How will hurricane Helene reshape Tampa Bay’s housing market?

Trina Winter remembers a time when big storms happened only once every four or five years. But lately, her neighborhood is constantly on edge.

“After every flood, we lose a few neighbors,” she said.

Those losses mean changes for her community in Tampa’s Sunset Park neighborhood.

Her home is raised about 10 feet. During Helene, she watched as water flooded their garage, but left the majority of her home unscathed. That wasn’t the case for her neighbors in lower-lying homes. Many are already planning to move.

“Everybody is scrambling, in fact, to try to get their homes sold, because there is going to be so much competition,” Winter said.

In what’s shaped up to be Tampa Bay’s most devastating hurricane in a century, Helene decimated entire neighborhoods from Crystal River to Clearwater. Storied local haunts and family homes passed down through generations were wiped out in one fell swoop, leaving a blank canvas for possible redevelopment.

But even once a community rebuilds, it may never return to what it was before.

Longtime residents are forced to move. Charming old buildings are replaced by sturdier, more modern structures. Once-affordable neighborhoods see costs skyrocket, pricing out longtime residents.

“The price of repairs may mean we lose our character,” said Gulfport Mayor Sam Henderson after Helene, referencing the vibe of the eclectic arts and fishing community in southern Pinellas County. “There will be a different kind of people who can afford to live here, moving forward.”

When Winter’s family moved into Sunset Park in 1991, it was an affordable area, she said. They purchased their home for around $80,000. But after each flood prompts rebuilding — often by real estate investors who build multimillion-dollar homes — she doesn’t consider it as accessible to middle-class families anymore.

“It’s heartbreaking to look around and see the devastation of our neighbors,” she said. “We’ve always said we’d never leave, but I guess never say never.”

Rising tides and rising prices

The frenzy of rebuilding after disasters can prompt transformative community change — including shifts to home values, rent prices and resident population.

In a study published last year in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, researchers analyzed 16 years of property data across various Florida markets. They found that after a hurricane hits, home prices temporarily rise and wealthier buyers move in.

“Basically, the hurricane destroys part of the housing stock,” said Yanjun Liao, an economist at Resources for the Future, a nonprofit research institute in Washington, D.C. “And so there is less housing supply on the market, which has upped the price.”

The population turnover typical after storms can cause a “gentrifying effect” Liao said. In the long run, rebuilding efforts could boost both home values and rent costs, which can prompt “changes in sort of the social fabric of the community.”

This trend is already unfolding in parts of the Gulf Coast where Hurricane Ian made landfall two years ago.

The Tampa Bay Times analyzed property data in four counties that bore the brunt of Ian’s impact in 2022. In the year after Hurricane Ian, Lee County homes sold in areas with the highest rates of flood insurance claims saw prices roughly 9% higher than those sold in places with less damage.

At the same time, home values in the hardest-hit places around Fort Myers Beach, Sanibel Island and Cape Coral dropped, the Times found. Data from Zillow shows that in the year after Hurricane Ian, the more damage an area sustained, the more values tended to decline.

The downward trend has slowed significantly in the last two years — suggesting that the market is recovering. Still, home values remain diminished in parts of the metro area, the Times found. The average Sanibel home used to be valued at over $1.2 million, for example. But as of last month, it’s now about $304,000 lower.

In St. Petersburg’s Shore Acres neighborhood, which has continuously been ravaged by flooding, short sales on storm-damaged homes are already popping up after Hurricane Helene.

One home at 2135 Montana Ave. NE, which was purchased two years ago for $660,000, is now being listed for $399,000.

“CASH OFFERS ONLY!” reads the listing.

Lessons from Southwest Florida

If she could do it all over again, Karen Dietrich says she would’ve kept her house in south Sarasota County, even if it meant living in a tent in the backyard. But in those frantic couple of months following Ian, selling felt like the only option.

Her home in the city of Venice was completely drenched by the Category 5 storm. Mold started to grow and Dietrich became ill. She and her husband couldn’t afford to renovate and had nowhere to stay while they waited on assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

They had their eye on a house in Wisconsin and planned to move by Christmas. On Dec. 23, after their first buyer fell through, they hastily sold to a local investor for $200,000 and set off on their new beginning.

They returned to Venice just a year later and found it was “unrecognizable.” Longtime friends and neighbors had left. Everything felt more expensive. The entire town seemed like it was under construction.

The couple rented a house for a while but they were eventually evicted after a dispute over property maintenance issues. Dietrich said she believes the eviction was unlawful and she wants to fight it.

After a hurricane, two moves, an eviction and a couple of failed business ventures, Dietrich, 63, said she’s “flat broke” and on the verge of homelessness, bouncing between hotels and an air mattress in a friend’s garage.

“I’ve never lived like this in my life,” she said. “We worked so hard for our home and we lost everything.”

Many of the buyers that came in right after the storm were not individual homeowners, but developers eager to snap up prime pieces of land that wouldn’t have otherwise been available, said Budge Huskey, the Naples-based president and CEO of Sotheby’s International Realty.

“They’re going to maximize the value of the site,” he said. “They’ll build new construction at a far higher price.”

Justin Thibaut, president and CEO of the Fort Myers based commercial real estate firm LSI Companies, said Ian vastly accelerated opportunities for growth in the region, though not everyone is happy about it.

In Fort Myers Beach, the storm has opened up conversations about rezoning properties to allow for greater height and density. Some residents worry that proposals for flashy high rises could threaten the community’s identity as a quaint, laid-back beach town.

“That’s kind of what’s being worked through now: What’s a happy medium for council and residents?” Thibaut said. “You can’t build back ground-level buildings anymore. There’s now an implicit shown flood risk.”

The house Dietrich could not afford to fix up has been sold twice since she left — first for $250,000, then for $295,000.

“They all got a piece of the pie,” she said. “It makes me sick. Everybody treated it like it was just a money maker. It was our home.”

Imminent change

After Hurricane Helene, Nadine Clark and Chris Berry got to work drying the floors and pulling furniture from the walls to assess the damage of their Riverview home. But after a couple of hours, Clark had a realization.

“What are we doing this for?” she asked Berry. “I don’t think we’re going to be living here any more.”

They rent an older manufactured home, mere yards from Alafia River, which reached a record height of 9.4 feet during Helene. The house was never built to withstand something like this, Clark said.

“There’s no drying it out unless you’re willing to put a lot of money back into it. It would need to be a total renovation,” she said. “It’s most likely condemned.”

After years of watching their neighbors rebuild after multiple flood events, Clark said they’ve already started looking for a place to live. Others are fleeing, too, she said, holding back tears. What happens next to their close-knit community — less than a dozen homes — is a mystery.

“Nobody can live in any of the houses on my block right now,” she said.

But after Helene, even those who stay in their communities know that change is imminent. Winter, in Sunset Park, said it’s only a matter of time.

“Just the fact that these storms are getting bigger and more frequent, maybe it’s irresponsible to live on the water like this,” she said. “I don’t know the answer.”

Staff writers Lane DeGregory, Emily L. Mahoney and Christopher O’Donnell contributed to this story.