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Going
to the beach for the Leahys means loading up the
car and heading to the Isle of Palms, a barrier
island near Charleston, S.C. The island has
changed a great deal in the 13 or so years I’ve
been visiting. The houses seem to be getting
bigger. Traffic is more congested. And, of course,
the beach is always changing -- or, more
precisely, to the chagrin of property owners,
moving.
But
there was something new about the latest visit: Here
and there, houses sported small, red, “Save IOP
Neighborhoods” signs. Curiosity got the best of
me, so I checked the website
of the group that created the signs, the Isle of
Palms Neighborhood Association.
It
seems all is not well in paradise.
A
number of residents is concerned that
redevelopment is rapidly changing island’s
character from one that’s largely residential to
one that’s almost exclusively devoted to
short-term vacation rentals. Considering that the
entire northeast end of the island is owned by
Wild Dunes, an upscale vacation/residential
development, it’s hard to imagine that things
could get any more touristy than they already are.
But
that’s what’s happening. Along streets that
for years were bounded by unassuming brick
ranchers or ramshackle beach homes, Dempsey
Dumpsters have sprouted like weeds. Old homes are
being pulled down to make way for new, often very
large, beach homes that will be swiftly converted
to short-term rentals.
Worse
still, in the eyes of some residents, old lots are
being subdivided into increasingly smaller plots,
allowing for denser construction and even more
short-term rentals. The Isle of Palms
government, as governments are wont to do, has
agreed to let the building occur. Isle of Palms
gets new tax revenues, Charleston County gets more
tax revenues and the real estate firms get more
business.
In
any other circumstance, it might make sense to
increase density and build more flexible housing
stock. But not when the land underfoot is moving.
Like
all barrier islands, the Isle of Palms is in
constant motion. The interaction of tides, waves,
wind and sand means that in any given year, the
beach front can move several hundred feet. Right
now, this powerful dynamic is reshaping the beach
front to such a degree that a series of Wild Dunes
high rises that once stood several hundred feet
away from the surf at high tide now have the waves
sweeping underneath their pilings. The property is
valuable, though, so Wild Dunes is fighting back
with an unsightly, and ultimately futile, array of
sand bags in the hope of keeping the water away.
It’s
the same story elsewhere on the island. The ocean
has taken beachfront from some and given it to
others. Some years ago, the south end of the
island accreted so much sand that the original
developer returned to claim the new land and built
three new rows of homes.
But
this, too, will prove temporary, as the island,
like its cousins up and down the east coast,
continue their retreat in the face of rising sea
levels, a relic of the last Ice Age plus a little
global warming. As dynamic systems, they are doing
what they are supposed to do. And that’s a huge
problem for property owners.
The
traditional response to changing beachfronts has
been to build groins, jetties, sea walls,
bulkheads or simply to pump new sand onto the
existing beach from off shore. These are all
perfectly understandable solutions. They also
happen to make things worse.
Legislation
blocks the creation of new bulkheads, groins and
jetties, but it doesn’t block beach
re-nourishment. Folly Beach, south of Charleston,
has been a frequent re-nourishment target for the
Army Corps of Engineers. An effort in 1993 brought
tens of thousands of cubic yards of new sand to
the rapidly disappearing shoreline --
disappearing, in part, thanks to the century-old
jetties erected to protect the entrance to
Charleston harbor, just north of Folly. By 1995,
all the new sand was gone.
Nearby
Morris Island has fared even worse. Once a Civil
War battle site, Morris Island had a lighthouse
erected on its landward side, more than a thousand
feet away from the beach. Today, thanks to the
Charleston jetties, the lighthouse stands
abandoned and listing, nearly 3,000 feet out at
sea.
The
Morris Island example, though extreme, is a stark
warning that attempts to manage a dynamic system
like beach sand is doomed to failure. Even so, the
economics behind increasingly dense beachfront
development dictate that people continue to erect
castles on the sand, and then fight like the devil
to defend them. Local governments, invested just
as heavily in the fight owing to their dependence
on tourist dollars, raise taxes, issue bonds and
plead for federal help. In some cases, the fight
becomes self-destructively expensive: Cape May,
N.J., whose broad beach drew presidents and
magnates alike, spent itself into insolvency
trying to save its sand.
Virginia
Beach, a fellow captive to tourism, regularly re-nourishes
its beaches, and has the nation’s oldest,
continuous re-nourishment program. Its multi-year
“Big Beach” program, completed in 2002, pumped
four million cubic feet of sand onto the
shoreline, making it broader in some places than
it had been in more than 300 years. The cost? One
hundred and twenty-five million dollars, 65
percent of which was picked up by the federal
government.
Nearby
Sandbridge has had its beaches re-nourished three
times in the last decade; the most recent effort
underway this summer will bring two million cubic
yards of sand to the shore and cost just shy of
$10 million.
In
each locality, re-nourishment is an expensive,
ongoing fact of life.
Which
brings me back to the idea of saving the Isle of
Palms neighborhoods.
We
went fishing in the harbor one day and I asked our
guide about the signs and the campaign. He
didn’t know that much about it. But then he
pointed to the shoreline: “You see all that?
It’s all developed. A solid wall of houses from
Sullivan’s Island to IOP. A friend of mine was
going to get one of those Save IOP signs and put
up another next to it that said ‘Too Late.’”
It
is too late. The Isle of Palms, Sullivan’s
Island and even the very small (and very unstable)
DeWeese Island, like barrier islands and
beachfronts nationwide, are being developed at an
increasingly rapid pace. People like the sand, the
surf and the lifestyle.
But
the next time they take that evening stroll along
the beach, they ought to consider the simple
lessons at their feet – the sand castles, some
built with great care and ingenious design.
All
that effort will be swept away on the next tide…
much like the very expensive, well-appointed homes
they, themselves, have built just behind the
fragile dunes.
--
Sept. 3, 2007
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