Dan Kipnis

Irma left Dan Kipnis’s Miami Beach house mostly untouched. “I lost three little stick palm trees,” Kipnis, chairman of Miami Beach’s Marine and Waterfront Protection Authority, said by phone. “And one of my papayas fell over.”

But it’s not hurricanes that have Kipnis worried about the local real estate market. Rather, it’s the seemingly endless construction—elevating roads, installing new stormwater drains, and other projects—designed to lessen the impact of sea-level rise. And then there are the property taxes required to pay for all that work: Miami Beach’s plans are set to cost as much as $500 million.

The noise and inconvenience of that work pushed Kipnis to try to sell his house. But he worries that the same things which make him want to leave are also scaring off buyers. After 18 months on the market, and despite dropping the price by more than one-third from $3.2 million, Kipnis still hasn’t sold his home.

“I had a couple look at it yesterday,” Kipnis said. "They said, ‘This is terrific.’” But when the real estate agent mentioned the roadwork, Kipnis said, the couple lost their nerve. “They’re not going to live here while we spend two years raising the streets.”

Jim Cason

When Jim Cason first became mayor of Coral Gables in 2011, he sometimes felt like a lonely voice, warning about sea-level rise and what it could mean for South Florida’s real estate market. He argued for then-radical ideas, such as the need for cities to set aside money now to pay for the eventual demolition of homes inundated with water and then abandoned.

Those concerns no longer make him an outlier. Cason, who left office in May, attended a regular gathering of South Florida elected officials in Fort Lauderdale in December to talk about the effects of climate change. Unlike previous years, he said, the event this time was “totally sold-out.”

He said mayors and city managers shared their anxiety about what rising seas mean for their cities’ property values. Those worries range from the mundane—finding more money to update infrastructure damaged by storms—to the existential: How long will banks keep issuing 30-year mortgages?

“The hurricane certainly added to that concern,” Cason said by phone during a break. “That’s why so many people are at this conference. They just saw it.”