Marshfield, a small town about 45 minutes south, where we have a weekend house. I must constantly remind myself that it could be far worse.
Ah, good, another hypocritical liberal who helped spread Coronavirus outside of the big cities. BTW, how did he get to Marshfield? Fossil fueled trip?
One of the benefits of this place are opportunities to stroll the beaches and neighborhoods. Walking is by far the best way to see things that you often don’t see from a car. One glaring phenomenon I have noticed is the increasing numbers of what I am calling The Baseless House. These are houses that seem to be plopped on pressure-treated piers or high concrete-foundation walls, regardless of the site or the design of the house.
Most of these new houses are not what we would call “high-end†design, but some, like the one shown above, aren’t all that bad, referencing the steep roofs and porches of the neighborhood houses around it. Others are far less successful.
But what they all have in common is a rather misbegotten space under the house that is neither fish nor fowl. This space is the direct consequence of the FEMA regulations and flood maps issued in 2016 that have been adopted nationwide and have had a profound effect on the first-floor heights of structures built along marshes or waterways. The height requirement varies from region to region and even neighborhood to neighborhood. My own neighborhood now sits in a relatively high-risk AE Zone (down one zone from the most-restrictive VE Zone) defined within the 100-year flood limits and reflects the combined influence of stillwater flood elevations and wave effects of under 3 feet.
Yeah, they’ve been doing this at the beach for hundreds of years, but, see, climate change
All of those practical consequences aside, the aesthetic consequences are even worse. It’s clear from my walks around the neighborhood that no one is considering the design ramifications of the new FEMA regulations. Instead, in a kind of crude first stab at climate change mitigation, they’re simply building their standard house designs of the past on top of high piles or concrete foundations with no regard to how it might look.
Good grief. I grew up at the Jersey Shore. They had plenty of houses built like that. I saw them in Florida. They had them down at the NC beaches. This is nothing new. Warmists are such cultists.
You mean like the Jetsons?
Cool!!!!
Teach, what made you think the author was a liberal? The fact that he wrote in complete sentences? Didn’t accuse FEMA as being Nazis? Understood that global warming is actual?
That last one does nail it.
Sometime late last century, a man contacted me and wanted me to pour a concrete slab addition onto his house. It wasn’t quite at the beach, but the city of Hampton, Virginia, had a minimum elevation requirement of 9 feet above sea level . . . and his house sat at 8’5″. I would have had to install a 7″ riser into the addition, plus cut out a cove for headroom in his kitchen, to build this to code. I turned down the job.
My own house had a finished floor elevation of 12 feet, but I was still required to buy flood insurance because it was within 1000 feet of tidal water. Of course, that tidal water was a half-the-time dry little creek, but hey, it was there.
The worst flooding in our neighborhood was from Hurricane Danny, or was it Floyd, but the tidal flooding never made it to our house.
As for my current abode? Given that it;s at 640 feet, I don’t think I need to jack it up on stilts.
Oh, so that’s his problem: he doesn’t like the designs! Well, boo hoo hoo!