A record price for shoreline property

August 2016 aerial oblique of a stretch of shoreline on the Dungeness River delta on the Olympic Peninsula.  The home referenced below is the 4th from the left.

An associate recently sent me a message, referring me to a Facebook post by a local real estate agency on Washington's Olympic Peninsula.  The message read, "Sequim's highest home sale price EVER just closed today!".   The thing that made this sale noteworthy was the home's location on the Dungeness River delta, in an area that is currently exposed to fairly routine coastal flooding, the depth and frequency of which are only going to increase.  By the end of this century it is possible that this lot could flood on every high tide (i.e. see these maps, particularly map #5, assembled as part of this project).  It shouldn't come as a surprise that the infrastructure on this particular property was identified as being highly vulnerable in a quantitative sea level rise vulnerability analysis conducted a few years back.  It seems a lot of money to pay for that sort of risk, but this particular home sales record is yet another indication that, locally, vulnerabilities related to sea level rise or coastal flooding are not influencing local real estate markets, or purchasing decisions.  

Screen grabbed Facebook post that got me going on this topic

This is also relevant because I was just interviewed by invezz.com, a financial investment news and guidance company (here is the article).  They were interested in writing a piece examining if, when and how factors like sea level rise, changing coastal flooding dynamics, or changes to the National Flood Insurance Program, will affect coastal real estate markets.  My overall message was that I do think that there will be influences, and I do think it could be in our lifetime.  That take-away is based on some emerging evidence that real estate impacts due to sea level rise are already detectable in places like Florida, and that the overall real estate market there may have already shed 5 billion dollars of value due to sea level rise-related risk (which seems like, and IS, a lot of money, but is only a small fraction of the total real estate value there).  Its worth noting, though, that even this evidence emerging from a place that is one of the U.S.'s sea level rise hotspots is inconclusive, as evidenced by some of the real estate perspectives voiced in this interesting VICE piece on the Miami real estate market:

Another key unknown, and one that is very relevant to those of us that think more broadly about uses of the coast, is how the sorts of major investments that people are now making to live on the shoreline will affect their decision-making as sea level rises.  In particular, one has to assume that people who have invested so much in shoreline property will go to great lengths to defend it from flooding, which will likely come with societal and ecological costs.  I had the chance, a few years back, to participate in a project that used a modelling approach to assess the social and ecological costs along the shoreline of Grays Harbor county in Washington State assuming that people make every effort to protect their property from flooding as sea level rose.  Not only was the "protect-at-all-costs" approach very expensive, but also led to the greatest reductions in high value habitat and beach accessibility.  There is no reason to hypothesize a different outcome for the shoreline of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, in my mind.