You just watched the impact of rising sea levels in rodents in North Carolina,
in fact, that was one of two oceanfront properties in that
area that were swallowed up by the ocean on the same day.
Now, luckily both were unoccupied at the time, but it's a good visual to
remind us all of what is happening to this planet as a result of human behavior.
Climate change is real.
And if only those homeowners had taken the advice of Ben Shapiro and
sold that property prior to it getting swallowed up by the ocean.
Now, the first to fall was at 24235 Ocean Drive,
which collapsed at three a.m On Tuesday, the second structure at
24265 Ocean drive went down shortly after noon Tuesday.
The primary owners of each house live out of state, one in Tennessee and
the other in California.
Now, after another house had collapsed on February 9th in the same ocean drive area.
Dare County officials had warned that several other nearby
houses were also at risk of imminent collapse.
And so this made me super curious about the home right like is this
a beachfront property that was, purchased decades ago.
It's been within a family's estate and all the rising sea levels so terrible.
I know the house was actually sold November 12th of 2020 okay,
at least the house that we showed you getting swallowed up by the ocean.
And the person who bought it, bought it for $275,000 as you noticed,
Zillow's Zestimate of the property was $381,200.
I checked it this morning and it was still the estimate for Zillow and
if you take a look at the public tax history gives you an idea of
how much the value of the home was, what it was assessed at.
And so it was purchased in 2020.
I don't know why the tax assessment was 426,500.
But what was notable to me was that the value actually
went up even as this giant risk was imminent.
This issue was imminent and one final thing I want to get to.
This is hilarious.
So this is from realtor dot com.
It's one of these real estate websites and so they,
give you data to help you figure out what the natural disaster risks are for
a property or an area that you want to, buy.
And so they show the FEMA notice and so FEMA for
that particular home, it was considered a ve zone.
So it's a special flood hazard area.
It's considered high risk, which means if you buy the home,
you absolutely must buy flood insurance.
But right beneath that, I don't know if this is a realtor thing.
I don't know where this number or this assessment comes from.
But flood risk is increasing as sea levels rise and
weather patterns change, but the flood factor is minor.
Two out of 10 out of 10.
>> That's not bad, yeah, to get like above a five out of 10.
You could really only see the chimney of the house at low tide.
It's just purely underwater.
That's so devastating.
And then, and then the value goes up.
I guess not a lot of people have, in living room pools and
water beds might be trendy again, I don't know.
I do want to give them credit though.
I've always been bothered by this thing where people oversell neighborhoods and
roads like you might have like the Beverly hills such and such.
It's not in Beverly hills.
I lived in an apartment.
That said it was mountain view.
There's no mountain view that is an ocean drive.
If ever I've seen one like they are committing to the bit there but
it's just devastating to watch.
Maybe they only visited the house a couple times a year for like vacation or
whatever, but they put hundreds of thousands of dollars into it.
Now, what do they have?
Like I guess you can like test the fixer upper people.
They always have like a house that just needs a new paint.
They call it a fixer upper.
That's a fixer upper.
You need to go fishing out of the ocean and see what you can do.
Yeah, listen, the reason why I like this story and wanted to talk about it,
you're right.
It is devastating you put hundreds of thousands of dollars into a property and
it gets swallowed up by the ocean.
But what would persuade someone to buy that property in the first place?
Like you would really have to either be in the dark about the reality
of climate change and rising sea levels or you know about it, but
you don't really like, you haven't really accepted it yet.
And I think there are a lot of americans that fall in that category where they're
not bad people, they don't deny that climate change is real.
But I think it's hard for
a lot of people to wrap their heads around how bad it already is and
the ramifications that people are already suffering, there's a little bit of that.
Yeah but it's not really going to happen to me mentality, but
it's happening to everyone in one form or the other.
Whether it's extreme weather events, whether it's extreme drought.
We're experiencing that on the west Coast right now, as we speak.
No, it's pretty bad at the time.
We accept that.
Yeah, and I would just quickly say, as with so many things we talked about,
john Oliver did a couple of years ago, a show on flood insurance.
And like cyclical payouts on the same property of being like really hurt by
flooding and then a big payout to rebuild it and then it gets destroyed again.
Not as bad as that.
But I would say if people are interested in this topic, go back and
find that john Oliver episode is really good.