In around 12 hours, Hurricane Milton is set to make landfall within miles of Tampa Bay, a region that is home to more than 5 million people. Once a sleepy retirement community, the area has seen a major development boom in recent years fueled by Millennials and Gen Zers seeking the perks of coastal living; it was the 11th fastest-growing city of its size in the U.S. as of this spring and has been expected to continue to grow at nearly twice the rate of the rest of the country over the next five years. A third of those residents, including many of the newcomers, live in low-lying neighborhoods now under urgent evacuation notices due to the threat of “unsurvivable” storm surge, which could rise up to 15 feet.
The development boom that has made Tampa Bay so desirable is also why it’s particularly vulnerable. In an analysis of Hurricane Ian — the most expensive storm in Florida’s history, which struck just south of Milton’s projected track in 2022 — the re-insurance company Swiss Re found that if the storm had struck in the 1970s, it would have caused a third to a half as much damage. Simply put: You can’t adapt your way out of a hurricane problem.
If there is anyone to talk to about the vulnerabilities unique to Tampa Bay, it’s Stephen M. Strader, an associate professor and hazard geographer at Villanova University. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
You shared an image on Twitter of the explosive growth in the Tampa Bay area between 1940 and 2024. Why does this make the region vulnerable to a storm like Milton? Is it just about there being more people there?
When we think about disasters, we think of the intersection of three components: a violent event, like what we have with Milton; vulnerability, or what types of people could be in the path, which could be related to racial divides, age, and gender norms; and what a lot of my work focuses on, exposure.
Exposure is just the number of people or things that we care about — businesses, schools, and things like that — that are subject to losses if an event occurs. Florida is a great example of rapid urbanization since the 1900s, and it’s rapid development in a very hazard-prone region.
It can be easy for outsiders to sit back and wonder why anyone would buy a house on the water or on a barrier island near Tampa.
There are a lot of factors that come into play when you think about where we develop and why we develop certain locations. One of the biggest pressures that we see is that it’s desirable land: In the short term, people want to live near the water. It’s beautiful! People don’t think necessarily about the risk that comes with it because they’re too focused on their dream, which is to live near the ocean.
The other side of that is, from an economic standpoint, people see it as an opportunity to have businesses and to build condos. Developers see the land and think, “How much could I buy this for and sell it for with homes on it?” This really started back with Carl Fisher, who was famous for building the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. He was a thrill-seeker, but also a businessman and developer, and he loved to go to South Florida — which is now Miami Beach, and then was swamps and mangroves and not developed at all. And he thought, Hmm, this would be a great place for people to visit for vacations and experiences. He slowly started filling in the wetlands with sand. And that’s the history of Florida's development: It continued because this was very valuable land.
There is a lot of socioeconomic pressure to develop in these areas, but we’re also starting to see it change. Those pressures are lessening because you have insurance industries now and events like this year after year.
There is another issue in Southwest Florida, which is that many of the homes were constructed before building codes were updated, right?
I tend to do a lot more work on the manufactured housing side. Before 1974, all manufactured homes were called mobile homes, and there wasn’t really a standard. Then, in 1974, the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development came in and said, “We need to increase the standards,” and they did.
Fast-forward to 1992 and Hurricane Andrew, and they realized these codes were not strong enough. Many people lived in manufactured homes that were destroyed by Andrew, which was a very windy hurricane. We think hurricanes are wind threats because of Andrew, but hurricanes are water threats, and most deaths occur because of that water. Andrew was the opposite.
Between 1992 and 1994, they updated building codes for manufactured housing, and actually, along the coastline, Florida has some of the strongest codes for manufactured homes in the country. A lot of the areas that will be affected by Milton will have those strong standards. But many homes were also grandfathered in if they were built before that time.
That’s just one type of housing. My guess is that when you have a lot of rapid development since the 1990s — well, I have some questions about structural integrity since building codes can be strong but they might not be followed. And we sometimes don’t know until afterwards. A lot of what is being built are condos or McMansions — it’s basically, How fast can you build them, how cheap can you build them, and how high can you sell them? And they look great until their performance is put into question.
Insurance companies are starting to see this and ask, “How do we retrofit structures?” Structure-wise, though, I think Tampa is in a decent spot. The problem is, the water is so powerful that it’s not going to matter.
What kinds of conversations do you think Floridians should be having about development or potential redevelopment after Milton?
I’m a huge proponent of resisting the urge to build right back — the reason being that’s how you get repetitive losses. The hard part is, with a lot of insurance, if you have it, you only get provisions to build back the way you were. You don’t have the ability to improve. So what I end up telling people is, sometimes these disasters provide an opportunity to assess what we need to do from a planning standpoint. This is unsustainable development, and not just because of hurricanes, but because of rising sea levels and the stress on the environment. And unfortunately, a lot of these developments were built on top of wetlands and marshes and mangroves that used to protect the island areas as natural barriers.
The hard part is that people’s emotions are very strong after disasters, and they immediately want to return to how things were. That’s why you see people picking up the pieces the day after a storm, sometimes even when they’re injured. So we have to resist the urge as a group, and say, maybe this isn’t the time to think about rebuilding here.
Many wetland restoration projects in Florida are doing that very thing: reclaiming the environments that protected people inland. But on the other side you have developers and builders and local economies that rely on people coming to these areas, and that pressures people to come right back. Then you end up with a situation of repetitive losses and that’s why FEMA has been losing money over the years — it’s not so much that we’re putting money toward disasters but that we’re not getting value out of it, because it’s so much more likely for there to be impacts because of that exposure growth. Look at what happened after Helene and what’s going to happen with Milton: We’re splitting resources between the two. But we’re doing the best with the tools we have when there’s pressure on both sides, and considerations both economic and safety.
Is there anything else people should know about the geography of Tampa or the development risk there?
This storm is going to be different than other storms, and that’s because of the direction and intensity of it. The one thing we have to remember is that all that development — and everybody, for the most part, who isn’t 100 years old — has not experienced a hurricane of this magnitude in their life. That means everyone has the cognitive bias to say, “I’ve been through hurricanes before and was fine.” That is probably not going to be the case with this event; no one has been through this before.
What’s worrisome to me is that the trajectory of the hurricane is changing. A subtle shift north or south by 20 miles could mean a big difference for the Tampa region — if you have the right side of the hurricane push water into the Bay, it’s no different than 10 people jumping into a hot tub. The water level goes up and forces all that water into a smaller region, which is going to lead to more storm surge in Tampa Bay, Clearwater, and the St. Pete area. I don’t want to call it a “perfect storm,” but if you push all that water in there, you’re going to flood people in a way that hurricanes they’ve been through before never got close to. And I worry, if it goes south, about Fort Myers and the areas that were hit hard by Hurricane Ian. So it’s multilayered.
The good news that I’ll bring up is that we’re reeling from Helene, which means people have it in their brains about how bad this can be, which is probably causing more people to evacuate than normal. We have a problem with disaster amnesia in places where a hurricane hasn’t happened in a long time so “it’s not going to happen again.” And we forget. I remember Hurricane Katrina and what it did to New Orleans. It still has effects, but the students I’m teaching now weren’t even alive when it hit. These memories are short, and many people in Florida today weren’t there 30 years ago or 20 years ago. The only good thing to come out of Helene is that people are now aware of what can happen.
Charging half steam ahead. EIA