The Daily - Which Towns Are Worth Saving?

Episode Date: October 11, 2021

An enormous infusion of money and effort will be needed to prepare the United States for the changes wrought by the climate crisis.We visited towns in North Carolina that have been regularly hit by floods to confront a heartbreaking question: How does a community decide whether its homes are worth saving?Guest: Christopher Flavelle, a climate reporter for The New York Times.Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: For the first time, there is bipartisan acknowledgement — through actions, if not words — that the United States is unprepared for global warming and will need huge amounts of cash to cope.Homeowners in the Outer Banks of North Carolina are facing a tax increase of almost 50 percent to protect their homes. Is this the future of coastal towns?For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Climate change has forced the residents and leaders of communities across the U.S. to confront the most difficult question of all. Is their community worth saving? Today. question of all. Is their community worth saving? Today, my colleague, climate reporter Chris Flavell, with a case study of how two towns in the same state are answering that question. It's Monday, October 11th. Chris, tell me about this reporting that you have been doing in North Carolina.

So my beat at the paper is looking at climate change, and in particular, the effects of climate change on different parts of the United States. So I'm always trying to find places that are already dealing with really difficult levels of vulnerability to flooding, hurricanes, wildfires, you name it. And I went to North Carolina because the flooding there and the hurricanes have been so bad for so long that you've got towns that are already facing, you know, what we think of as the climate future, right? Storms that hit over and over again. And I really want to know, after a few floods, what happens to a place and what determines if that place can survive and recover? And what does recovery even look like? And what does it look like for places they can deal with it and places that can't deal with these flooding or

storms or fires? So I went to North Carolina and in particular, I found two places that for me seem to capture the extreme disparity of what it means to try to adapt to climate change. So where should we start? Which of these towns in North Carolina? Let's start in Fair Bluff. It's a town just north of the South Carolina border. It's small. It's mostly working class, a lot of retirees, a lot of black residents. It was hit hard by the economic downturn throughout the last few decades. Didn't have a lot in terms of tourism or other industry. What it does have is a really serious and persistent problem with getting flooded. And what is the source of that flooding?

So the Lumber River goes through Fair Bluff. It's lovely, actually. If you go and spend time on the banks, it's a very pretty river because there's a bend right where the town is. And the downtown core, what they call Main Street, is right by that river. And so when the river floods, which it does a lot,

that water goes straight onto Main Street. So I knocked on doors to try and find out how residents feel about living in this town that keeps on flooding. Oh. Got the wrong door. Oh, okay. My apologies. Gotcha. My name is Chris. I'm a reporter with the New York Times. And one of the people I met was a woman named Willa Billings.

Could I ask you a few questions about... She's been in Fair Bluff for decades. I built this house in 77. 77. Wow. You've been here since... 77. She grew up in Fair Bluff. Were you born here Wow. You've been here since? 77. Okay. She grew up in Fair Bluff. Were you born here or you came here from somewhere else?

I always lived in Fair Bluff as a child. Okay, okay. But when I moved to New York and come back home with my kids, I had this house built. She lives in a handsome but modest single-story brick house. It's a bungalow. What, you want to walk through it or something? Whatever works. Yeah, I'm just curious. And when I knocked on her door, she very kindly came down and sat on her porch with me,

offered me a drink, and started talking about what she's been through. So it looks like some of these homes got totally destroyed by the flood. Some of them weren't touched at all. And I guess some got a bit of water. How much water did you get? Willa has been through a number of hurricanes that have damaged her home. One of them was Hurricane Matthew in 2016. Was the street underwater with Matthew? Oh my God. That water was up to here. Wow. How long did the water stay for? It sit for weeks. Weeks.

Until it receded. And then two years later in 2018, Hurricane Florence came and damaged your house all over again. And so did this house flood in Matthew and Florence? Twice, yeah. Matthew and Florence. Back to back. Time I fix one, I turn around and do the other again. Wow.

Fact is fact. Time I fix one, I turn around and do the other again. Wow. So it's worth just thinking about how much of a pain it is to have your house flood, right? At some point, you say to yourself, I don't want to be somewhere where I'm getting flooded over and over again. All the people, they got flooded. Yeah. Now some, all of them left. And so Willa, like other people I met in Fair Bluff,

are now watching their neighbors drift away one by one. And what used to be a thriving community is becoming just more and more empty and abandoned. I guess one of the questions that I'm curious about is if I lived somewhere that flooded twice, really bad, back to back, I might leave. Is there something about Fair Bluff that makes you want to stay in there? I love this place. Ain't nothing like Fair Bluff. What do you, it's my first time here today. What do you like about it? What is it about Fair Bluff that keeps you here? Well, ain't nobody bothering me.

She loves the peace and the quiet and the sense of safety and community and knowing her neighbors. But at the same time, she said it's hard because it keeps on flooding. Are you worried it could happen again? I don't know. And to get the sense of a town sort of, you know, on a bit of a knife's edge, right, where everyone is grappling with this personal and also collective dilemma about whether to stay or go and what it would take them to be pushed to leave. And can they stay safe in the meantime? Willa, thank you for your time. I appreciate it. Okay. If I'm trying to find other people who live here, so that house is empty. I think the house next door, it looks

like they're doing construction. Are there other houses around here where people are living in them right now that I could knock on their door? No, I was on this block. Yeah, everyone's left. Okay. Okay. Alright. I'm glad I found you. Thank you for your time.

Alright, man. I was alright. All these buildings here was empty. I was over here by myself. Yeah, you're obviously very tough. I admire it. Okay, thank you. I was all around. All these buildings here was empty. I was over here by myself. Yeah, you're obviously very tough. I admire it. Okay, thank you. I'll talk to you soon. You're welcome, man. Take care. So how many people have left Fair Bluff? After Hurricane Matthew, the population fell by about half. It was around 1,000, and then it fell to somewhere around 500 right afterwards. Wow.

It's gone back up a little bit, but then Hurricane Florence hit again in 2018. That's when government programs come in. The federal government, especially FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and other agencies will say, we'll give you money for your house, which you can't sell because it floods all the time. No one wants it. Then you can move and you can live anywhere you want. And people take that offer. In fact, so many take it that local officials have started getting worried and started saying, no, don't come back in, federal government, state government.

Leave us alone with your offers to help people move. Too many people are taking you up on this offer. You are destroying our town. So the dilemma is no longer just at the individual level. It's at the town level. As town officials say, it's hard enough to keep this place going just with the physical damage from the storms. Now I've got governments above me trying to encourage people to leave. Right. So storm by storm, this town is being hollowed out.

Exactly. So how do town officials navigate this really significant depopulation as a result of this flooding? So, look, we are trying to get a sense of how the town is trying to rebuild post-Matthew and post-Florence. So when I got to Fair Bluff, I had to be sure to meet someone named Al Leonard. And so how long have you been the town manager for? Well, let me split hairs with you. I'm not the town manager. And he's sort of the town planner. It's a bit hard to give him a specific title

only because he actually works for five towns. I will consult, if you will, that's the right word, for four other smaller towns here in the county. Because none of these places have the money to afford a planner full-time. So he splits his time and he's helping towns like Fairbluff figuring out what do you do? The U.S. Economic Development Administration gave us a $4.8 million grant. So I met with Al Leonard in his office and he pulled out charts and billboards and lists of grants.

And sort of walked me through in conversation all the damage from the storms. It was devastated by Matthew, the owner of the complex, refurbished it, repaired it, moved people back in. When he got flooded the second time, he said, that's it. Shut it down. Not going to do it again. And I was really having a hard time making sense of what he was saying because the amount of damage he was describing to the main street and to really the entirety of the town, which just sounded so astonishing. I was there with a photographer and after maybe an hour, I said, this is great. Let me, let me ask a favor. I don't know what you're asking. It was like, I said, look, is there any way you would be willing

to show us around a little bit? Maybe the things that I'd love to see are, you know, I've got that map there. That's great. But which streets and areas got hit the hardest? Show me what you're talking about. And he said yes. I mean, we got our cars. I said we could drive you around. Would that work for you? I'd be glad to do that. Let's do that. That'd be awesome. That's fantastic. And we toured the town and all of a sudden the sort of jaw-dropping levels of damage he had been describing in his office that were hard to conceive of made perfect sense by driving around this town.

Now tell me, so we're pulling out now, tell me where we should start this tour of town. Okay, take a left. What exactly did you see? Start with the main street. And the road that we're on, would this section of road have been underwater in matthew and florence there was a picture in the new york times of that building right there underwater yeah the whole thing that's yikes the main street had all the businesses in town it was sort of bracketed by two churches it was right next to the river. And it is as if the flooding only receded the day before. At one point, I went back to the shops on Main Street on my own and recorded what I saw just so

I could keep that image in my mind. So I'm on Main Street. Let me tell you what I see. There's what used to be a fast food restaurant. Its front door is wide open. Its countertop and its floor covered in trash. There's what looks like an old movie theater. The roof has collapsed. There's a battered American flag stuck in the debris. There's another storefront with a tricycle on the ground,

but the tricycle is lying with its wheels up and it's surrounded by junk. There's a hardware store with a plastic container full of Christmas decorations stacked on a chair in front of shelves that have been half torn out of the wall. There's another storefront that's got nothing inside but a refrigerator and the refrigerator is lying face down on the floor with its door open. There's a florist shop whose front door is hanging open. Inside is a giant Valentine's heart on an easel giant it's as tall as i am and written on the heart in black marker i addressed the letters

f you there's a photography store full of boxes and bins strewn across the floor there's an abandoned gun store with a sign you can see just through the window that says no profanity and also no rush in the gunsmith it's been five years since Hurricane Matthew put downtown Fair Bluff underwater and three years since Hurricane Florence put the town underwater again. And what's amazing looking through the dirty windows and the broken doors is that nothing seems to have changed since the water receded. It's as though the owners of the stores just walked away. And the thing that really sunk in for me after spending time in the car with Al Leonard seeing this town is the kinds of services that you think of as making up a community just weren't there anymore. There was no grocery store. There were no schools. In fact, there were almost no stores of any kind.

So what would the economic base of Fair Bluff be at this point? base of Fair Bluff be at this point? Wow. As we sit here today, it's probably a dollar general. And that's it? Wow. Not only have you got people who left, and so you got fewer taxpayers in the town, but there's less economic activity because none of the services that made up the town, or almost none, are there anymore. And so you really get sort of like a total collapse of the economic life of this town layered on top of the physical collapse. And so what kind of options does Leonard lay out for what can be done? You know, it all made perfect sense if everything fell into place. If we can get all of this property acquired, of really incredibly damaged stores that makes up downtown, clean up all the chemicals that are left behind, turn that area into a giant park.

What are the parameters of the green space you envision? Everything to this side of the railroad tracks? And this side as well. And this side as well. Oh, okay. It's going to be a park. A little park, yeah. Wow.. So a huge, a huge amount of land. It's going to be huge. I think. It's also a floodplain and where the river can flood when there's a storm. Rebuild that downtown a few blocks up on higher land. Bring in business. Bring residents back. Bring back a tax base. It all, in theory, works. Then if you look at the master plan,

you'll have uptown right beside the green space that's going to be developed. So there are some plans for economic development. But to his credit, he didn't say it's going to happen. He didn't even say it's likely to happen. He said these are the things that could happen if and only if the federal and state governments give them really, really significant amounts of money beyond what they've already paid. Then it can happen. But there is one thing it all hangs on, which is they don't just need the money. They need people who still live there to stay there.

still live there to stay there. Again, if you get one more flood, will the people who've stayed through two floods stick around for a third? Will somebody like Willa Billings, who has lived through two floods, stay for a third or even a fourth? And will anybody who's considering moving into Fair Bluff, who sees another flood, will they still want to move in? Will that constant threat of flooding really end the town's ability to maintain even the reduced tax base they have now? Because that's the lever they don't control. Right. And that's where it seems like they've got a real issue. And that's what I was thinking as I was driving around with Al Leonard. He seems like somebody who spent enough time thinking about this stuff that he's come to terms with the fact

that maybe this can't be turned around, but he keeps on trying. I had certainly thought the day I came here and I had on waders and I was in the town hall and the furniture was floating around, I was in the town hall and the furniture was floating around. I had thought we would have recovered and been much further along than we are five years later. I never thought it would be this slow, but having gone through the last five years, I think I'm wise enough now to not predict how long it's going to take. You know, the jury is going to be out for a long time, I think. Chris, given all of this, is this town basically finished? It's certainly how it feels.

It certainly feels like a town that, absent something like a miracle, is not going to survive much longer in anything like its current form. It might not be abandoned. I'm sure people will still live there. But the question is, how do they pull out of this nosedive that they've been in since Hurricane Matthew?

Especially if they get one or two more serious floods and people who have just about had it with repairing their homes say, that's it, I'm out of here. And if that happens, they don't really have anything they can do. There's no one you can appeal to if, you know, the next third of your residents or half of your residents say, I'm out of here. That is what I think ultimately would kill the town. But it's going to come faster because they cannot pay to protect themselves.

So I went to this other town in North Carolina that does have the money to protect itself. And I want to see how that looks and also try to answer the question, how much more time can they buy with that money? How much can they change the scenario and how much longer can they defend themselves against the same problems that are pushing Fair Bluff towards collapse. We'll be right back.

So Chris, you had said you wanted to see what a town looks like that does have the resources to deal with the impacts of climate change. So where did you end up going? Yeah, so I also went to a small town called Avon. Avon is on a string of islands called the Outer Banks, also in North Carolina, not actually that far from Fair Bluff, and also facing a similar kind of threat to Fair Bluff in terms of flooding being a recurrent and serious threat. But really, in every other way, Avon and the rest of the Outer Banks are just completely from Fair Bluff. Today's word is open. Open road. Open toad. This is a wealthy community. Its residents are majority whites. Like the rest of the Outer Banks, the economy is based on tourism. And even just walking through town, you can feel how prosperous and bustling it is. But wide open, outer banks. And so I went with a colleague,

another photographer named Aaron Schaff, to go and see how this very different kind of place faces what is effectively the same type of threat as Fair Bluff, but in a situation that couldn't be more different. And who did you meet in Avon? Hello. The Petersons, perhaps. Hi, Chris Flavell from the New York Times.

How are you? Good. So let's start with a couple I met named Carol and Bob Peterson. Thank you. Hello, Bob. That's Carol. Hello, Bob and Carol.

Nice to meet you. They're older. They own a house. I'd call it a mansion. It's right on the beach. They bought it in the 90s. It's not their full-time home. They split their time between that home and Indiana. Okay, okay, okay. and Indiana. We live in Indiana.

Okay, okay, okay. We bought this house in the end of 97. It was a beautiful building. It's on stilts like all of the buildings along the beach in Avon. It's more than a dozen feet above the ground. You've got to go up steps to get to the front door. It seems like the quintessential beach home. I'll spy out to this one day.

The rooms were lovely. There was an incredible view. It was everything that you would want. Look at this. In a beach house. This is beautiful. So if you come tomorrow morning, you'll see dolphins as well. Really? Oh gosh. They usually come over. You won't be able to get rid of me now. But outside the house was this really strange scene. We lost a little bit of the front dune. There were these huge mounds of sand that piled chest high in front of their house. So we're looking at the sand up to my chest across your yard.

Seven feet of sand. Sand covering their front yard so deep you could never get through it. And then as you get closer to the house, it's even higher, well above your head. So we're facing sort of a wall of sand here. Should we climb over it to go up to those steps? Or where should we go?

Go around? Okay. I grew up in Canada and it was like after a really severe snowstorm where someone has shoveled walkways, only it was sand. It was actually hard at first to understand what I was looking at. Hmm. What is going on here, Chris? What has happened? So the beach that is right in front of the

Peterson's House used to be more than 100 feet wide. But over the last few years, it's been eroding so quickly, now there's hardly any of it left. And all the sands that used to make up that beach has been moved in two directions. Some of it gets washed away back into the ocean, and some of it, especially when there's a storm, gets washed up and over into the town. So the sand dunes that once sat on the beach in front of homes like the Petersons' house are being pushed onto people's property

and really making a mess around their houses. There used to be a boardwalk that was destroyed. These people all had pools. They're destroyed. And they're trying to reclaim their land from the sand at this point. And we should make clear that this is a natural process for barrier islands. This is sort of what's supposed to happen, that they move towards land. What's different here is two things. First, it's happening more quickly because the storms are stronger and they're moving more sand more often. But also, remember the backdrop is sea levels are rising,

right? So every time you get a storm, it's starting from a higher level, so it's causing ever more damage. So these natural processes that used to take decades are now happening so quickly that individual homeowners can actually see that change in the course of just a few years. And beyond just the Petersons, what does this accelerated pace of change mean for the town? Yeah, so this exposure to the ocean is really a defining characteristic of life in Avon. And the thing to remember about Avon, again, is it's on a barrier island. The town is really just a thin strip of land that's only wide enough for one main road. just a thin strip of land that's only wide enough for one main road. So there's a single highway that runs through Avon, connecting it to the mainland, to the north, and to more towns in the Outer Banks to the south. And it's really close to the ocean on one side and a sound on

the other. So when a storm hits, the ocean not only pushes sand under people's houses, like the Petersons, but it's also pushing water and sand across the highway. And the result is this two-lane highway shuts down on a regular basis. It gets flooded. It gets damaged. It becomes inoperable. And because it's the only road in town, when the road shuts, the town shuts down. There's no way in or out, and there's no way to get around. So having just that one roadway leaves Avon painfully vulnerable to this kind of new climate landscape. So as in Fair Bluff, these recurring problems with flooding are pretty much an existential threat. Yeah, they are, because like Fair Bluff, this is essentially a small town that is under constant threat from water.

The difference here is not only is it a challenge for the town itself, but if you had to evacuate, you're facing a single road that can easily get swamped by a storm. Good evening, everyone. And that's why the county that Avon is in, Dare County in North Carolina, decided how to do something. I'd like to thank everyone for attending virtually. And they held a meeting earlier this year with residents of Avon and property owners in Avon about what they should do. So let's not waste any more time.

It's a virtual meeting, and as it starts... I'd like to ask the county manager, Mr. Bobby Outen, to come forward and make the presentation. They bring up Bobby Outen, the county manager. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Who's essentially in charge of figuring out what to do to turn things around. And thank all of you all for joining us tonight. So Bobby Outowden gets up, and the first thing he does is lay out in really strident terms just how serious the problem is. Avon didn't used to be a hotspot. There was no flooding. There was no overwash. There was two rows of dunes. There was a big, wide beach. It just wasn't a place that anybody expected to have the problems that we're having. In five years, that has changed dramatically. How often this road is flooding, all the terrible things that happen when the road floods. When we have that flooding, the flooding impedes our first responders.

We can't get ambulances through to keep people safe. We can't get fire trucks through. We've had problems even getting the sanitation through to pick up trash. Our recovery efforts, if it's from a hurricane, trying to get the community back, we can't get in and out. We can't move things. We can't get fuel, water, things in that we need because the road is flooded. And the impact that it has on people's homes and their lives, they can't go to the doctor. They can't get to the grocery store.

They can't do the things that they normally do because the water's over the road. And that's only going to get worse. The longer we wait, the worse that's going to get, the deeper that it's going to get, and the more expensive it's going to be to try to fix it. And in this meeting, what kind of a plan is offered up to try to solve the problem? Well, it's pretty simple. It's something called beach nourishment. And what is that, beach nourishment? Beach nourishment boils down to a fairly simple process.

What you do is you find a spot offshore where the sand at the bottom of the ocean roughly matches the size of the sand that you want to replace. You build a machine that sucks the sand off the ocean floor, pumps it through a pipe a few miles to the beach, then you lay it down on the beach, basically building back the beach that's been torn away by the waves. That doesn't sound simple at all. It basically sounds like forcing a beach to exist where none does exist by mechanically pumping sand in. It's not easy, but it works. The issue is, how much does it cost?

Well, how much does it cost? Well, how much does it cost? The beach nourishment will cost us around $11 to $14 million. He says the price tag is as much as $14 million, which, even for this relatively wealthy town, is still a lot of money. Remember, there's only a few hundred full-time residents. So now the question becomes, how do we pay for it? And that's probably why most, if not all of you are tuned into this meeting. So they've now got to figure out how they're going to raise that much money. There are no federal or state funds available, none. So right off the bat, and this is where the meeting

becomes a bit contentious, he says, look, we're not getting this money from the federal government. We're not getting it from the state. We've got to find a way to come up with this money on our own. We've been to every source of funds that we have, and we've been unsuccessful in getting funds. And so if we're going to do the project, somehow it's got to be done with funds that we generate in the county. This is where Bobby Outen says, you know what? As we had proposed before, everybody in Avon would be paying something for this. We've got to pay for it, and that means raising everyone's taxes. But the problem isn't just that people don't like the idea of paying higher property taxes. The rate of erosion in the Avon paying higher property taxes. The rate of the erosion

in the Avon area has increased dramatically. The second problem is this isn't a forever thing. Beach nourishment projects are designed to last five years. You don't just do beach nourishment once. It's a temporary fix. And as that beach erodes, we plan to do a maintenance project in five years to put beach back. And we plan to keep doing that as long as we can. Because almost by definition, you are just putting back sand that's designed to wash away. And the only issue is, can you keep reloading sand faster than the ocean takes it away? And are the Avon residents in this meeting, are they on board with that, paying for this through a tax? Oh, they were very unhappy with it.

You know, I don't understand why you don't put in place a single county-wide beach nurse tax. I just don't understand how you can tax everybody at different rates. It just doesn't seem equitable. I find it almost unbelievable, frankly, that you propose raising property taxes on private property owners in Avon to pump sand onto a beach that's owned by the U.S. federal government and to help protect a section of highway in C-12 that's owned by the state of North Carolina. Now, everyone seemed to have a different opinion about what to do instead. There was no agreement on who should pay for it. So you haven't been successful so far. Go back again.

Don't give up. Keep trying until you get the funding we need. And so over the course of this meeting, which lasts maybe two hours, Bobby out becomes sort of the whipping boy for all these problems. He's the guy who has the job of persuading people that although they are upset about this idea, there really is no alternative. We can't wait. If we wait to see what and if they're going to do, by then the problem we're trying to prevent will happen. And so we don't have time to wait.

No one's going to save them. They have to do this, and they have to do it now. If you don't get ahead of this, then you're behind it. And when you get behind it, it's more expensive, and you've got more problems than you can deal with. And then he closes out the meeting. So thank you for joining us. Thank you for coming on the call. Thank you for all your questions, not only tonight, but for the emails that we received. They're much appreciated.

And we're trying really hard to get the information to you also. So then what happens? Well, a few weeks later, county officials take a vote, and they decide they're going to go ahead with it. They're going to do beach nourishment and raise taxes to pay for it. So they're doing it. That's right. It's going ahead. But they're doing it with the knowledge that in five years, like you said, they're going to be right back here all over again. That's exactly it.

And a few weeks after that initial county meeting, I met with Bobby Outen to ask him, how sustainable is this? If you've got to keep doing it every five years, how long can you keep that up for? And what did he say? What you're asking me is, are our political people going to support retreat? He finally mentioned the word that no one had really been willing to say up to that point, which is retreat. When do you actually just decide to help people leave and let nature run its course on the town? But he wasn't really willing to accept that idea. And his actual answer wasn't that different from what I hear from other elected officials around the country, which is that is not something they even want to think about? So the answer is that we know

that there's an erosion problem and we mitigate that problem as long as we can mitigate it. And when we can't mitigate it, then we're going to lose beaches. And when we can't mitigate it, then we're going to lose beaches. And when we can't mitigate it, we're going to lose structures. So retreat's going to happen whether we say you have to or you say you don't. And so if we inform people, here's what we're doing, here's how it's working, here's what the erosion rates are, here's what's going on in the community, here's our long-term, what we're planning to do in the community. And you come in and want to build a house on the oceanfront, you're coming in with your eyes open. Yeah. You're going to say, my investment horizon is this based on what I've done. In a sense, it's maybe not their job to think that far ahead in the future,

because you could argue that as long as residents are informed and they make decisions they want to make, then responsibility rests with people who buy homes. And certainly there's no public appetite for officials to say, well, guys, this town might not survive and here's why. I think people want a degree of optimism from their officials. And if not optimism, they just don't want to hear that kind of bad news. And if the answer from officials instead is, you know what, I think we can fix this for now, that's probably all people really want to think about. Right. So in a sense, Avon is buying itself a little time, like you said, five-year increments. And that's what a rich town like Avon can do that a poor town like Fair Bluff really can't.

But it doesn't really seem to be investing in a long-term solution. That's exactly right. There's two ways of looking at this. On the one hand, Avon is very different from Fairbluff because it has the money to buy time, right? And five years matters a lot. Ten years, 15 years, it matters even more. So in that way, climate change exacerbates inequality. But in a different sense, maybe in a more fundamental sense, they're not that different.

Because in both cases, it's not obvious what the long-term fix is, or even if there is one. So even with all the money that Avon can afford to throw at this, it still can't really buy itself out of the bind that it's in with Fairbluff, which is, how do you make sure this place is still around in 10 or 20 or 30 years? And on that, there's no answer. It's so interesting because in a sense, the story of these two towns that you visited to illustrate what's happening with climate change in the United States is the story of inequality, right? One has the luxury of buying time, the other doesn't. But given what you've said here, it's really a story of just how much climate change is an equalizer, because eventually

its consequences will come for both of these communities. Yeah, in a sense, this is the worst kind of equality because both Avon and Fairbluff, in the end, are really equally exposed to this terrible long-term future, and so is the rest of coastal and riverfront America. Money only gets you so far. And even with all the money that the United States can afford to throw at these problems,

in the end, it really can't fix them. And it just makes you think that whatever the future is for Avon and Fairbluff, probably that same future is waiting for a lot of towns all around the country. If there's anything that's true with climate change, it's that it's going to get worse. The costs will grow, and at some point, there'll have to be decisions somewhere about which towns to let go of or to stop spending money on. And so for now, the thing that determines which of these towns can last longer is how much money they can pull out of their economy through taxes. And you could quibble over whether that's a good way or a bad way to decide these things. But it's the only way for now because there isn't really anybody else having those conversations.

So for now, that's what passes for fair. Well, Chris, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you. We'll be right back. in a 2018 Times podcast called Caliphate that he served as an ISIS fighter and executioner in Syria, admitted in court on Friday to fabricating those stories. The man, Shiroz Chowdhury, had faced Canadian charges of perpetrating a hoax

involving the threat of terrorism. In return for his admission, those charges were dropped. A Times investigation prompted by those charges and released in December of 2020 had previously cast significant doubt on Chowdhury's claims and led editors to conclude that Caliphate did not meet Times standards for accuracy. did not meet time standards for accuracy. Today's episode was produced by Michael Simon-Johnson, Diana Nguyen, and Sidney Harper.

It was edited by Mark George and Dave Shaw, with help from Claudine Ebate. Contains original music by Marion Lozano, Chelsea Daniel, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro.

See you tomorrow.