How Palm Beach balances mansion politics against climate change – By Amanda L Gordon (Bloomberg News) / June 12 2021
Palm Beach may eventually adopt techniques used in places like Charleston to leave an unoccupied, sacrificial first floor that can flood without damage
It feels like a precipice moment for Palm Beach, a Florida town in the throes of a waterfront mansion-building mania just as the impacts of climate change start pushing in.
At the town council’s regular meeting this past week, officials talked about the need to raise the grade of a beloved bike trail—and, at the same time, somehow add height to the privately-owned seawalls running alongside it. Raising both together would help preserve views and accessibility.
But if individual sections of the public bikeway and the mansion-fronting seawalls are raised piecemeal and go out of sync, it would weaken the defense against flooding and make for uneven pedaling. As the town’s director of public works Paul Brazil put it, “We don’t want our bike trail to become a mountain bike trail.”
The next day, at another meeting in the same room in Palm Beach Town Hall, some of the same cast of characters recalled the insurrection that took place years ago when the council got close to passing building-code reforms that would have regulated megamansions. Some moneyed locals got together, formed a political group and quashed the effort.
CONTINUE > https://nationalpost.com/news/world/how-palm-beach-balances-mansion-politics-against-climate-change
