In August of this year, the Washington Post published an article by John Tibbets and Chris Mooney that discusses sea level rise and eroding home values. The piece opens with the case of Elizabeth Boineau, who once hoped to sell her home in coastal South Carolina for one million dollars. But because of climate change–and subsequent rising seas–the value of her home dropped so dramatically (she reduced the price eleven times), she has finally decided to just tear it down.

As Tibbets and Mooney explain:

Boineau is one of many homeowners on the front lines of society’s confrontation with climate change, living in houses where rising sea levels have worsened flooding not just in extreme events like hurricanes, but also heavy rains and even high tides. Now, three studies have found evidence that the threat of higher seas is also undermining coastal property values as home buyers — particularly investors — begin the retreat to higher ground.

Boineau demolished the house and moved across the river to safer ground. She’s waiting for her old lot to sell so she can purchase another. So much of this rests upon that strange idea of value as it relates to risk, climate change, and rising sea levels.

Here’s where things get interesting. Tibbets and Mooney cite a joint study from researchers at Penn State and UC Boulder that concludes that vulnerable homes sell for about 6 percent less than “unexposed” homes. But it goes further: “The most vulnerable properties — those that stand to be flooded after seas rise by just one foot ­— were selling at a 14.7 percent discount, according to the study, which is set to be published in the Journal of Financial Economics.”

The researchers from this study argue that these price/value drops are being created mostly by wealthy, more educated buyers who are purchasing “multiple properties or second homes.” These are not buyers who are living in these properties. The study authors gloss these investors as “sophisticated buyers,” arguing that they “demand a discount to bear the risk of future sea level rise.”

Think about that! In essence, this is the financialization of future value losses due to climate change, sea level rise, and flooding. The article cites homes in Charleston, South Carolina that have lost “$266 million in value since 2005 because of coastal flooding and expectations of still higher seas.” But here’s the thing: Despite more awareness and concern about sea level rise and flooding risks, coastal development–and property appreciation–continue.

At least for now, coastal property values aren’t actually declining. Home prices are still going up, just not as fast. As Tibbets and Mooney explain, this isn’t actually a case of lost or declining value, but rather less market appreciation relative to surrounding properties that are exposed to fewer risks (here they cite Jeremy Porter from Columbia University).

Value is a strange thing. I’ve been obsessed with its weirdness for a while now (see this too). Coastal real estate is particularly unwieldy. With the thread of rising seas, erosion, and coastal flooding, the effects on coastal land values are bound to be severe. But when? Real estate values are fickle, yet resilient. There are tools out there, like this one, that try to tell homeowners about potential risks. But I’m not sure if the gravity of the situation has quite sunk in yet.

The complicated thing about value–in real estate or anything else–is that so much of it depends on rather ethereal stuff. Sure, there’s the Marxian Labor Theory of Value, but that’s not some ironclad rule about the value of all things. That was never really the point of it anyway. And as it turns out, people often place value on things for either very idiosyncratic, highly individualistic reasons, or because of larger social and structural conditions that shape hopes, desires, habits, and decisions. There’s nothing naturally valuable about the coast per se, beyond its uses various uses and attractions for people in certain times and places. It’s not necessarily a given that living along the coast has to be luxurious or even remotely desirable in the near future. In many parts of the world, it’s not particularly safe to live on the edge of the sea. In other parts of the world, of course, the coast remains a fairly sought after place to be (despite the warning signs). When will coastal properties slide from desirable to dangerous? When will the hazards and risks shift the equation? Time will tell.

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist.

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You never know when or how new research will begin. Let alone how you’re going to do it. That’s why it’s always good to take notes…and photographs.

In March 2012, when I was in the middle of my doctoral work in Cabo Pulmo, I just happened to map the coastal profile of a nearby beach (known as “Los Frailes”). It’s a long, sandy stretch of beach that curves around a small bay. I walked along the edge of the waterline with a small hand-held GPS unit and mapped the profile. I’m still not sure why I did it; I just decided to map it. By chance, the very next week, a huge section of that same beach collapsed into the ocean. As it turns out, there’s a deep underwater canyon that runs right up to the shore. That morning I heard several reports about the beach collapse, so I raced over to check it out with a few friends. About 120 meters of the beach–the same place where I’d walked and mapped the week before–had just fallen into the ocean. I re-mapped the coast, took some photographs, and archived it in my memory bank as something to keep in mind.

Later that year, this issue of coastal instability came up yet again. In early September, I stepped outside to watch an approaching storm as it hit Cabo Pulmo. I didn’t even mention this event in my fieldnotes, but I did take photographs (see Image 1 above). At the time, my research was focused primarily on the local politics of conservation and development. I wasn’t looking at anything related to the effects of climate change, coastal erosion, or sea level rise. But there it was. Once again: archived.

I returned to Cabo Pulmo in 2013. This time, I was paying more attention to coastal erosion, but it still wasn’t my primary research focus. I re-photographed the sea wall and beach that I had photographed in 2012 (see Image 2). This second image is shot with a different camera, and from a different position, but the change that took place is pretty clear: a large section of the rounded sea wall in the foreground is gone, along with a big chunk of the soil behind the wall.

During that trip in 2013, I spent more time photographing the effects of coastal change and erosion, including photographs of failing sea walls and repairs. This was when I began paying closer attention to the unstable nature of the coast, and not only how people live with this instability, but also try to control it as much as possible. These sea walls are basically temporary fixes that can withstand coastal erosion for an often unknowable period of time. Some hold up better than others. But these residents persist, battling against the tides and storms.

Around that time I started asking more people about these changes. Some of these conversations had come up during my interviews, and I wanted to know more. One couple who has been traveling to Cabo Pulmo for more than two decades shared a photograph they had taken of the beach in the mid 1990s (Image 3), which is basically a 180 degree view of the same beach shown in images 1 and 2. Like all of the other images (and data), this went to my mental archive as something I wanted to focus on more closely in the future.

Fast forward to the present. I just returned from another follow up trip to Cabo Pulmo this past June. I also went there for some follow up research in 2017. On both of these trips I was paying ever more attention to erosion and what people were saying about it. Image 4 (below), taken on New Year’s day in 2017, shows a similar view of the beach as Image 3. If you look closely at Image 4, you can see the same orange-yellow wall on the left side of the image that is in Image 3. These images were clearly taken from different positions, but they show the dramatic changes that have taken place over the past two decades. The sandy beach that used to buffer these coastal structures has been severely reduced. At high tide, there is no beach. Image 5, from June of this year (2018), shows the same approximate location. This last image was taken at a moderate high tide, and it illustrates the complete loss of beach (and a sea wall that has been severely undermined).

The collapsing beach and the storm photograph that I discussed at the beginning of this post have, in the end, sparked an entirely new line of research for me. I am currently working on new projects that examine coastal erosion and sea level rise from an anthropological perspective. This includes ongoing work in Cabo Pulmo, and an expanded project that examines these issues along the California coast in the US.

Up until this point, I have used photography in a fairly unsystematic way, mostly as a quick note-taking tool. I took photographs to loosely document places and events, and as visual reminders. Now it’s time to get far more systematic. When I shot all of these images, I was not thinking about using photography as a primary method for my research, but I am now.

Repeat photography is a thing, in case you didn’t know. If you haven’t heard about it, I recommend checking into the work of photographers such as Mark Klett (for starters). Here’s a short article from the Christian Science Monitor in 1985 that discusses some of Klett’s work, along with a few others who have undertaken this kind of re-photographic work. In Klett et al.’s 1977 book “Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project” the authors relocated and rephotographed locations that were first documented by 19th century photographers:

Over a period of three years, using the photographs of O’Sullivan, Jackson, Hillers, Russell, and Gardner, along with government maps and notes, the survey found 120 of the orginal sites. They then made photographs that matched the originals in both angle and light.

The work of Klett and others has been very useful and inspirational. But is anybody using this methodology in anthropology? The answer is yes. Trudi Smith, for example, is an anthropologist who has done some excellent work with repeat photography. I first learned about her work back around 2009 and have followed her since. Her work is creative, detailed, and compelling. Smith published a 2007 article in Visual Anthropology titled “Repeat Photography as a Method in Visual Anthropology.” Answering George Marcus’s call for a ‘research imaginary’ that challenges and reorients existing ethnographic practices, Smith writes:

I propose that repeat photography reimagines ethnographic practice and realigns product and process in visual anthropology while it examines the photographic record of a place and subjects it to contemporary analysis. Repeat photography reworks the double meaning of ethnography for visual anthropology. The process, or the fieldwork component of ethnographic practice in repeat photography, is a visual, embodied strategy that emphasizes looking, insight, and reenactment.

Klett et al. and Smith each blend the scientific and the aesthetic in their work. They are concerned with not only finding and rephotographing certain locations, but also thinking through the process that goes into making photographs. Why did the photographer make the image in that particular way, and what does it tell us about culture and aesthetics of that time? And what does this tell us about change, not just in landscapes but also in cultural meanings and memories that people attach to those landscapes?

As I move from the note-taking stage to a more focused research project, these are definitely some of the questions I plan to explore via repeat photography. I am also interested in exploring how this kind of photography can be helpful for opening up dialog and reflection about issues (climate change, sea level rise, and the subsequent social, economic and political problems that come with them) that are often difficult to discuss.

In Cabo Pulmo, this means I will be systematically rephotographing images that I have taken between 2005 and the present. At the same time, the plan is to repeat photographs such as Image 3 (above) and and then interview residents (and hopefully some of the people who took the photographs) to round out the process. Working with the photographic collections of local residents could be a great way to not only document historical change, but also to create venues for talking about both the present and the future.

I’m doing something along the same lines up here in California, although in this case there are often extensive photographic archives (via local Historical Societies and various university collections) that provide a good baseline for repeat photography work. I am starting this work in San Diego and Santa Cruz counties, and building off of the work of Gary Griggs (among others) for the latter. Griggs, who is a coastal geologist and Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, has done extensive work on issues of coastal change, erosion, and sea level rise (see Griggs 2017 for example). He has not only produced a ton of scholarly articles about these issues, but also written a lot for broader audiences. This includes a popular 2006 publication with Deepika Shrestha Ross that employs repeat photography to examine the Santa Cruz coast in the past and present. Here’s a short online article about some of this Santa Cruz-based work by Griggs and Ross.

In all of the sites where I am working, the primary idea is to use visual methods to compliment and augment more traditional ethnographic methods. I’m looking to find out more about the material effects of coastal erosion and sea level rise (i.e. literally documenting how places have changed), while also exploring the social meanings and implications of these persistent, ongoing processes.

As someone who grew up near the ocean, and in the water all of the time (like 4-6 hours per day), I can’t say that these issues were at the forefront of my mind. Sure, I knew about sea walls and erosion and the effects of big storms (like the 1983 El Niño), but these weren’t issues that were on my mind day in and out. This stuff only became a pressing issue when something big collapsed or when some massive storm overtook a coastal road. Otherwise, for me and many of the people I surfed with, we just sort of lived with the changing coast and took it all day by day. We paid close attention to all of the daily effects (shifting beach sands affect waves daily), but it’s not like we were worried all the time about long-term change or damage.

This is all personal and anecdotal, of course, but based upon some of the preliminary interviews and informal conversations that I have done on these issues so far, many people seem to have a similar attitude. While climate change, sea level rise, and coastal erosion are big, hot-button issues, it’s not necessarily the case that they are such pressing issues that they are a daily concern. It’s hard to see change at this level. Some of this depends quite heavily on the extent to which people feel that they are personally at risk, however. But, as with climate change, trying to assess not only what people think, but also how and why they ultimately decide to take action is tricky. These are just some of the questions that I am in the process of trying to answer now. Photographs, especially when they depict striking differences, may be able to help highlight some of the long-term changes that are difficult to see on a day to day basis, and therefore facilitate the ethnographic process. That’s the idea, anyway.

The next step is to identify some of the images and locations that I plan on rephotographing. That means paying closer attention to dates, time of day, tides, lighting, lens choices, angles and so on. But that’s the fun part. After that I’ll move on to using those images as part of the interview process. Or, perhaps, it could be fun to open up the whole process and have people relocate and photograph these places with me. These are just some ideas. It’s always fun (and challenging) to move from ideas and notes to actual research. And that’s right where I’m at now.

All of this began with a chance event, which I happened to document, and a few photographs of an approaching storm. This is how research and a lot of creative work takes shape, at least for me. Sometimes things lead nowhere, and sometimes small avenues, ideas, or side projects lead to whole new lines of exploration and research. This is yet another reminder for why taking good fieldnotes is so important, because you just never know where some seemingly minor detail will lead you. But in this case, don’t just take notes! As I said in the opening lines of this post: take photographs as well. It doesn’t matter if you’re using an iPhone or an 8×10 film camera. And, if you think you have any interest in using repeat photography as a method: take notes about your photographs as well! Trust me, it will save you an immense amount of time when you try to relocate and rephotograph something you shot 10 years ago. Wish me luck.

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist.

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