A Florida family on the Gulf Coast faces impossible choices as insurance hits $7,100/year. Hurricane anxiety, climate migration, and the question: Is home still home when staying might kill you?

The Last Storm

An Encounter on the Florida Coast

The humidity here doesn’t just hang in the air—it wraps around you like a second skin, heavy with salt and the particular sweetness of vegetation that grows too fast, too fierce, too much. I’ve been standing on this porch for ten minutes, watching the Gulf of Mexico turn silver under a moon that doesn’t know what it’s illuminating.

This house behind me is beautiful. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen that opens onto a screened patio where the family eats breakfast while watching the water. The previous owner installed hurricane windows in 2018. The current owner—Miguel—replaced the roof in 2021. The insurance agent—the third one they’ve had in five years—raised their premium by forty percent last month.

“We’re not living here anymore,” Miguel says. He’s standing in the doorway, arms crossed, watching me watch the water. “We are merely existing here. There’s a difference.”

His wife Elena appears beside him, carrying two glasses of water. The glasses are sweating, the way everything sweats in Florida, the way the whole state seems to be perspiring under the weight of what it’s becoming. She hands me one. The water is cold, and I’m grateful for it in a way I haven’t been grateful for water in years.

“Mayra is asleep,” she says. “Finally. She had a nightmare about the hurricane again.”

“How old is Mayra?”

“Eleven.” Miguel’s voice catches. “She remembers Ian. She remembers the week we spent at my mother’s house with no power, no air conditioning, eating canned food while we watched the news show footage of houses floating down the street we’d walked every day. She remembers.”

We sit on the porch. The humidity is a presence, a guest at this conversation that never leaves, that settles into your lungs and stays. I think about what it means to live in a place that might kill you. Not metaphorically. Not eventually. Really, actually, in the next six months, in the next storm, in the next September that comes with a name that sounds innocent until it isn’t.

“Tell me about the insurance,” I say.

Miguel laughs. It’s not a pleasant laugh. It’s the laugh of someone who has been through the numbers so many times that they’ve lost their meaning.

“In 2020, we paid twenty-eight hundred dollars a year for homeowner’s insurance. Twenty-eight hundred. That was high, we thought. That was already a struggle. But it was manageable.” He takes a long drink of water. “Last year, it was forty-three hundred. This year, the quote we got was seventy-one hundred. And that’s with the hurricane windows. That’s with the new roof. That’s with every single upgrade we’ve made, every single thing they told us to do to protect our investment.”

“Seventy-one hundred,” I repeat.

“For a house worth four hundred thousand.” Elena’s voice is flat. This is a conversation they’ve had before, many times, with each other and with agents and with friends who nod sympathetically and then go back to their own insurance struggles. “Seventy-one hundred dollars a year just to have the right to live here. And that’s if they don’t drop us entirely.”

The word “drop” hangs in the humid air. I know what it means. I’ve been reading about it, researching it, trying to understand what it feels like to be told that the company that promised to protect you is no longer interested in your risk. The statistics say that insurance companies are withdrawing from high-risk markets at unprecedented rates. Florida has the highest insurance premiums in the country. The Realtor.com Housing and Climate Risk Report calls this area one of the most vulnerable in the nation.

“The other option is the state pool,” Miguel says. “The insurer of last resort. But that’s twelve thousand dollars a year. Twelve thousand dollars. For the same coverage that used to cost us less than three.”

“And if we don’t have insurance?” Elena asks, and she asks it like she’s asking about a ghost, like she’s asking about a future that’s too terrible to imagine. “If we can’t get insurance at all? Then what happens to our house?”

They look at each other. This is a question they’ve been circling for months, a question that doesn’t have an answer that makes sense. Because the house is their investment. The house is their daughter’s future. The house is everything they came here for, everything they built, everything they’ve spent fifteen years constructing one weekend at a time.

“We could sell,” Miguel says. He says it like he’s naming a ghost too. “We could sell and move somewhere safer. Somewhere the insurance costs a reasonable amount. Somewhere Mayra doesn’t have to practice hurricane drills every September.”

“But where?” Elena asks. “Where would we go? Our families are here. Our life is here. Our memories are here. Our dead are here.”

The conversation pauses. The humidity doesn’t. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barks twice and then stops. The moon continues to turn silver into water that will, eventually, rise again.

“I read something last week,” I say. “A survey by Kin Homeownership Trends, based on Realtor.com data. Nearly half of American homeowners are considering a move in 2026 because of climate-related concerns. Forty-nine percent.”

Miguel nods. He’s probably read the same statistic. He’s probably read all of them.

“And among those considering relocation due to climate concerns, a quarter are considering moving to a different state entirely. Florida and California are the states homeowners say they would most avoid moving to because of extreme weather risks. Fifty-eight percent would avoid Florida. Fifty-two percent would avoid California.”

“So people are leaving,” Elena says.

“People are leaving,” I confirm. “But people are also staying. Ninety-three percent of homeowners say they worry their home could be damaged by extreme weather in the next two to three years. Sixty-eight percent expect extreme weather events in their area to increase in frequency in 2026. And yet most of them aren’t leaving.”

“Why do you think that is?”

I think about the question. I’ve been asking it of myself since I started this project, since I started seeking out the people who are living in the places that climate change is changing.

“Economic gains,” I say. “The Realtor.com analysis says economic factors are keeping people in high-risk cities. Home values have gone up. Even with the insurance costs, even with the risk, people have equity here. They have jobs here. They have roots here. Leaving means starting over. And starting over is expensive.”

Miguel stands up. He walks to the railing of the porch and looks out at the water. The moonlight catches his face, and I see something there that I recognize—the particular expression of someone standing at a crossroads they didn’t choose to stand at.

“We bought this house in 2015,” he says. “Elena was pregnant with Mayra. We thought we were giving her everything. A house by the water. A yard to play in. A childhood in a place where childhood seemed possible.”

He puts his hands on the railing. His knuckles are white.

“In 2022, after Ian, we thought about selling. The premium had already doubled by then. But we stayed. We told ourselves it was because the market was bad. We told ourselves it was because we didn’t know where we’d go. We told ourselves Mayra needed to stay in her school, with her friends.”

He turns to look at me.

“But the truth is, we stayed because we didn’t want to admit that this place we loved was hurting us. That the place we chose was the wrong place. That the dream we built was built on a foundation that was going to get wet.”

Elena comes to stand beside him. They don’t touch, but they don’t need to. Their proximity is a touch, their standing together is a contact.

“Last month, Mayra’s school had a hurricane drill,” Elena says. “She came home and asked me if our house would survive the next one. I didn’t know what to tell her. I wanted to say yes, of course yes, we’ve done everything they told us to do. But I’ve seen the footage of houses that did everything right and still didn’t survive.”

“She needs to know she’s safe,” Miguel says. “And I can’t tell her that anymore. Not honestly.”

“So what are you going to do?” I ask.

The question hangs in the humid air. This is the question, isn’t it? The question that forty-nine percent of American homeowners are asking themselves. The question that sixty-eight percent of people in climate-vulnerable areas are asking themselves. The question that millions of families are whispering in kitchens and bedrooms and porches just like this one, all across Florida, all across the Gulf Coast, all across everywhere that water is rising and storms are strengthening and insurance companies are leaving.

“We don’t know,” Elena says. And then she laughs, and this laugh is different from Miguel’s—it’s softer, sadder, more tired. “That’s the truth. We don’t know. We’ve been talking about it for two years and we still don’t know.”

The conversation continues. We talk about Tennessee, where Elena’s sister moved last year. We talk about North Carolina, where the mountains are beautiful and the hurricanes are weaker and the insurance costs are lower. We talk about Colorado, where a friend of Miguel’s moved for work and sends photographs of snow that looks like a different planet.

“But it’s not home,” Miguel says. “That’s the thing. None of those places are home. This is home. This has always been home. Even when it’s trying to kill us, it’s home.”

“Forty percent of homeowners who are considering a move say they’re planning to relocate within the same state,” I say. “Only twenty-five percent are considering a different state entirely. The rest are thinking about staying put.”

“Staying and hoping,” Elena says. “That’s what that is. Just hoping.”

“Is that so bad?”

She looks at me. Her eyes are dark and tired and wise.

“When you’re praying that your daughter’s school doesn’t get flooded next September, hoping doesn’t feel like a strategy. It feels like a prayer. And prayers don’t stop hurricanes.”

The moon has moved. The water has shifted. Somewhere in the house, Mayra is sleeping, hopefully not dreaming, hopefully not seeing houses floating down streets she’s walked every day.

Miguel sits back down. His body is heavy with a weight that isn’t physical, that can’t be lifted by anything except certainty, and certainty is the one thing none of us have.

“Climate change could erase one point four seven trillion dollars in U.S. home values by 2050,” I say. “That’s from the Realtor.com analysis. Tens of millions of people displaced. Neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block.”

“I know those numbers,” Miguel says. “I’ve read them. We all have. We read them and we worry and then we wake up the next morning and we make breakfast and we go to work and we live our lives. Because what else are we supposed to do?”

“Leave,” I say.

“Leave,” he agrees. And then he doesn’t say anything.

I realize I’ve been leaning forward. The humidity has gotten heavier, or maybe I’ve just stopped noticing it, stopped noticing everything except this conversation, this moment, these three people on a porch in Florida trying to decide whether their home is still a home.

“Can I tell you what I’ve noticed?” I ask.

“Please,” Elena says.

“In every conversation I’ve had with families in your situation, there’s a moment. A moment when they stop talking about the numbers and start talking about the memories. When they stop talking about insurance premiums and start talking about the first time they saw the water from this porch. When they stop talking about evacuation routes and start talking about birthday parties in the backyard, anniversaries celebrated at the kitchen table, all the ordinary moments that make a place a home.”

Miguel nods. “That’s what we’re doing right now, isn’t it? Talking about memories while the water rises.”

“Maybe that’s not weakness,” I say. “Maybe that’s not denial. Maybe that’s what hope looks like when it’s too afraid to be hopeful.”

Elena stands up. She walks to the edge of the porch and looks out at the water. The moonlight makes her silhouette sharp, defined, certain.

“I had Mayra in this house,” she says. “I brought her home from the hospital to this house. Her first steps were on that floor.” She points to the living room inside, visible through the window. “Her first words were spoken in that kitchen. Every scraped knee, every nightmare, every birthday—we gave her all of that here. This house is her entire childhood.”

She turns to face us.

“How do you put a price on that? How do you calculate the insurance premium for memories? How do you decide whether the risk is worth it when the risk isn’t just money? When the risk is everything?”

The night is late. The humidity is eternal. Somewhere in Florida, somewhere in the Gulf, somewhere in the path of the next storm that’s already forming in waters that are too warm, another family is sitting on another porch, asking the same questions.

Miguel stands up. He walks to his wife and puts his arm around her. They stand together, looking at the water, looking at the moon, looking at a future they can’t see.

“I think the answer is that you don’t calculate it,” I say. “You can’t. You just decide. And whatever you decide, you live with it. That’s the hardest part. Not the numbers. Not the insurance. The living with it. The living with the decision.”

“Is that supposed to make us feel better?” Miguel asks.

“No.” I stand up too. “It’s supposed to make you feel seen. Because you’re not alone in this. Forty-nine percent of American homeowners are asking the same question. Forty-nine percent of American homeowners are lying awake at night wondering if their home is still a home, if their investment is still an investment, if their future is still a future.”

Before You Go

I want to ask you something.

Not because I want an answer. Not because I’m keeping score. But because this conversation isn’t complete until you step into it.

Think about your home. The place where you live, where you’ve built something, where memories are stored in walls and floors and ceilings. Maybe it’s an apartment in a city. Maybe it’s a house by the water. Maybe it’s a mobile home in a state that’s becoming uninsurable. Maybe it’s exactly where you want to be, or maybe it’s where you ended up and never left.

Now ask yourself: What are you willing to lose to keep it?

Not the practical questions. Not the financial calculations. The real question. The one that lives in your chest and doesn’t want to be named.

And then—

Your Invitation

Have the conversation tonight.

Not the practical conversation about insurance premiums and property values. The real conversation. The one where you ask the people you live with: If we had to leave, what would we take? What would we leave behind? Where would we go? What would we become?

It doesn’t have to lead anywhere. It doesn’t have to be a decision. It just has to be said out loud, in the light, with the people who will face whatever comes next with you.

Because the forty-nine percent of homeowners considering a move aren’t all going to move. Some of them are just going to have the conversation. Some of them are just going to acknowledge that the future is uncertain, that the water is rising, that the storms are coming. And some of them—the ones who really live through it—will make a decision. Not based on numbers. Not based on statistics. Based on what they can live with, and what they can’t.

Have the conversation. Then carry on with your day.

And tomorrow, maybe have it again. Maybe make it a habit—the way families in Florida are making it a habit, the way families in California are making it a habit, the way families everywhere are realizing that home isn’t just a place. It’s a decision you make every day.

The decision doesn’t have to be permanent. But it does have to be made.

And that’s worth the risk.

The humidity never really leaves. That’s what they told me when I got here, and they were right. It settles into everything, into the wood and the paint and the memories. But the people here don’t leave. Not all of them. Some of them stay because they have nowhere else to go. Some of them stay because this is where their people are buried. Some of them stay because they refuse to be driven out by something as impersonal as climate change.

But more and more of them are leaving. More and more of them are having the conversation. More and more of them are realizing that home is a decision, and decisions can be changed.

See you at the next intersection.