Flood Zones

There is another nudge pushing people to think about rising seas and the future of low lying islands. It came this weekend in the form of an article in the Key West Citizen discussing meetings scheduled to take place over the next weeks between citizens and Federal Emergency Management Officials who have drawn up new flood zone maps. They hope the appeals process will be finished this year and the new zones will be implemented in 2021. Naturally there was not much reaction to the initial announcement of proposed flood zone changes, but now at the eleventh hour this has become a matter of urgency.

The mapping and subsequent changes in flood insurance rates is extraordinarily complicated apparently but the Federal Emergency Management Agency has been working on this for a while and is ready to meet the citizenry to try to explain why zoning is changing. The newspaper says there are 6900  properties listed in Key West and 2000 of them will see their rating get worse while almost 400 properties get some slight reprieve. The flood insurance premium paid by all these people is expected to rise from eleven million dollars a year to fifteen million across the city as a whole.

 

The property owners lobbying group by now well entrenched with some legal victories to its credit, is among those anxious to redirect insurance rate increases. After all they call themselves Fair Insurance Rates in Monroe -FIRM and these new flood zone maps will be implemented for all Monroe County. The Citizen article focused on Key West for the time being.  It seems to me periodic flooding gradually increasing over time is the future for the Keys, as sea levels are rising in measurable steps and scientists see no reason for that to stop.

Recently there was some consternation when the low lying road on south Sugarloaf Key was discussed as point zero for future high tide flooding. The dozen homes along the road would be cut off every high tide in a couple of decades unless the road is raised a couple of feet at vast expense. Now we face the prospect of paying insurance companies more money to have them cover the increasing risk of destruction by flood. The insurance companies don't argue the merits or morality. They study the numbers, evaluate the odds and charge accordingly. 

Climate change is a hot button issue and provokes nothing but yelling and taunting and powerful emotions. It's not hard to see why! If deniers are correct there is a movement to change the way we live for nefarious unseen purposes that have nothing to do with the climate- just social engineering of some sort. On the other hand the people who believe climate change is a threat to humanity are bound to feel threatened by the other part of the population that is choosing to ignore a clear and very present threat to us all. I don't really think my opinion counts for much especially as I have no offspring and will probably be dead well before 2040 when I will turn 81 if I am still alive.Plus I own no property in the Keys and in retirement will I hope be traveling for a while before I return to reassess my chances of living out my old age here on a boat that will rise with the tide.

I feel very lucky to have found a career in middle age in this strange and changing place. I have held down by some miracle a job with regular hours, benefits and a pension. All this in a town known for vacations partying and temporary labor. And Key West has changed even as I have sat here doing my unseen, unknown job.Twenty years ago people were lamenting the end of Key West as they had known it, yet the town even then was filled with artists and literates and even the street people had personalities. I'm not sure if the town has changed as the doomsayers claim considering that the change probably has occurred in myself.   I have, after all slipped out of middle age into Old Age Pensioner territory but as that happened it feels to me as though Key West has matured too, and is mastering the art of subservience to the dollar at the expense of personality. An entirely good thing when you remember this town is the source of my pension, but also a  source of much grumbling among some literati.  I should probably ask a new arrival bright eyed and bushy tailed how full of shit I am but I don't want to face that reality just yet, I am old and I lament the passing of my time. It is enough for now to come to terms with the fact that it seems ever more real that the map of my world is going to get creased at the edges. I don't need the next generations to tell me that hard fact.

The control tower at Key West Airport is still utterly wrecked and the Hurricane Irma replacement, a trailer is still in operation across the airfield. Money for such an obvious need isn't forthcoming so I wonder how coping with major landmass threats is going to go down with our penny pinching leaders. Little wonder the insurance company actuaries are increasing rates and even less wonder FEMA is expanding likely flood zones. FIRM has a story on its web page outlining plans being drawn up by the Army Corps of Engineers to try to mitigate sea level rise by planting mangroves and building buffers. It smacks of King Canute to me but as there is no funding set aside and the Federal government will only cover two thirds of the cost the whole thing seems unlikely, in the Trump Era, to gain any traction at all.  The bigger question is when do we come together to discuss our options like adults? 

To be astonished insurance rates are going to go up along with sea levels seems rather naive to me. I trust our neighbors in other states will stop nagging about helping us with our hurricanes now that they have tasted the far reaching effects of coastal flooding in their distant lands. Thanks to the changing climate that raises our levels Alaska has soggy tundra, California burns, the inland rivers burst their banks, winter storms freeze more than usual (I'm told) and hurricanes cause billions in damage. Yet we expect insurance rates to do what? Stay the same? That's not how the insurance carriers got to buy up the land to build vast skyscraper monuments to themselves across the planet. They know the odds and they work them. If they tell us premiums are going up you'd better believe there's a reason for it. The real question is do you want to pay the premium and accept with equanimity that you are gambling with short odds by buying expensive land down here?

 

People ask me if prices are dropping, if there is essentially the whiff of panic in the air as the prospect of the Keys sinking takes hold. I can say loud and clear that's not the case. Even if life is more strait laced than it was, and that may be a good thing, life is still good here by any measure. I wouldn't balk about coming to live here if that's what you wanted to do and were able to do it, or willing to make the necessary sacrifices to do it. Every Paradise has it's serpents and the Keys has more than its fair share I dare say. I still prefer to be wiped out by a  hurricane on a  warm September day than lose power in an ice storm in February or drown in a prairie in the Spring.

I'm of the opinion that thinking for yourself is no bad thing. Climate is changing bringing unintended and barely understood consequences with it. Clearly we are not as a species going to do anything to mitigate that and proposing reducing emissions in the Keys (population 75,000) is not going to outweigh all the factories aircraft and major urban agglomerations from polluting as they always have. There are seven billion people contributing to increased carbon emissions, lets not forget. We can do our bit (ban straws) and think about what we should do (not fly, not eat meat, not do everything we know daily), but the other half of the equation is get realistic about what life at sea level means in a  time of global warming. For now we have mostly perfect weather great fishing and a chance at a lifestyle at least somewhat out of the mainstream. But we also have costs and trying to deny one reality while embracing the other just doesn't make sense to me. I shall watch the progress of the appeals and denials of reality with great interest.

Midnight in Paris

It was a quick visit to the Dalí Museum in St Petersburg, a stop on the way home. Rusty spent three hours with a sitter, (rover.com) and I am trying to learn not to leave him behind with a lump in my throat. This time he got away and came haring after the car as we drove away which made it harder but I got through those three hours and so did he. I fear I enjoyed myself even more than he did walking with a lovely young university student and taking treats from her. 

We are member of the Dalí so we get to skip the lines at the entrance which is nice but our cards were messed up so leaving my wife to deal with the bureaucracy (it was her fault, she threw away the valid replacements and kept the outdated cards it turned out...) I tried once again to capture the essential Dalí surrealism in the wet Rolls Royce parked in the gift shop. They call it the Rainy Taxi frequently reproduced with a Cadillac and the driver with a shark's head. Not here:

Water streaming down inside the windows makes  a photograph as I like it, crisp and clear, impossible so I allowed myself some latitude and contented myself with the Countess' hand appearing through the mist. The other name for this piece is Mannequin Rotting In A Taxi Cab but I couldn't figure out how to spot snails crawling on her body....

The other creepy thing I've seen here previously is a holograph recreation of the artist himself, walking and talking on screens around the museum. My wife enjoyed the interaction, I shuddered and moved on. I do enjoy the innovations and the exhibits they are bringing to the museum which used to be a rather stuffy mausoleum but some of the surreal experiences are beyond me. I think Dalí would have loved them.

We were at the museum for one specific thing, the display of early 20th entry art focussed on 1929 in Paris when the Surrealists were coalescing around two distinct movements.  Dali landed in Paris and joined the "wrong" group quickly switching his allegiance to the more prominent Andre Breton group and the exhibit shows a short film recreating a clash between the poet and Gala, Dalí's wife (and by her estimation his muse) when Breton and Dalí were falling apart. 

The exhibit wasn't huge but it was full of images of the surrealists and their thoughts plastered all over the walls. Thus using the museum app you can listen to an audio tour of the artwork. The app audio is brilliant, you just hold the phone to your ear like a conversation with no need for headphones but the tours are a total headache to follow. I had to keep asking my wife where to go as she who is quipped with her infallible sense of direction was way ahead of me. I circled hopelessly lost for fifteen minutes staring at the incorrect pieces while ruminating on a totally irrelevant critique in my ear about something across the room.

Despite it being a holiday Monday and us being a bit later than usual owing to dog sitting detour it wasn't overly crowded.

I got to watch clips of several Surrealist movies including of course the infamous eye slitting by Bunuel in Un Chien Andalou which I hadn't seen for years. It seemed less horrifying than when I watched it in an art theater 40 years ago and of course much less horrifying than when it came out to audiences not quite used to trains driving toward them onscreen.

Giorgio de Chirico was among those with a picture on the wall and as usual they managed to put up a picture you don't associate with the more famous artist he became.

What I liked too was the fact that we got to see the faces behind the art which so rarely happens. What struck me about these avant guards creators was how bland they appeared in real life. They look like bankers and accountants in jackets and ties with neatly parted hair styles and even Dalí who cultivated public eccentricity later looked the part of an eager young salesman early on.

Then there was The Lighthouse by Tanguy whose story captured my imagination. Here was a Surrealist who started out as a sailor on a freighter and on a whim decided (as you do) to become an artist. he was inspired by what he saw so he left behind the workaday world of shipping as a deckhand and started expressing himself. He blamed Jacques Prévert the poet and de Chirico for his decision and  apparently they embraced him.  

Yves Tanguy:

Another of these bourgeois-turned-artist types shows up in the form of Pierre Roy of Nantes who became an architect and went on to forget that and take up painting instead. They had a couple of his works on display illustrating his roots combined with still life and open landscapes and a piece of surrealist tape (!) which really caught my fancy. 

It's one of the features of Dalí that I enjoy inasmuch as he displays his draughtsmanship at the same time as showing off his surrealist message through perfectly drawn works.  

Then there was Max Ernst and Loplop  is best explained by the Museum of Modern Art but was a birdlike representation of his alter ego in art. Remember these people called themselves surrealists so anything goes here...

I had never heard of Jean Arp, not even when he is known as Hans Arp. He was born in Alsace when France and Germany were arguing and fighting for possession of the border land so he grew up bilingual and used one name in French and the other when speaking German. Europe can be a messy place so we shouldn't be surprised when reality goes off the rails and surrealism takes its place. Please don't ask me to explain why I like this piece and it captured my attention. Mustache and bottles by Jean (Hans) Arp. There:

You wander through a decade of time, a period of intense living by survivors of intense warfare, facing the certain destruction of their world in a few years more and yet they hungered after meaning and explanation and description of life and they fought each other and the establishment to prove they were right. It must have been an extraordinary time and I knew nothing of it as I had to wait anther thirty years to be born. And now I'm old the whole proposition of scrambling to be heard and to be right seems nonsensical. What they left behind justifies it all.

Even if it can be hard to understand and sometimes even to enjoy. I saw some early street photos taken around Paris and I was struck by how banal many of them were, fuzzy black and white prints of streets and trees and fog, stuff you could expect to find on Instagram by people barely able to hold a phone camera steady. Yet photography was break through art form for surrealists, its immediacy and documentary qualities exposed them to new ideas of how to create art. The funny thing is, then as now Photography as Art is a tough concept to sell to the mass of people used to photography as phone snaps, or billboards, TV advertising. In 1929 the idea that a photographic print could be Art was laughable except to these people.

Alexander Calder is known as the Sculptor of Air. Considering he died in 1976 he offered a revolutionary view of sculpture by creating hanging pieces and as you can see artwork that is as ethereal as cobwebs:

There is still plenty of time to make a trek to St Petersburg, a city worth a visit anyway to check out for yourself the surrealist ferment ofParis between the wars. Well worth it.

As much as I wanted to get back to Rusty and then get home I like to stop and look out through the hurricane proof armored glass.

It gives a view of the gardens around the museum and Tampa Bay in the distance. 

And as this was the MLK holiday the parade that was to make leaving the city slightly awkward was getting underway for the long walk to the stadium near downtown St Petersburg. 

Rusty is an excellent traveling companion as he rides the back seat silently and uncomplaining, sleeping, sitting from time to time and looking out the window at scenery. He is as always no trouble at all.

Housing For Almost All

I walk the mangrove trails when I can on my days off to shake off the accumulated stress of work and people and traffic and getting things done. I never take the peace and quiet of the woods for granted even if this may not look like much to someone used to mountains and valleys and views and rivers and things. For to take a mile or even a half mile walk along trail that was to have been a development, happily abandoned decades ago, allows me to reset my stress levels. Camera and dog and I am set.

When my wife and  were looking for somewhere to live in the Lower keys about five years ago we had no idea what we might find but my wife was determined to get a shot at a decent rental as soon as it came up. She haunted Craigslist so she could pounce as soon as anew ad appeared. We were in fact first on scene the very night the advertisement appeared and our landlord was encouraged by our references and our reliable jobs. We got the house and it has been amazing. Our landlord is wonderful, our rent is reasonable beyond anything one could expect in the Keys. We are lucky.  

I mention this to put in perspective some of the discussions reported this week in the papers about proposals, vague enough one must acknowledge to deal with the shortage of decent affordable housing. The city commission in Key West got a view of a new homeless shelter to be built on the location of the current decrepit facilities on Stock Island. The Keys Overnight Temporary Shelter at the Sheriff's headquarters has been a refuge not only for homeless people but also for working poor residents of the city. Consider a room could cost $1200 a month say. Add a first month, last month and a security deposit and you are looking with utility hookups as well, at $4,000 to move into a place at the lower end of the rental scale in the city. Failing that you get a shower a locker and a mattress at KOTS in the company of anyone else in the same boat.

KOTS is a hastily created facility with air conditioned huts and no great sense of permanence. It was built to by pass the Pottinger decision in Miami where a Federal judge ruled that to arrest a "vagrant" the local jurisdiction had to offer a safe place for the homeless to sleep. Without KOTS people could legally sleep anywhere in public in Key West. Pottinger has been overturned but the benefit of housing the residentially challenged has been made obvious in a  city where residents complain all the time about public "sleepers." So now the city has the opportunity to create a better permanent facility and the commissioners looked at some plans.

The new shelter would be raised on stilts, good to avoid flooding, but the ground floor area would also be where the residents would stage as they waited for the shelter to open. Architects also offered a landscaped path to get the homeless from College Road  to the shelter itself. From the Citizen page:

The idea is to avoid clusters of homeless residents gathering as they currently do on College Road. They are unfortunately considered unsightly and provoke complaints...So in the future they will walk from College Road largely unseen to the underside of the new shelter and wait patiently to receive their bed assignments. That's the theory at any rate.

Homelessness like everything else in the Southernmost City waxes and wanes with the seasons. The population increases in winter when sleeping with the mosquitoes is I imagine an improvement over sleeping on a steam grate in a  snowdrift. The shelter was a brilliant innovation designed to cope with a vast population of people sleeping in parks and on city streets and when  it opened it was a twenty four hour facility until the housed population cried foul at the thought of bums lounging around in a  city and so the hours were reduced and the homeless found themselves wandering the city again by day. Personally I thought out of sight even with a  publicly funded TV was better for all concerned but I am by nature out of step with the majority.

The other part of the KOTS population is the working poor as mentioned above and the new shelter will be one hopes a step up for people trying to do the right thing and keep their heads above water. Then there are the many among the destitute who have mental health problems including of course disproportionate numbers of vets who get lip service for their sacrifices and are left to wander the streets mumbling to themselves. Thus we live with an intractable problem without any of the special circumstances in the Lower Keys. KOTS is critically important to everyone's quality of life who shares a small island with the destitute the mad and the professional bums of whom there are not a few.

The issue of housing has been around forever and still our leaders chunter on as though there were a  way to fix the shortages. The only way to house people is to build housing and sell or rent it at an affordable price. The Meridian complex on Stock Island is a sterling example of affordable units with all proper facilities at reasonable prices, by local standards. However it has not yet been replicated.

There is a housing complex with hundreds of units available now on Big Coppitt Key, half a dozen miles from North Roosevelt Boulevard and that is going to help some people. The plans are apparently also in place for a sweeping construction project replacing several trailer parks in the process. The fact is this project has been on the back burner for years amid calls for sub standard trailers to be removed. I wrote an essay in 2015 on the subject of Housing On Stock Island.

The thing is the trailers really are affordable, if decrepit and when there is a public conversation about "affordable housing" no one actually stands up in the room and says we will rent (or sell) for a definite price. The newspaper reported four categories of affordable housing for the proposed 280 unit Wreckers Cay on Stock island. Which sounded a bit too precise for the real world but maybe ultimately they will produce comparable numbers to ultra low income, low income, median income and moderate income which last  category amounts to $90,000 for a "family" whatever that is and whatever rental rate that will come to in the end.

The Upper keys have developed a system, if you can call it that, of housing employees on the mainland and busing them to their jobs in Key Largo and Islamorada. They use Greyhound equivalents services that run through the Keys and you will see clumps of people every afternoon waiting to be transported home. It's an option not available a hundred miles to the south though some people commute from Homestead to Key West and spend only weekends at home. Some few businesses offer employee housing to try to help ease the shortage.

Housing costs and shortages are  a fact of life and I have nothing new or sensible to offer on the subject. The only reason I bring it up now is thanks to the developments coming into existence over the inevitable objections of people who fear living with the poor for neighbors.

I have tried to make the most of my privilege, having a job that pays a living wage, a landlord who is a decent human being beyond any expectations, of having the time to escape the stresses of daily living and see the beauty in the Keys that appeals to me and hardly anyone else apparently. 

Every time climate change shows up in the public consciousness there is an expectation that house prices will plummet and everyone in the low lying Keys will get the flooding and destruction of wealth that they deserve. One day that prediction seems bound to come true but for now we live as we ever did, with heavier traffic, still inexpensive carbon produced electricity and absolutely no awareness of sustainability among the majority of the population. 

I look for beauty and I find it. Everything else is noise. IF you have somewhere to live. And a job. Etc...

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither

do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly

Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?