The Price is Wrong

ROMAN MARS: This is Episode 3 of Not Built for This: The Price is Wrong.

ANNOUNCER (THE PRICE IS RIGHT): And now, your hostess on The Price is Right… Here she is! Arlene Francis…

ARLENE FRANCIS (THE PRICE IS RIGHT): Hi. Welcome to The Price Is Right. Well…

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The earliest seasons of The Price Is Right had a wide range of prizes. There was, of course, your standard game show fare–things like cars, jewelry, furniture… But some items were more outlandish.

ARLENE FRANCIS (THE PRICE IS RIGHT): So, just look over to the left for the first item to go up for bids on The Price Is Right…

ANNOUNCER (THE PRICE IS RIGHT): A submarine!

EMMETT FITZGERALD: This is from an episode that ran back in 1961. All four contestants are laughing as this submersible appears stage left. It looks like a life-size version of something you’d pull out of the bottom of a cereal box–not exactly seaworthy.

ARLENE FRANCIS (THE PRICE IS RIGHT): All righty. Well, now Mrs. Patrick, we’re going to start with you. And you got an airplane last week. Let’s see if you can go underwater this week. The minimum will be $100. 

MRS. PATRICK (THE PRICE IS RIGHT): Oh, I think I’ll bid, um… Start it at $100. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Mrs. Patrick missed out on that submarine. But the last prize of the day was something all of the contestants seemed genuinely excited about.

ANNOUNCER (THE PRICE IS RIGHT): A home in Florida. [cheers]

EMMETT FITZGERALD: A home in Cape Coral, Florida. 

ANNOUNCER (THE PRICE IS RIGHT): The living room is spacious, light, and airy with a sliding glass wall that leads to a screened sun porch…

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The guessing went on for a few rounds. And eventually, the contestants narrowed in on a number.

ARLENE FRANCIS (THE PRICE IS RIGHT): $15,070. And the winner is Mrs. Patrick!

EMMETT FITZGERALD: When Mrs. Patrick won her home in Cape Coral, the city wasn’t even fully built yet. The developers were still in the process of converting miles of swamp and coastal wetlands into a middle class paradise–a kind of coastal Levittown, where even a schoolteacher could afford to live the Florida dream.

GULF AMERICAN CORPORATION CAPE CORAL FL PROMOTIONAL COMMERCIAL: Getting here is only the beginning of all the fun and excitement. Wait until you see what’s been planned for you once you arrive at Cape Coral.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The city is located in southwest Florida, right where the mouth of the Caloosahatchee River empties into the Gulf of Mexico. And the founders had big plans for the community–not just a subdivision or a small town but a whole city with canals running through residents’ backyards. So many canals that in magazines and radio ads Cape Coral billed itself as a “Waterfront Wonderland.” Even that home on the Price is Right was a marketing tool–just one of the many ways the developers tried to reach cold-stricken northerners and retirees who were ready for the good life.

JAYSON DE LEON: For a long time, the promise of balmy winters and cheap housing drew families to Florida–including mine.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Jayson De Leon is a 99PI producer and our resident Florida Man.

JAYSON DE LEON: Growing up, my parents were in the real estate business–as was my brother, some cousins, and lots of close friends, too…which is very Florida. So from a young age, I got to see up-close how this alchemy of water and sun captivated people. But the Florida dream is not what it used to be. As you hear this, the state is in the middle of one of the most dangerous hurricane seasons it’s ever faced. That’s because the seas around Florida are really hot, and that’s fueling more intense storms, increasing the potential for destruction. The Florida coast has already been battered by one massive storm this summer, and the worst weeks of hurricane season are still to come.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: And all across the state, Floridians are starting to really feel the cost of living on America’s riskiest peninsula. Because climate change isn’t only generating harsher weather, it’s hitting people’s bank accounts. For years, the cost of owning a home in Florida has been going up, but nowhere has that change been more dramatic than in the price people are paying for insurance.

JAYSON DE LEON: Insurance companies are not climate activists, but they might know more about climate risk than just about anyone. And as the storms get more extreme and unpredictable, a lot of insurers are running the numbers on Florida and realizing that the math just isn’t working anymore.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: For decades, low-cost insurance helped mask the risks of living on the coasts of Southwest Florida. However, right now a climate correction is underway. Prices are skyrocketing. And in this new financial reality, residents of Cape Coral are realizing that their Waterfront Wonderland was just not built for this. I’m Emmett FitzGerald. 

Jayson will take it from here.

JAYSON DE LEON: The story of Cape Coral’s insurance crisis really begins with the founders of the city: a pair of hucksters named Jack and Leonard Rosen.

JASON VUIC: The Rosens were two brothers from Baltimore–self-made, tough… I mean, I admire their story.

JAYSON DE LEON: This is Jason Vuic, a historian who grew up in a town north of Cape Coral. Jason wrote about the Rosen Brothers in his book, The Swamp Peddlers.

JASON VUIC: They relied on each other, they fought with each other, they hated each other, but they loved each other as only brothers could. And they grew up, um, they were both carnival barkers.

JAYSON DE LEON: Like, literal carnival barkers?

JASON VUIC: “Step right up!”

JAYSON DE LEON: Jack Rosen was the youngest–the big picture, operations type. In the various businesses he had with his brother, he was often behind the scenes running the show. Because Leonard, he was a born salesman–a complete and total extrovert who was loud and brash–the kind of guy who was known to show up to board meetings wearing sneakers and tennis shorts. Even if Leonard was kind of a lot to be around, he had a way of drawing people in–a trait that carried over into the Rosens first major business success in the early 1950s.

JASON VUIC: They sold many gallons of a shampoo mixed in a bathtub with lanolin. 

1954 CHARLES ANTELL LANOLIN SHAMPOO AD: Charles Antell Lanolin Shampoo. Yes, ladies, a luxurious lanolin lather shampoo created by Charles Antell to bring a new glamor–a clean, rich softness to your hair…

JASON VUIC: You know, lanolin comes from wool and it’s supposed to have lustrative power…I don’t know what it does, but it doesn’t do much. And they’d say things like, “Have you ever seen a bald sheep? No. Lanolin.” And they made millions.

JAYSON DE LEON: With all the money they made selling this ludicrous hair stuff, the Rosens wanted to strike out on a new venture. Leonard had arthritis, and he heard that the climate down in Florida could be good for him. And it was on a trip down to the Sunshine State, he noticed something new was afoot in the real estate market.

JAYSON DE LEON: People weren’t just dropping in for vacation anymore. They were buying. And so, the brothers looked at each other and asked–

JASON VUIC: “Why are we selling shampoo for a dollar a bottle when Americans are paying a thousand a lot to move to Florida?” And so they moved to Florida. They specifically went to Florida to find land to sell because they were getting out of the shampoo business with the money they had made. And they were gonna go to Florida and they were going for the gold.

JAYSON DE LEON: In 1957, Jack and Leonard purchased the first few acres of what would become Cape Coral. For generations, this spit of land on Florida’s Gulf coast belonged to the native Calusa. They built homes and other structures atop these giant shell mounds, which kept them high and dry during the wet season. But when the Rosens showed up in the 1950s, this land was mostly uninhabited swamp–a place that even locals only visited briefly to hunt deer and wild hogs.

JASON VUIC: You know, it was marshy and mangrovey. You know, the mangrove mud, you know you walk by mangroves, you put your shoe in the mud, you don’t get it back, right? I mean, this is stinky, tough… It’s beautiful Florida nature, but it’s not a place that, you know, you want to hang out much.

JAYSON DE LEON: Still, the Rosens paid no attention to that–and really, neither did anyone else. Local and state officials did nothing to prevent development in these dubious and sometimes dangerous areas. In fact, it was the total opposite. They rolled out the red carpet to developers who vowed to drain these swamps and build the next suburban paradise.

JASON VUIC: There were no laws about development on county land in Florida. You could build whatever–you could build the Taj Mahal–in 1957 without a permit. Nobody would stop you. In fact, they were thrilled that somebody would build out there.

JAYSON DE LEON: The Rosens created a company called Gulf American to purchase and develop Cape Coral. And to get the land high enough to reasonably put a house on, they elevated it 5 ½ feet above sea level, which is not a lot. I mean, I’m 5’ 7”on a good day. Still, getting these houses above the water required a ton of manpower and big machinery. Down by the Caloosahatchee River, massive draglines and dredges carved a path inland, creating miles and miles worth of canals. Aerial photos of all these waterways snaking through residents’ backyards would soon wind up on postcards and in magazines. But they weren’t just for show. Because the canals are also how the Rosens created the actual land that they would eventually build houses on. 

As the dredges worked their way through this swampy terrain, they’d dump all that dirt from the bottom of the river in giant piles alongside it. And because all that crud from the riverbed is free, the Rosens simply graded these piles of muck and voila! Land!

JASON VUIC: And so this isn’t beach sand that you’re pulling up. It smells. It’s horrible. Flies, you know, the dead shells, the dead sea crabs, the dead vegetation… Some of the descriptions from Cape Coral in the early days…it was kind of biblical.

JAYSON DE LEON: Developments like Cape Coral destroyed mangroves and paved over wetlands, areas that naturally absorb flood waters and reduce storm surges. Experts call this land a “hurricane buffer zone.” But the Rosens and developers all over Florida were tearing these environments apart and building homes there instead.

Residential lots in Gulf American’s new city were sold on installments: $20 down and $20 a month. In some of the earliest layouts, you can see tens of thousands of homesites color-coded as tiny, equally sized rectangles. At first, Gulf American didn’t even bother to include space in the plans for a school or a grocery store. They wanted to squeeze as many lots as they could out of this swamp. And as it turns out, there was a real appetite for what they were selling.

JOSEPH RASO (ORAL HISTORY): We were motivating people to leave their home up north and come down here and live with us. So, we didn’t tell no lies, we didn’t even stretch the truth. [laughs]

JAYSON DE LEON: This is Joseph Raso, a salesman at Gulf American. In an old recording, Joseph spoke about his time at the company selling this new city on the water. When he first arrived, Cape Coral was actually hit by a massive hurricane, ripping roofs off houses and flooding some roads and homes. But he says that didn’t stop the company from forging ahead.

JOSEPH RASO (ORAL HISTORY): The very next day, we sold a couple houses and we sold lots of land for the people that came here. Like I said, the people that came down believed in the things we told them. They believed, and they bought it. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Gulf American’s marketing was unlike anything Florida had ever seen. At one point, the company spent more money advertising the Florida lifestyle than the state of Florida did. They hired teams to travel the northeast and midwest. At local hotels, they’d offer customers free chicken dinners and show them a movie about Cape Coral. Sometimes salespeople would close the deal by the end of the night. And for anyone who still needed a little convincing, Gulf American booked them on an all expense paid trip down to their Waterfront Wonderland.

JOSEPH RASO (ORAL HISTORY): We used to bring them here by air, by bus, by train, by boat–any way that we could bring them here, we brought them here. 

GLORIA RASO TATE: So, they would fly you in and bring your kids and you would stay in their clutches, so in their hotel within their bus route. And they had you captive.

JAYSON DE LEON: Gloria Raso Tate is Joseph Raso’s daughter. She was just nine years old when the family moved to Cape Coral. And when her dad joined the sales team, she got a job of her own, too. It was just a little more informal.

GLORIA RASO TATE: And my sister and I were babysitters so we would take the kids, and say… 

JAYSON DE LEON: You would take the kids of the people who came?

GLORIA RASO TATE: Yes, who came on the flybuys. And we would take them to the beach and they would be in love with this place. “We want to move here! We want to move here!”

JOSEPH RASO (ORAL HISTORY): We fed them breakfast. We fed them lunch. We fed them dinner. Prime rib–never cheap. I was so sick of prime rib, you couldn’t believe it. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Once the deal closed, a Gulf American pilot would fly you up in a Cessna to show you your slice of paradise. From the sky, customers would see this Pac-Man-like maze of canals and houses. By the late 1960s, Gulf American had sold so many lots, it was sometimes hard to tell a customer just which piece of land was theirs.

JASON VUIC: And the pilot has a bag of flour or sugar. And he leans out the window, and he goes, “Your lot is right there!” And he drops the bag. And the bag lands on the ground and goes, “Poof!”

GLORIA RASO TATE: This puff of white… And who knows where it went? And who knows where that land was? I mean, let’s be honest, a lot of people had no clue what they were buying in Florida. But, you know, that’s the way it rolled. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Jack and Leonard Rosen started out like a lot of the other Florida developers: trying to spitshine some swampy land to sell to a bunch of dopes up north. And the plan? It worked. Lots of people started moving to their city. Between 1970 and 1980, the population of Cape Coral tripled to over 30,000. And as time went on, the land just kept filling in. Today more than 200,000 people call the city home.

But Cape Coral has a problem–one that stems from its original sin. The whole premise of the city was to use canals to put as many single-family homes on the water as they possibly could. Today, it has over 400 miles worth of canals–the most of any city anywhere in the world. However, as the seas rise and storms get worse and worse, what used to be Cape Coral’s biggest asset has turned into their biggest liability.

JASON VUIC: You know, when do these canalfront properties that weren’t really smart to build in the beginning, now they’re downright dangerous to live on. Some huge number of Cape Coral is flood-prone as we speak.

JAYSON DE LEON: A recent study suggests that nearly 90% of properties in Cape Coral are at risk of flooding. That’s more than 110,000 homes–the most of any city in Florida. The development of all this swampy land was risky even before the effects of climate change became super clear. But at the same time the Rasos and the Rosens were selling the city, there was another development happening–this time in the insurance market. And it would make it harder for newcomers to really understand the true risks of living in Cape Coral. After the break: how we all ended up paying for the Florida dream.

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JAYSON DE LEON: In the 1950s, America was in the middle of a post-war housing boom, and lots of construction was happening. It just wasn’t always in the safest places. That was especially true in Florida, where the Rosens were dredging and filling swamps at warp speed.

CAROLYN KOUSKY: Those types of changes to the landscape come back to haunt communities because the water still comes and still needs somewhere to go.

JAYSON DE LEON: This is Carolyn Kousky. She studies policy and climate risk at the Environmental Defense Fund. Carolyn says that communities that build themselves on top of wetlands unsurprisingly have a greater chance of flooding. And for a long time, if residents wanted to insure against that risk, they couldn’t. No private companies wanted to sell flood insurance because a big flood could bankrupt and actually had bankrupted a lot of insurers. So, the cost of helping homeowners rebuild after a flood increasingly fell to the federal government, which found itself paying out loads of money in disaster aid.

CAROLYN KOUSKY: And there start being conversations that disaster aid is getting to be pretty pricey for the federal government and insurance would be a way to help spread the cost but also to encourage better development in our floodplains. And so, the sort of national conversation around a potential flood insurance program begins in the ’50s and ’60s and then is finally adopted in 1968.

JAYSON DE LEON: The National Flood Insurance Program–or the NFIP–is an insurance program run by the federal government. And one of its main goals was to discourage people from buying in places they probably shouldn’t.

CAROLYN KOUSKY: Residents who purchase flood insurance policies are having to see the cost of risk when they make those premium payments. And the thought is that that is then going to encourage people to be more careful about moving into incredibly risky areas.

JAYSON DE LEON: FEMA, who runs the NFIP, knew it needed a critical mass of customers to make the program work. Insurance, after all, is a numbers game. The more people you get inside the program, the more you can spread out the costs of a disaster. But, at least initially, communities weren’t like, “Hell yeah, flood insurance!” Because, as it turns out, it’s really hard to get people to buy a thing for something that might happen at some point in the future. So, to get homeowners into the program, the federal government did two things. 

First, they mandated that if you have a mortgage on a house in a high-risk flood zone, you had to buy flood insurance. Which, you know, that makes good sense. And crucially, they also offered residents living in flood-prone communities a subsidy, or what’s essentially a discount, giving people the benefits of flood insurance but at a cheaper rate than the actual risk they faced.

CAROLYN KOUSKY: And so this discount is built into flood insurance prices from the beginning. And the thought was it would phase out quickly as homes turned over, newer homes were built, and it’s supposed to be eliminated if there’s major retrofits or anything. And it turned out to be just really sticky.

JAYSON DE LEON: At least early on, there were some good reasons for the discount. FEMA didn’t want to punish residents who had already purchased homes in a flood zone even before the program existed. So the discount was a tool to help ease people in. And it was supposed to eventually go away, but it just never did. 

And there are other ways the flood insurance program has underpriced risk. For one, FEMA has historically used flood maps to price premiums. But those maps are notoriously outdated and often fail to accurately identify flood-prone areas. So over the years, lots of people with significant flood risk were shown on the map as living in a pretty safe area. And they ended up getting cheaper rates because of it.

BILL SPIKOWSKI: The current system greatly underprices flood insurance, which is why it’s so great for those of us who buy flood insurance. We think it’s great!

JAYSON DE LEON: Bill Spikowski is a city planner who lives just outside of Cape Coral.

BILL SPIKOWSKI: I think I pay $700 a year for my house.

JAYSON DE LEON: $700?

BILL SPIKOWSKI: $700 a year for flood insurance.

JAYSON DE LEON: Even Bill acknowledges that this is a bargain. He says the flood insurance program holds a lot of power over this part of the country. In Cape Coral alone, there are over 27,000 flood insurance policies through the NFIP. And for decades, lots of residents have been getting a pretty sweet deal because flood insurance was just cheaper than it should have been–particularly for the wealthiest homeowners. FEMA knows that its rates have been a problem. It’s just that anytime they try to correct them, everyone revolts.

BILL SPIKOWSKI: As soon as the new insurance rates come out, the citizens call their congressmen. And the congressmen, being elected officials, scream and yell, “How could you do this?” And they roll it back.

JAYSON DE LEON: The reason FEMA wants to raise rates is because the program runs at a massive deficit, to the tune of some $20 billion. So as disasters keep piling on, the program has to borrow from us, taxpayers, to help pay its obligations. And the NFIP hasn’t just been a boon to Florida homeowners, but for local governments who want to see their cities grow.

CAROLYN KOUSKY: Local governments have a bit of a perverse incentive to allow excessive development in risky areas because they get the property tax revenue from it. But when those homes are damaged, the local government doesn’t pay any of the costs of those damages. So, they just get the nice benefits in the safe years and don’t have to deal with it.

JAYSON DE LEON: When it floods, it’s not their problem. Its–

CAROLYN KOUSKY: It’s on the owner–or the federal government.

JAYSON DE LEON: In theory, the NFIP was supposed to act as a disincentive–a tool that would make living in the floodplains pricey and even steer some residents outside of a flood zone. But in reality, it hasn’t worked out that way. The flood insurance program didn’t reign in risky development. The discounted policies blinded people to the amount of risk they were actually taking on, which gave people an incentive to move into risky places like Cape Coral. After all, who wouldn’t want their Florida dream subsidized by the federal government?

JAYSON DE LEON: Would Cape Coral exist as it is today had there not been a federal program as a backstop to cover against flood loss? 

WYATT DALTRY: Um…I don’t…That’s a good question. [laughs]

JAYSON DE LEON: This is Wyatt Daltry. In addition to being on the planning team for Cape Coral, he’s also the city’s floodplain manager. I spoke to Wyatt a few months back in a small conference room down in Cape Coral City Hall.

WYATT DALTRY: As far as the NFIP is concerned, I think we would still exist. I don’t think we would be as large. 

JAYSON DE LEON: So, to some degree, it incentivized a growth in this area?

WYATT DALTRY: To a degree. I think it helped supercharge the growth we’ve seen in Southwest Florida.

JAYSON DE LEON: The flood insurance program was created to fill a gap left by the private market. And today, a similar dynamic is playing out on the state level with homeowners insurance–a policy that’s completely separate from flood insurance and one that’s required by lenders on all mortgages, so it affects even more people. Companies that sell homeowners insurance are starting to get really freaked out about climate change. And these businesses are deciding that some places have become so risky that they’re effectively uninsurable. So rather than stick around and lose money, lots of companies are choosing to abandon the riskiest locations. And just like with flood insurance, as those private companies leave, the state has had to step in, creating and expanding their own home insurance programs.

ABRAHM LUSTGARTEN: Thirty-odd states now have a state-run program, including California, which is dramatically expanding that program right now to protect the state’s economy and protect that growth that’s so vital to the economy. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Abrahm Lustgarten is a climate reporter at ProPublica. He says that these state-run home insurance programs act as a backstop, helping to keep lots of at-risk communities financially viable, which is a good thing! But they’re also kind of obscuring an uncomfortable truth because when the private market says a place is uninsurable, that’s a warning sign to everyone living in the area: this place is dangerous! But the state programs send a different message. They tell you, “This place is okay–or at least okay enough.”

ABRAHM LUSTGARTEN: And that’s the paradox. So, we have these systems that have blinded people to risk and encouraged us all to live, you know, in very vulnerable places. And so many people have done that, that now we do have a very genuine need to protect some of those people.

JAYSON DE LEON: So on the one hand, as places all around the country face more and more severe climate threats, it’s probably not a great idea to keep encouraging people to live in risky areas. But on the other hand, there already are a lot of people in those places. And if the state or the federal government refused to step in when the private companies flee, lots of people might be left without any insurance options at all.

ABRAHM LUSTGARTEN: I own a home in California. I’m petrified of losing my insurance–of the prospect of that. So, I don’t want to see my insurance go away. And if it were to go away, I don’t want to see my state-offered backstop go away because, without it, I don’t know what I would do.

JAYSON DE LEON: State-run home insurance programs and low-cost flood insurance have helped protect what is, for most people, their most valuable asset. But they’ve also compounded a similar problem. They’ve made it harder for people to really consider the perils of living in a place like Cape Coral. But the risks were always there. And they recently became plain for everyone to see.

JAYSON DE LEON: Orange car… Oh, I see it.

[car door closes]

JAYSON DE LEON: It’s late August 2023, and I just pulled into a driveway where I’m greeted by Marion Morris.

JAYSON DE LEON: Hello!

MARION MORRIS: Hi! Jayson? [dogs barking]

JAYSON DE LEON: Yes. Yes yes yes.

MARION MORRIS: You hear my babies?

JAYSON DE LEON: I hear the dogs. [laughs]

JAYSON DE LEON: Marion lives in Cape Coral with her husband, Loyd, and a handful of pets. On the day I visit, the heat index is right around 110. And a classic five o’clock storm is brewing outside. So to get out of this soupy mess, we move all the pleasantries into Marion’s kitchen. There, she offers me some water and I see a cat poke its head out from down the hall. On a table, Marion points to a very sweet family photo.

MARION MORRIS: That was me, believe it or not.

JAYSON DE LEON: That’s you right there?

MARION MORRIS: Yeah, that’s me and that’s me. That’s my husband. Look what age does to you. Guess what? You’re not going to be so cute when you get older. [laughs]

JAYSON DE LEON: I’m about to have my first kid, so…

JAYSON DE LEON: Marion is in her 70s and recently retired. She moved to Cape Coral after her aunt passed away and left her this house. It’s a classic mid-century Florida ranch: single story with a carport on the side and a lanai in the back. It’s actually one of Gulf American’s original homes. But not just any of the original homes…

ANNOUNCER (THE PRICE IS RIGHT): A home in Florida!

MARION MORRIS: That’s our home! Yeah!

JAYSON DE LEON: She lives in the place that was given away on The Price Is Right all those years ago.

MARION MORRIS: Oh, my god. There it is, look!

JAYSON DE LEON: I played Marion the clip you heard earlier on my phone while we huddled around her kitchen table.

JAYSON DE LEON: So, you didn’t know any of the history of The Price Is Right?

MARION MORRIS: No. And I don’t think my aunt did either. I can’t believe it. Price Is Right?

JAYSON DE LEON: Marion was born in Ohio. And she first started coming down to Cape Coral in the ’70s. That’s when her aunt bought the place.

MARION MORRIS: I used to drive down here three, four times a year for vacation, to come down and see my aunt and uncle.

JAYSON DE LEON: And how were those vacations? 

MARION MORRIS: How were they? Hot as heck. 

JAYSON DE LEON: As the years went on, Marion couldn’t help but notice all the changes that were happening in the city–more canals, more roads, and lots more people.

MARION MORRIS: Every time I came down, I says, “Oh my God, one of these days, God’s going to get mad and just bring a big wave and just wash it all away,” ‘cause they kept building and building and building and building. They took beautiful land and just destroyed it.

JAYSON DE LEON: And that biblical wave that Marion was worried about–it finally came.

In September of 2022, Hurricane Ian made landfall not too far from Cape Coral.

MARION MORRIS: I mean, when it hits the fan, it hits the fan. So, this is the first time the water ever came into the house. 

JAYSON DE LEON: There’s a saying that getting hit by a hurricane is a little like getting run over by a turtle. The days in the leadup to the storm are long. Everyone knows the latest forecast because everywhere you go there’s at least one TV tuned to the local news. You watch as the cone of uncertainty narrows. You go to Publix. You fill up your car. The storm spins in the opposite direction that the clock ticks. You prepare on the off chance that it could be you, but no one ever feels ready when it is.

MARION MORRIS: Outside, it came all the way up to the bottom of the windows.

JAYSON DE LEON: The bottom of the windows?

MARION MORRIS: Yeah. It looked like a little mini tsunami running down the street. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Oh, my goodness. And you rode it out here?

MARION MORRIS: Well, when you have three cats and two dogs, it’s not like, you know, you can run anywhere. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Hurricane Ian was the strongest storm the area had ever seen and one of the worst in the history of the country. It brought not only wind gusts of 140 miles per hour but a massive storm surge. The Caloosahatchee River overflowed its banks, and so did lots of canals in the city. It was a worse case scenario–a massive, slow-moving, rain-heavy storm. In parts of Cape Coral, high water marks were close to nine feet.

MARION MORRIS: When we started flooding, I picked up one dog, he picked up the other, and we put him on our tall dressers we had. And I’m sitting there on that one dresser of the chest and looking outside. And suddenly, the shed that we had there–I watched the air just blow it apart from the inside out. It just went poof. It was horrible. 

JAYSON DE LEON: The flood waters stayed in Marion’s home overnight and receded by morning. When it was all said and done, she had two inches of mud to dig out of the house. She sifted through what could and couldn’t be saved–furniture she inherited from her aunt, old remembrances. Anything waterlogged sat at the end of her driveway.

MARION MORRIS: We had trash piled up seven, eight feet tall down round here. All you could see is mounds and mounds of stuff. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Together, Marion and Loyd restored kitchen cabinets, broke down old walls, and put in new floors–work they largely did with their own hands and with their own money.

MARION MORRIS: We didn’t have flood insurance. A lot of stuff came out of our pocket. And it hit a lot of our savings. It really did. It did. Big time. I won’t go into numbers and stuff, but it knocked us on our butt.

JAYSON DE LEON: Marion didn’t have flood insurance in part because of some really big changes that the federal government made to the national flood insurance program. Just a few months before Hurricane Ian, FEMA finally decided to correct the premiums. So now, a lot of residents are discovering what it looks like when the price matches the risk. Here’s Carolyn Kousky again.

CAROLYN KOUSKY: FEMA was underpricing risk. And when you start accounting for it, premiums have to go up. And if you’re going to have risk-based rates at a property level, they are going to be expensive in high-risk areas like along the Gulf Coast. And the Gulf Coast is the area where we’re seeing the biggest price increases.

JAYSON DE LEON: The NFIP’s new pricing model is called Risk Rating 2.0. I know, it sounds a little dystopian. Risk Rating 2.0 more accurately prices the risk of each individual home, almost like a private insurer would. And Carolyn says that one of the counties experiencing the biggest rate hikes in Florida is Lee County, where Cape Coral is located.

CAROLYN KOUSKY: The median premium under Risk Rating 2.0 is going to go up more than 250%.

JAYSON DE LEON: FEMA created a glide path for longtime policyholders that gradually increases rates over time. But for residents who just saw their city flood and now want a new flood policy, they’re gonna have to pay the full, more expensive rate. And some of the people I spoke with say that 250% actually underestimates the changes they’ve been seeing.

MARION MORRIS: I called last year to see how much it would cost us to get flood insurance. They wanted $7,000. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Marion Morris was among the first citizens whose flood insurance rates skyrocketed. When she called to ask about a policy, it was the month before Ian. Some longtime residents used to pay $500 or $600 for flood insurance every year. But Marion’s $7,000 quote would’ve meant an extra $500 or $600 coming out of her pocket every month. For two seniors on a fixed income, they just couldn’t swing it. So, they didn’t have flood insurance for one of the worst floods ever. They had to rebuild their home with their own money. And they still don’t have insurance to protect them from the next flood. When I spoke to Marion, she sounded defeated by the whole thing. The recovery, the financial gymnastics, the anxiety of summer–it’s all just been too much.

MARION MORRIS: I’m just gonna have to put it in God’s hands. If it floods, it’s not going to do me any good. You know, there’s nothing I can do. Grin and bear it–that’s all. That’s what we do. 

GLORIA RASO TATE: Everyone’s having insurance issues, and insurance has become a nightmare in Florida all the way round.

JAYSON DE LEON: Again, Gloria Raso Tate–the daughter of Joseph Raso, who worked for the Rosens at Gulf American. In addition to being one of the first residents of Cape Coral, Gloria has made a name for herself in the city. She’s the owner of Raso Realty and has continued in the tradition of her father–selling the Florida dream. Back when Hurricane Ian hit, Gloria was also on the city council, representing the oldest part of the city and the one most affected by the hurricane. 

GLORIA RASO TATE: I mean, it’s a year later, and people are still not satisfied with their claims and are still working through it. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Gloria tells me that insurance, almost more than anything, has people reconsidering moving to Cape Coral.

GLORIA RASO TATE: As a realtor selling property, I just shudder when I have to tell someone that they need flood insurance and where it’s gonna go. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Have you seen that influence people in making decisions?

GLORIA RASO TATE: Absolutely. Absolutely.

JAYSON DE LEON: Gloria worries that because Risk Rating 2.0 is so aggressive, eventually FEMA will place the entire city in a flood zone, which could dramatically increase the number of people with mortgages who would have to purchase very expensive flood insurance. And Florida’s state-run home insurance program? They’re planning to increase rates, too, not exactly because of climate reasons–I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the governor isn’t really about that–but because he wants more people buying private insurance and getting off of the state’s back.

All of the experts I spoke with for this story say that one of the first steps in untangling this insurance problem is to eventually price insurance accurately so that it reflects the amount of risk a homeowner is really facing. And that is starting to happen. It’s just the way it’s happening, it makes it almost impossible for people like Marion and Gloria–residents with roots in Cape Coral–who built a life here precisely because of its affordability. And that’s one of the main criticisms of Risk Rating 2.0, that this new policy is going to hurt places like Cape Coral disproportionately, especially the working class people who live there. And it has. But that’s also because that’s kind of the point. It’s supposed to hurt.

GLORIA RASO TATE: In that respect, the 2.0 and the FEMA maps and all of that–they are here to protect us. It’s just they weren’t here at the beginning, and the retrofit can bankrupt most people.

JAYSON DE LEON: The retrofit is painful.

GLORIA RASO TATE: The retrofit is painful. Yeah.

JAYSON DE LEON: Gloria tells me that since the hurricane, people have had to make some really hard choices about where they live, including her because Ian destroyed her home, too.

GLORIA RASO TATE: I had almost four feet of water in my home, a sewer line break. I had a 62-year-old tree that fell in the middle of my house, and that was that. I was in shock, so it took me a few days to actually wrap myself around what had happened. And meanwhile, I was on the city council responsible for an entire city. Also a realtor trying to find people housing. It was a nightmare come true. 

JAYSON DE LEON: In the aftermath of Ian, Gloria wanted nothing more than to rebuild her home. But it was right on the coast and subject to something called the 50 Percent Rule. The 50 Percent Rule is yet another FEMA regulation that made life after the storm harder for residents. The idea is that any home in a high-risk flood zone that’s damaged by more than half of its value needs to get rebuilt up to the latest building codes, which–for older homes in Cape Coral like Gloria’s–more often than not means elevating the whole house a few feet. The rule is in place to force communities in risky areas to “build back better,” so that the next time another hurricane comes around, the home has a better chance at surviving the storm. Here’s Wyatt Daltry again, Cape Coral’s floodplain manager.

WYATT DALTRY: No one likes the rule. We understand it. It’s a good rule–just a rule that no one likes.

JAYSON DE LEON: After the storm, Wyatt’s job only got harder. He spent months sending out letters to people to tell them their homes were too badly damaged and that if they wanted to rebuild them, they’d need to elevate the entire house–an extremely expensive proposition. He spent hours on the phone getting yelled at.

WYATT DALTRY: It’s hard telling people, “You’ve had this tragedy occur to your home.” Now we’re compounding that by saying, “Well, you’re gonna have to make a very important decision.”

JAYSON DE LEON: What I find so interesting about the 50 Percent Rule is that it gets to the heart of a tension in how we respond to climate change. Of course we want public policy to encourage citizens to build back with the future in mind. We want a government that, for once, is being proactive instead of reactive to what’s happening in our new climate. But we also want a government that takes care of its people. And the 50 Percent Rule shows how, after a storm, it’s hard to do both of those things at the same time. Bill Spikowski, the local city planner, told me that long-term thinking around Southwest Florida is hard and damn near impossible after a storm. Understandably, people just want to get back into their homes. So, when you get a letter from Wyatt saying that you need to do X and Y and Z…

BILL SPIKOWSKI: Nobody can hear that as a good thing. They can only hear that as the government stomping on us. 

JAYSON DE LEON: How did you hear that as someone who lives in this area?

BILL SPIKOWSKI: I feel it both ways. So, I’m often the person trying to answer the question, “What do we do about climate change?” But I’ve also personally been through two really, really bad hurricanes. And I have friends and neighbors, lots of them, who’ve been through this. And I’m just completely torn because I think, you know, both are true. Yet how can both be true? How can it both be the right thing and completely the wrong thing? Do you make this easier on the citizens of your community? Or do you take the big picture view that everybody should rebuild up higher because the waters are coming up?

JAYSON DE LEON: For people like Gloria, the 50 Percent Rule is what stood between her and rebuilding her home–the last place she ever lived in with her husband–one of the first quarter-acre lots the Rosen Brothers ever built. To her, it was a home with a lot of personal history and history to the city, even if it was only slightly above sea level. Still, Gloria knew elevating the house was just one of a seemingly endless number of things the home needed to be lived in again: new walls, new floors, new everything.

GLORIA RASO TATE: I took it down to the studs, and then I just sold it for land value.

JAYSON DE LEON: Gloria told me that she wanted to rebuild the “right way,” getting the home up to the proper building standards. But after the storm, she looked around the city and saw lots of people who had a massive amount of damage just putting their homes back together again. 50 Percent Rule be damned.

GLORIA RASO TATE: “Did you elevate?” “No.” “Did you do this?” “No.” “Where are your permits?” “I didn’t get them.” So…and lots of homes in these areas are being fixed and rebuilt, and they’re not going to be insurable. 

JAYSON DE LEON: A few months ago, FEMA actually put out a statement saying that a bunch of residents in Cape Coral violated some floodplain regulations, including the 50 Percent Rule. The city did push back. But unless it somehow addresses the problems FEMA found, flood insurance could get even more expensive for all of the residents of Cape Coral.

Bill says that as insurance prices keep creeping up, an interesting phenomenon is taking shape in some of the riskiest parts of Southwest Florida. It’s not just the poor and the working class who are forgoing coverage. But increasingly, rich folks are opting out, too.

BILL SPIKOWSKI: Which, if you’re wealthy, you can self-insure, which means really having no insurance.

JAYSON DE LEON: After Hurricane Ian, lots of big, corporate money moved into the places that were the most severely hit and bought homes in cash, which means that they don’t have to have flood insurance or really any insurance at all. They can just take the gamble and hope that maybe FEMA comes in on the backend to help them out when the next storm rolls through.

BILL SPIKOWSKI: So, what you have is people of means moving in and swooping in on these areas that have been hit by disasters because they’re the only ones who can afford to do it. And that’s just going to be getting worse and worse. 

JAYSON DE LEON: You see that happening here? 

BILL SPIKOWSKI: Absolutely. It’s already happening here.

JAYSON DE LEON: This past February, on my last drive through the city, I took a trip down to Cape Coral’s most southern point, where the Rosens first broke ground nearly 70 years ago.

JAYSON DE LEON: When I drove through here in August, it was not this packed. There’s just a lot of people here now.

JAYSON DE LEON: It was an absolutely gorgeous day–a real reminder of why around here it’s so easy to forget the last storm. On one road down by the water, construction crews were hard at work on nearly every home, still rebuilding from Hurricane Ian almost two years later.

JAYSON DE LEON: A lot of places are still under construction. There’s some new construction going on. 

JAYSON DE LEON: I took this drive because I wanted to see Gloria Raso Tate’s old home–the one she had to gut and sell after four feet of river destroyed it–the place where she lived for 27 years before a wall of water took it all away.

JAYSON DE LEON: So, this is Gloria’s old home. There used to be a tree in the middle, but no longer. But it looks like it’s been touched up, redone. 

JAYSON DE LEON: The home looked new. And notably, it had not been elevated–still flat as a pancake on the same ground Gulf American dredged out of the depths of the river a few feet away. Later, while digging through some public records, I saw that Gloria’s home was actually purchased by an LLC–one of those investors who swooped in, using the storm as an excuse for a good deal.

I drove in a loop around Gloria’s old block, counted seven homes listed for sale on her street alone with, I’m sure, a lot more to come. I exit the loop, and I’m back out on the main road. I think about the Florida that I grew up in and the one that I’m driving through. And I can’t help but feel that we’re approaching the end of an era–a time when we manipulated enough land and finances to make a place like this make sense. Because, on this one block, in this one corner of the city where the Florida dream started, it didn’t look like paradise. It looked like a relic–as if I was already seeing it in the past tense.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Next time on Not Built for This… Flood risk is increasing all across the country as the climate changes and people continue to move into flood-prone areas. 

CAROLYN KOUSKY: That line of risk is going to be growing for our lifetimes and our children’s lifetimes. We have locked into warming and sea level rise. That’s going to continue. We don’t have good policy answers yet for how to handle that.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: But more and more, policymakers are coming around to the idea that we might need to start abandoning some of the most risky places altogether, and get the people living there out of harm’s way, which is a lot easier said than done.

CAROLYN KOUSKY: We don’t know how to equitably unbuild in high-risk areas. And I think this is going to be our problem for decades.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: In our next episode, we head to Southwest Louisiana, to see what it looks like to unbuild a flood-prone neighborhood and the bittersweet painful process known as managed retreat.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: I said, “Well, you can take a bulldozer. Go straight through it right now. Pull it right out. I don’t care. There is no emotional attachment to the house anymore.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: This episode of Not Built for This was reported and produced by Jayson De Leon and me, Emmett FitzGerald, along with producer Sofie Kodner and managing editor Delaney Hall. Further invaluable editing from Christopher Johnson, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, and of course our Captain, Roman Mars. Mix and sound design by Martín Gonzalez. Theme and original music by George Langford from Actual Magic with additional music by Swan Real. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia. Series art by Aaron Nestor.

A very special thanks to Deborah Hendrix at the University of Florida’s Samuel Proctor Oral History Program and to David Dodrill, who interviewed and recorded a lot of the former employees at Gulf American. His book, Selling the Dream, offers the most comprehensive set of first-person accounts from early residents of Cape Coral. Another big thanks to everyone who spoke with us for this story, and specifically Jason Pim, Cheryl Anderson, Max Forgey, Joseph and Paul Bonasia, Wayne Daltry, and Craig Pittman.

Not Built for This is a six-part series from 99% Invisible. New episodes will be coming to you in the 99PI feed on Tuesdays and Fridays, wherever you get your podcasts. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. The rest of the 99PI team includes Chris Berube, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Gabriella Gladney, Jeyca Maldonado-Medina, and Neena Pathak. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM Podcast Family. You can find 99% Invisible on all the usual social media sites, as well as our new Discord server. There’s a link to that, as well as every episode of 99PI and Not Built for This, at 99pi.org.