Hurricane Recovery and Houses Back on the Market

A week ago, the remnants of hurricane Ian came up the coast and parked right to the east of me here at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington D.C.  And it would stay parked for the better part of a week, raining and bringing the temperatures down to below normal for October.

I continue reading stories about hurricane clean up further south, which often include an anecdote from a resident who has had everything smashed in the storm just before they were poised to sell their home and make a chunk of money, comments like this one from this story in The Washington Post:  "Three days before the storm made landfall, Dupont, 84, and his wife, Mary Ellen, 71, were ready to close on a $147,000 offer someone made to buy the trailer they’d spent three years fixing up, a ticket to the bigger home they often fantasized about."  That trailer is now destroyed.

Every time I read one of these stories, or any hurricane story or climate disaster story for that matter, I feel all sorts of strange things:  that twinge of guilt for having sold our house before a big storm came and wiped it out, those ghostly feelings of post-storm trauma that never go away, that generalized anxiety from living on a planet that has changed and continues to change in ways that make it hard to know how to make smart decisions.

And then there is the outrage expressed in tweets, about how people have had no power for x days and when will it be fixed.  A week is a very short space in post-hurricane time.  I have never gone through anything like Andrew or Ian, but when we lost power after Hurricane Wilma, most of us were out of power for weeks. After Irma, the same, but that was in part because a neighbor's tree fell and took out part of the pole that supplied power to our house.

And now, to add to my weird house feelings, I find out that our old house is now on the market, as I suspected it would be.  You, too, could have a house in a flood zone, if you have $1,150,000.00.  Yes, you are likely reading that number correctly--over a million dollars.  And that's down $200,000, after being listed on September 13.  

Faithful readers, I assure you that we did not sell the house back in January for that amount of money.

Granted, the new owners put a lot of money into the house.  From the pictures, it looks like they replaced all the appliances, all the plumbing, the flooring, the outside paved areas.  I hate most of their design choices, but I understand that people who watch a lot of HGTV will want kitchens that look like this, not like the kitchen that we put in. I'm trying not to think of all the money we spent on stuff that was just going to get ripped out a few years after we installed it.  And some of it, like the hardwood floors was installed after hurricane damage and the long effort to get insurance to pay.

At least we did get some years of enjoyment out of it. But man, when I think about all that they got rid of--it's a shame they couldn't have teleported it to us--like the back yard patio furniture, the grill, the kitchen cabinets.

Again, my primary response to all this hurricane and housing stuff is gratitude:  gratitude that we're out of the Florida housing market, gratitude that we managed to survive the hurricanes that did come our way, gratitude that I'm here at seminary.  But what a strange week.