Four Feet Higher and Still Counting

Sunset Beach sits on Treasure Island, a barrier island on Pinellas County's Gulf coast where average elevations hover between five and ten feet above sea level. The chain of barrier islands from Clearwater Beach through St. Pete Beach carries extensive VE and AE flood zone designations, the most restrictive in FEMA's vocabulary, requiring breakaway walls, enhanced structural connections, and engineering standards that assume waves will hit the building.¹

Nearly one million people live in Pinellas County, spread across 590 miles of coastline.²

Since 2020, homeowners here have been flooded by Hurricane Eta, subsequent coastal storms, and then, in the fall of 2024, the one-two of Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Helene showed Tampa Bay what storm surge could do to the barrier islands. Milton, two weeks later, dropped 18 inches of rain on St. Petersburg in 24 hours, triggering the county's largest water rescue on record.³ Some residents left. Others are lifting their homes, a process that costs $100,000 to $250,000, takes months, and raises a house on hydraulic jacks to meet current flood elevation standards.⁴ Demand has surged since the hurricanes. "Everybody's been flooded or been worried about their homes being flooded," said Albert Jasuwan, president of JAS Builders.⁵

Among those who lifted: homeowners on Sunset Beach who reached their breaking point after four floods in four years. "It's this or we're selling," one told WFLA, "because I'm not going through this."⁶

The following interview is with a fictional homeowner, Marguerite "Margo" Fontaine-Babcock, whose situation is drawn from the documented experiences of real Sunset Beach residents and the structural realities of Pinellas County's flood landscape. She is imagined; her circumstances are not.

We met Margo on the new front porch of her grandmother's cottage, which now sits roughly four feet higher than it did last year. The stairs are unpainted pressure-treated lumber. A cat watched us from behind a flood vent.

You've been flooded four times since 2020. Can you walk me through what that sequence was like?

Margo: Eta was the one that broke the seal. 2020. I'd been in this house since my grandmother passed in 2016, and she'd been here since the seventies. Never flooded. So when the water came in, maybe eight inches, I thought: freak event. We clean up. I didn't even know what a flood claim was. I literally Googled "what do I do when my house floods" at two in the morning while standing in it.

Then it happened again. And again. By the time Helene hit, I wasn't even surprised. I just had a system. Furniture up on blocks, photos in Ziploc bags in the car, cat carrier by the door. My daughter called it "the drill." She was fifteen. She shouldn't have had a drill.

Milton was two weeks after Helene. I was still pulling drywall. That one, I just sat in my car in the Publix parking lot and watched the rain gauge on my phone. The water rescue footage from Clearwater, the 500 people at the Standard Apartments.³ I remember thinking: I'm not special. This is just where I live now.

What made you decide to lift instead of sell?

Margo: My grandmother bought this house for $22,000 in 1974. That sounds like a punchline now, but it's the only asset my family has ever had. Selling after four floods means selling damaged, selling disclosed, selling into a market where the buyer is either an investor who'll flip it or someone who doesn't understand what they're buying. Either way I'm handing someone my grandmother's house and my problem.

I looked at Elevate Florida, the state program. Federal grants, they cover 75 percent.⁷ I applied. Five thousand five hundred households applied.⁷ Then the funding got cut to only cover Severe Repetitive Loss properties after a disaster declaration.⁸ I qualified, technically, but the timeline was six to eight months before construction even starts, and that was the optimistic estimate.⁹ I couldn't sit through another hurricane season waiting for an approval letter.

So I took out a home equity loan. Borrowing against a house that keeps flooding to make it stop flooding. My loan officer didn't even blink. I think he'd processed twelve of those that month.

What was the lift itself like?

Margo: They put hydraulic jacks under the house and it goes up about two inches an hour. You're watching your entire life rise in slow motion. The cat did not approve. I only had to leave for two days, but the whole project, permits, engineering, the new foundation, reconnecting utilities, took about four months.⁴ They built a vented crawlspace underneath with flood openings, elevated the HVAC, everything.¹⁰

The weirdest part is the stairs. I lived in this house at ground level for eight years. Now I climb stairs to my own front door. My knees have opinions about this that they share daily.

The first storm after the lift. What was different?

Margo: Everything. There was a tropical system in the Gulf, maybe three weeks after they finished, and I realized I wasn't checking the weather every twenty minutes. I wasn't doing the drill. I was just sitting on my porch, which is now ten feet in the air, drinking coffee.

That part is real. That relief is real. I sleep differently now. My daughter sleeps differently.

So the water problem is solved.

Margo: The water-in-my-house problem is solved. Look down the street.

Say more about that.

Margo: Count the houses that are still at grade. My neighbor Carl, his place is three feet lower than mine now. Doris across the street, same. When surge comes in, the road still floods. The drainage still backs up. Storm debris still flows through. I'm dry, but I'm dry on a little pedestal inside a neighborhood that isn't.

My car is still down there. The power lines are still down there. If Carl's house takes substantial damage and the repairs exceed 50 percent of assessed value, he has to elevate to current code or sell.¹¹ He might lift. He might not be able to afford it. The guy who bought the place two doors down last year is an LLC out of Sarasota. I don't think they're lifting anything.

What happened to your insurance after the lift?

Margo: This is the part where everyone assumes the story gets better. It does, in the way that stepping from a bonfire into a campfire is technically an improvement.

I got an elevation certificate, $500, submitted it to my agent. My flood premium dropped maybe 35 percent.¹² But under Risk Rating 2.0, elevation is one factor among many, so it's not a magic reset.¹³ And FEMA's own data says the average Florida single-family flood policy was $776 a year as of 2023, but the "true risk" rate is $1,363.¹⁴ They're allowed to raise premiums 18 percent a year until they get there.¹⁴

So my rate went down. It is also going up. I hold both of those facts in my head every time I open the mail.

Then there's the NFIP cap: $250,000 for the building.¹⁵ My house, even as a modest cottage on a barrier island, is assessed at more than that. I am structurally underinsured by the program that insures me.

Wind coverage is another $4,000 to $5,800 a year in a storm surge zone.¹⁶ Citizens requires flood insurance now if your dwelling coverage is $400,000 or more.¹⁷ The total annual cost of insuring this house is approaching what my grandmother paid for it. I find that poetic in a way I don't enjoy.

You're in a VE zone, coastal high-velocity wave action. What does that mean for the lift?

Margo: More expensive, more inspected, more everything. Breakaway walls below the base flood elevation. Enhanced structural connections. Everything designed to survive waves, not just standing water.¹ My contractor said VE zone lifts are a different animal than AE zone lifts. The engineering alone added weeks.

The county is doing a Flood Vulnerability Assessment, with adaptation plans due this fall.¹⁸ Does that register for you?

Margo: I went to the public meeting in January. Sat in a room full of people who all had the same look. Not angry, exactly. More like: we already know the problem, what are you going to do about it?

The sea-level projections for Tampa Bay run somewhere between one and two feet by 2060, with the wider range reaching up to 8.5 feet by 2100.¹⁹ My lift is 3.5 feet. You can do that math on a napkin. I did, at the meeting. On an actual napkin.

I know the CRS discount in Pinellas, Class 2, 40 percent off flood premiums, is the best in the state, and I lose that if I leave.²⁰ I know the groundwater is rising and the drainage is changing and areas well away from the coast are flooding now when the water table comes up.²

I bought time. That's what the lift is. I bought time, and I'm trying not to think too hard about the exchange rate.

What would make you leave?

Margo: (long pause)

I don't know. I thought the fourth flood would do it, and it didn't. It made me lift instead. So apparently my threshold is higher than four floods, which is information about myself I didn't previously have.

Maybe it's when the insurance becomes truly unaffordable, not just painful. Maybe it's when enough neighbors leave that the street starts to feel like a mouth with missing teeth. Maybe it's when my daughter says she doesn't want to inherit this.

I think about Michael Larkin over in Shore Acres. The biologist who put in tile floors that look like wood so they'd survive the next flood.²¹ His kids' grades dropped. He's fighting with his wife more. He's paying rent and a mortgage simultaneously. He stayed. The family down the road from him bought a house inland.²²

Margo's cat, who had been watching from behind the flood vent for the duration, emerged onto the porch as we were leaving and sat precisely at the top of the new stairs. Elevated. Indifferent. Surveying a landscape that had rearranged itself around her without asking.

Footnotes

1. Pinellas County FEMA Flood Zone Guide, Revolution Florida, May 2026. https://www.revolutionflorida.com/blog/pinellas-county-flood-zone-guide ↩ ↩²

2. Pinellas County Flood Vulnerability Assessment. https://pinellas.gov/projects/vulnerability-assessment/ ↩ ↩²

3. WUSF, "What are Tampa Bay area governments doing to prevent inland flooding after Hurricane Milton?" May 8, 2025. https://www.wusf.org/environment/2025-05-08/what-tampa-bay-area-governments-doing-prevent-inland-flooding-hurricane-milton ↩ ↩²

4. Titan Elevation / Florida Home Lifting, "Florida Home Elevation: The Complete 2025 Guide." https://floridahomelifting.com/2025/09/18/florida-home-elevation-the-complete-2025-guide/ ↩ ↩²

5. WFLA, "Flood-prone homes rising to new heights in Tampa Bay, thanks to new technology," June 2026. https://www.wfla.com/news/pinellas-county/flood-prone-homes-rising-to-new-heights-in-tampa-bay-thanks-to-new-technology/ ↩

6. Ibid. ↩

7. WUSF, "Floridians are applying for funds to elevate their flood-risk homes," March 21, 2025. https://www.wusf.org/environment/2025-03-21/floridians-apply-funds-elevate-flood-risk-homes-state-run-info-sessions ↩ ↩²

8. FIRM Keys, "Elevate Florida: FDEM's Residential Mitigation Program," July 2025. https://firmkeys.org/2025/02/elevate-florida-fdems-residential-mitigation-program/ ↩

9. WUSF, March 2025. (Same as ⁷.) ↩

10. Tampa Bay Realtor, "Elevating Your Tampa Bay Home," September 2025. https://www.tampabayrealtorsean.com/marketupdates/elevating-your-tampa-bay-home-costs-process-and-why-it-makes-sense ↩

11. Pinellas County contractor guide, substantial damage / 50% rule. https://mangrovebayrealty.com/blog/pinellas-county-flood-zones-complete-2025-guide-for-home-buyers ↩

12. Harbour Insurance Agency, "How Much Is Flood Insurance in Florida?" January 2026. https://harbourinsuranceagency.com/blog/how-much-is-flood-insurance-in-florida-real-averages-by-county-home-type-risk-rating-2-0/ ↩

13. FEMA, "NFIP's Pricing Approach / Risk Rating 2.0," April 2026. https://www.fema.gov/flood-insurance/risk-rating ↩

14. FEMA, "Risk Rating 2.0 State Profile," April 2025. https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/documents/fema_rr-2.0_04-2025.pdf ↩ ↩²

15. Congressional Research Service, "NFIP Risk Rating 2.0: Frequently Asked Questions." https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN11777 ↩

16. Advantage FL, "Tampa Home Insurance," 2025. https://www.advantagefl.com/tampa-home-insurance/ ↩

17. NerdWallet, "Flood Insurance in Florida: 2026 Costs and Coverage," May 2026. https://www.nerdwallet.com/insurance/homeowners/learn/flood-insurance-florida ↩

18. Pinellas County Flood Vulnerability Assessment, January 2026 public meeting. https://pinellas.gov/projects/vulnerability-assessment/ ↩

19. Tampa Bay Climate Science Advisory Panel / Pinellas County Flood Map Service Center. https://floodmaps.pinellas.gov/pages/sea-level-rise ↩

20. NowTB.com, "Pinellas County Flood Zones," April 2026. https://nowtb.com/pinellas-county-flood-zones/ ↩

21. Bay News 9, "Helene and Milton: Faces of Recovery," September 25, 2025. https://baynews9.com/fl/tampa/weather/2025/09/25/helene-and-milton-faces-of-recovery ↩

22. Tampa Bay Times, "These Tampa Bay residents moved before a new hurricane season," May 30, 2025. https://www.tampabay.com/hurricane/2025/05/30/hurricane-climate-change-migration-flooding-florida-insurance/ ↩