On the Gulf Coast, homes are being elevated. When will the rest of Florida follow?

Miami Herald

21-05-2025

Once the hydraulic jacks were moved underneath the slab, Dr. Meghan Martin's home rose higher and higher – 12 inches at a time, level on a grid of wooden beams. Within a mere seven hours, her 1960s, ranch-style house was 12 feet up in the air.
'It was very surreal,' Martin, an emergency care pediatrician in St. Petersburg who has shared her experience of flooding three times in just four years with her more than 2 million followers on TikTok and Instagram, said. The videos she's now posted of her home elevation project, she told the Herald, don't do it justice, because 'it's just so high.'
With hurricane season around the corner, Martin is visibly relieved that her home and her family – her husband, four kids and three cats – are now out of the flood plain.
To stay safe from future storm surges and flooding, millions across Florida will need to follow suit. Florida already has more properties at risk of flooding than in any other state, and rising sea levels, increasingly more intense hurricanes and storm surges are making matters worse. Experts across real estate, construction, disaster preparedness, resilience and public and elected officials agree that Florida's future is in the air. This year, the state launched Elevate Florida, offering roughly $400 million in federal funding for residential mitigation, including raising an existing structure.
'If you don't adapt these buildings, they're not gonna make it,' says Roderick Scott, a flood hazard mitigation specialist who's been lifting homes since Hurricane Katrina kicked off the industry in New Orleans.
Experts argue that real estate prices in Florida have been propped up — at least in part— by what they call a 'climate denial bubble,' which has been valued in the billions. At some point, though, non-elevated buildings will start to devalue, while insurance costs will continue to rise across the state, whether a certain building has already flooded or not.
The task at hand, however, is nothing but formidable: While neither FEMA nor the state provide figures on how many homes will need to be elevated, Scott puts the estimate at as many as 2 million buildings. Roughly two-thirds of them – some 1.3 million – are private homes.
Statewide, little progress has been made. High costs, a lack of contractors, questions over permitting, and a market that incentivizes rebuilding without elevating, have led areas like Miami-Dade to instead focus on improving drainage systems or building sea walls. Such mitigation efforts, while part of the solution, will fail to protect properties from the several feet high storm surges that a hurricane can generate.
But on the other side of the state, in areas like Tampa Bay, Hurricanes Helene and Milton triggered a dramatic pivot. The two storms combined led to about 334,000 residential property insurance claims, according to February 2025 data by Florida's Office of Insurance Regulation, many of them in areas that were hit by particularly high storm surge. Since then, home elevations have surged.
'The increase is significant – it's actually unbelievable,' said Jeff Trosclair, CEO of JAS Builders, one of the few Florida contractors with experience in home elevation. Trosclair and his partners now raise 15 to 20 homes each month, more than ten times the pre-Helene and Milton average.
At one point, demand was so intense the traffic flood took out the company's website. 'That's just something that a construction company doesn't generally experience very often,' he said. Most of his clients are in Pinellas and Hillsborough county, among last year's hardest-hit areas.
The city of St. Petersburg, which used to issue an average of fewer than three home elevation permits annually, confirmed that Helene and Milton led to a sudden spike in applications, with 14 permits issue since last year, and another 12 pending from this year already.
'It's an expensive venture'
That sudden demand came from communities like low-lying Shore Acres, where the Martins bought a house just big enough to fit their four kids and three cats. They closed on the $260,000 steal nine years ago, having checked with neighbors that the area had never flooded. The only flood insurance record Dr. Martin's husband could find dated some 25 years back. They spent some $80,000 on renovations and assumed they could handle the risk of a little flooding every few decades.
But in recent years, repeated flooding from both named hurricanes and no-name storms fundamentally changed the community. When the Herald visited just after Helene, the streets were lined with waterlogged sofas and children's beds. Among Dr. Martin's personal losses: a Santa Claus cross-stitch from her late grandfather, who had inspired her to become a doctor.
'It's just so terrible to lose everything, to have everything in your house just completely water logged and dirty,' she told the Herald.
At least three houses on her block have already been elevated, she said, and about six more are in the process within the neighborhood. Another dozen are hoping to get started soon. Friends across the region, she says, are thinking about it.
Dr. Martin and her husband had already decided to raise their home after Hurricane Idalia flooded their home in 2023, just three years after they'd recovered from Eta. Each time documenting the devastation and emotional loss on social media.
'It's an expensive venture,' she told the Herald of the $400,000 price tag. Yet even considering that they're still paying off their mortgage, flood and homeowner's insurance, as well as the cost of renting a place while their home is being renovated, it's the cheapest option. A new house in a safer area around St. Pete would have cost them well above $1 million, while building a new, elevated house would have cost around $700,000.
The Martins picked the most experienced of the five contractors and got to work on a plan. The ground floor would be raised by a foot – still uninsurable, but useful for storage. Electrical wiring and outlets will be installed only on the 10-foot-high ceilings, and the space will be used for their two minivans, kids' bikes, and general storage.
When they submitted their request in June 2024, they were hoping that their home would be elevated in time to survive the next storm surge.
The process, however, was 'arduous' and 'very frustrating,' Dr. Martin told the Herald. In August, Dr. Martin says, the permitting office responded with a laundry list of still missing documents and plans. Each time they submitted additional documents, more requests followed.
Home elevation applications are already prioritized, the city said, though they're working to improve the process, including by streamlining the zoning review process for flood mitigation. Some have taken less than two months, others, like the Martin's, closer to a year.
'It's very frustrating, all of the things they could have given us in the beginning,' Martin said.
A month later, Hurricane Helene flooded their home for a third time. This time, 89 percent of the property's value was destroyed. Whether they'd wanted to or not, they'd now need to elevate their home, as FEMA stipulates that houses with damage exceeding half their value be torn down and rebuilt to the newest standards.
Trosclair said that some of his customers are elevating to comply with this so-called '50 percent rule' while others are preemptively raising their homes because they understand that climate change is making storms more severe. Since Helene and Milton, homeowners have been asked to include estimates for budget items that used to fall under the table, like the cost of wall paint.
It's a different story in Miami-Dade and along most of Florida's east coast. Raising pre-existing homes is still rare, in part because the region has recently been spared the devastation the Gulf Coast endured.
The priority, Scott said, should be elevating homes out of harm's way. Anything short of that simply won't cut it, he said. 'People who think they can stop flooding are delusional - they are not living in the real world,' he said.
Challenges of elevating in Florida
Like the regions affected by super storms Katrina and Sandy, Florida will need to grow a safe and solid home elevation industry – the sooner, the better. Contractors who execute the job will need to be aware of Florida's unique challenges, Trosclair said. First, there's the sandy soil, which requires special piles to secure the house. Then, there's the low-quality construction.
Unlike in New Orleans, where most homes sit on a thick, solid footing of more than 30 inches, foundations in Florida are often just 4 inches thick. Rebars were 'thrown in the dirt' and, decades later, have 'all rusted out,' said Trosclair, who grew up in Louisiana, and first got exposed to home elevation after Hurricane Katrina. The slimmer foundation slab can't hold the weight of the house once it's in the air, making it necessary to reinforce it with steel. On average, raising a home in Florida costs 30 percent more than elsewhere, Trosclair said.
The incredibly high expense has many homeowners holding out for Elevate Florida funding. Though the $400 million in federal grants is a step in the right direction, even spending all of it on raising ranch-style, slab-on-grade homes like the Martins' would only elevate about 1,000 homes. That's only about .1 percent of the 1.3 million private homes Scott estimates might need to be raised statewide.
Martin and her family felt they couldn't wait that long. They secured a low-interest loan instead, and, with hurricane season just around the corner and still no permit in sight, they gave their contractor the go ahead. 'We decided to raise it up, without a permit,' she told her followers. They did get a code violation, but finally secured their permit in April.
'Congratulations…application has passed the plan review process,' her husband read in a social media video, while she's smiling next to him on the couch in their three-bedroom rental.
Her followers, who've mostly come for the medical advice she shared with a no-nonsense approach, have been cheering her on. 'Congratulations on minimizing future flood damage!!,' one follower, who raised their own Connecticut home after Hurricane Sandy, wrote.
By the time Dr. Martin and her family return home, it may be early 2026. They still need stairs and must complete interior renovations. But by next hurricane season, they'll be 11 feet above their flood-prone neighborhood – perhaps even high enough to glimpse Tampa Bay – posting medical advice, not storm loss updates.
As one follower commented: 'Peace out flooding.'
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