Floods of Trouble
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Floods of Trouble
A series exploring how real estate and climate change collide in South Florida.
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Floods of Trouble
When it comes to extreme weather threats, hurricanes are the obvious focus in Florida. But flooding — and not just from those tropical tempests — is a multibillion-dollar threat that is largely untracked by government agencies and often kept secret from the public.
As The Miami Herald’s Pulitzer Center-supported “Floods of Trouble” series reveals, critical records about the flooding history of communities and individual homes across the state have long remained largely hidden from the public. Home buyers want to know where it floods and where it doesn’t — and so do planners trying to upgrade flood control protection. But the powerful real estate industry, home sellers and some cities worried about property tax revenues have resisted disclosure of information that certainly isn’t going to enhance the value of properties.
The series examined the pocketbook impacts of flooding, exploring when — or if might be the better term — the real estate market finally feels the impact of climate change and sea rise and our soaring home values pay the price.
We created custom animations that offer the clearest visual explanation yet of why sea level rise-driven flooding is such an existential issue for South Florida residents, whose hurricane-resistant homes have only a few feet of porous rock between groundwater levels and their ground floods.
In our last piece, we used data from public records requests to chart more than 16,000 flood complaints filed over the last 11 years in Miami-Dade and Broward counties. The results show that the flooding is largely untracked by governments and extends far beyond areas identified as at-risk by federal flood insurance analysis.
This story was originally published November 12, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
