Built to Last, Not in Southwest Florida

December 12, 2023

113. Built to Last, Not in Southwest Florida

Today we take a closer look into the eye-opening world of homeownership risks, particularly in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian in Southwest Florida.  My guest is Aris Papadopoulos, a construction expert and my partner in our documentary film, Built to Last: Buyer Beware. As we witness the extensive aftermath of Hurricane Ian, we discuss the shocking disparities in recovery rates between affluent areas like Naples and less fortunate ones like Fort Myers Beach.  Aris shares insights on construction materials, resilience, and the urgent need for education in hurricane-prone regions. This is a critical episode for anyone considering homeownership in vulnerable areas. Stay tuned for eye-opening revelations and valuable advice.

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Transcript

George Siegal: 0:00

Thank you for joining me on this week's Homeowners Be Aware podcast. I'm making a documentary film called Built to Last Buyer Beware. It's about the risks we take when we buy houses, where we buy houses, and how much we really know about what we're buying and how safe it is. Hurricane Ian is a great example of that in Southwest Florida. While I'm making this documentary, I've teamed up with Aris Papadopoulos. He's my partner in this project. He's incredibly knowledgeable about all things construction. He wrote the book Resilience the Ultimate Sustainability, which was the Bible for my last documentary film, the Last House Standing.

George Siegal: 0:36

So today we're going to talk to Aris about what we've learned so far during our first week of production on the film. I'm George Siegel and this is Homeowners Be Aware, the podcast that teaches you everything you need to know about being a homeowner. So we are sitting at a marina near Fort Myers Beach that was clearly damaged by Hurricane Ian, so if you hear a lot of noise, it's background noise. As they're fixing this, aris, what are your thoughts so far on what we've seen down here?

Aris Papadopolous: 1:05

We've been to Naples, we've been to Punta Gorda, we've been to Fort Myers, sanibel yeah it's a couple days and we've covered quite a bit of ground here, all the places you mentioned, but the ground zero for me is here at Fort Myers Beach. I mean, I've seen the imagery of post Ian and it's nothing like when you're here in the ground even a year later seeing the extended destruction.

George Siegal: 1:29

Yeah, I was kind of surprised by that myself. I thought they would be further along when we got down here, but you think it's going to take several years.

Aris Papadopolous: 1:37

It's going to take a long time for this place to rebuild and a lot of people won't have the money to do it Exactly yeah, I think what's getting rebuilt the quickest are those communities that have the money, that have their own money, let's say, to pay for it. We saw Sanibel an hour and a half to get to what usually takes half an hour, taking an hour and a half, and 90% of the traffic were contractors going there. So contractors are going to where the money is first to rebuild and places like Fort Myers Beach. They were a middle income community a lot of empty lots.

George Siegal: 2:13

But even in a place like Sanibel, if they have the money to start the rebuilding process, the problem they have? Okay, all the mosquitoes, all the bugs, all the garbage, all the things that you can't necessarily control. Even if you were to fix your house, it seems like it would be miserable to live there.

Aris Papadopolous: 2:32

Yeah, it's not the same Sanibel. It'll never be the same and it's going to take over a decade, I think, to even get back to that comfort, and who knows what's coming during the next decade. I mean we're seeing these storms more frequent, intensifying faster. I mean I personally would bet there's going to be another hurricane coming through this area way before that decade is over. So you got punched one, you're going to get another punch, maybe in a couple years, maybe in three, four years, if they're even lucky.

George Siegal: 3:07

Now we also sat with the mayor of Naples and you talk about a community that has money. So the area that they got back together the quickest was Fifth Avenue. I sit almost after a few days some of those restaurants were reopening. It's pretty amazing. When you could put the money behind something and you have a drive to do it, it happens a lot quicker.

Aris Papadopolous: 3:26

Exactly, I had a small lunch there yesterday, Fifth Avenue. I could not see any evidence of destruction no water lines on the walls, no damaged tiles, nothing. I mean they had to clean up everything and they had a lot of water on that street? They did. They had a couple feet of water. They had cars we saw that were floating on the streets just banging into whatever was downstream.

George Siegal: 3:50

Yeah, the mayor's van. She lost that to water and she wasn't able to drive it and it was really, it's really pretty unbelievable what they went through as well. So what would be takeaways? What have you? Because you're an expert on construction and building to begin with, but now that you see this, are there any themes or thoughts you have for people who are thinking of relocating to an area like this?

Aris Papadopolous: 4:09

Yeah, this is not a place to come and to live. Okay, visiting is one thing, taking a vacation is one thing, but if you want to take your life savings let's say after you've worked for many years and pluck it into a vulnerable location, and especially a house that's vulnerable because it was built, let's say, in the 60s or 70s, as a lot of these houses are, you're doing yourself and your family a big disfavor. I mean don't do it. Some of the people we talked to said don't do it.

George Siegal: 4:38

Yeah, the people that are victims certainly say that, but then you see so many people rebuilding no-transcript. What was insanity was we heard about in Sanibel? Some people with ground level units were just fixing them and still planning to live in them.

Aris Papadopolous: 4:54

There always be those kind of people and you know, as I said, the next event may come in a year, may come next year, we don't know.

George Siegal: 5:04

And if you had to give people advice, so okay, so you're not living here even the thought process you should have when you move into a house what should you be thinking about?

Aris Papadopolous: 5:14

Yeah, the first thing you should know is the location. What are the risks for that location? And when you talk about, let's say, most of the coastline here, we've got three major hazard categories We've got the wind, we've got the water and we've got fire. To always be concerned of. Fire is everywhere. We don't have the seismic issues that they have, let's say, in the West Coast when it comes to water. Know the elevation of the location that you're planning, the neighborhood and the location that you're looking at, and I like to tell people, anything less than 15 feet is risky.

George Siegal: 5:48

You're making me feel real good being a 10 feet.

Aris Papadopolous: 5:52

Anything less than 15 feet is risky. You know. 15 to let's say 25 is kind of in the middle. You're okay, at least maybe for the next 50 years, let's say until sea level changes.

George Siegal: 6:04

Okay, but for people who don't know Florida, what you're basically saying is almost any place near the water, you happen to live in a unique spot where you have elevation, naturally, but if you were to talk about Tampa, if you were to talk about Naples or Clearwater, st Pete, none of those areas are that high.

Aris Papadopolous: 6:24

These are all sandbars. These are sandbars that nature created. So we've settled on the sandbars. You know and we know what happens to sandbars they move with time.

George Siegal: 6:34

But in most of those situations it's not realistic to be 15 feet up, so you're just assuming that that's not going to work out for you.

Aris Papadopolous: 6:42

Well, we saw some houses that are pretty elevated. Some are one story, some are two stories elevated. That's the future. If you want to be here, you've got to be in an elevated house.

George Siegal: 6:53

But 15 feet would be tough to do. It is that would seem like it would be expensive. We saw an interesting house yesterday, made of polymer. What did you think of that construction?

Aris Papadopolous: 7:03

Yeah, I'd like to see this kind of innovation in the building industry and, of course, the building industry is a conservative one where people want to see how any material, any type of construction, behaves over decades, not just over a test period or two couple years. But I like what I saw. I mean essentially it's the material that we build boats with that reinforce the kind of fiberglass, fiber boards, and I like the ease of construction. So I think it's something worthwhile to try out, maybe not on a massive scale until a decade or so goes by, but it's one of the options. Definitely better option than wood is down here, because it's termite free, it's fire resistant, but the rating they tested to was 290 miles an hour.

Aris Papadopolous: 8:02

I mean that's a category six that existed, type storm. So I think it's one of the options that definitely need to be put on the table.

George Siegal: 8:14

So we go from that extreme where you see a house made of polymer that they're building and then, right next to the hotel that I was staying at, they're building an entire huge apartment complex out of wood, and that's the ground floor to the third floor. What are your thoughts about that?

Aris Papadopolous: 8:30

Yeah, I'm very surprised that this county, Lee County, gave a permit for that kind of construction, especially after what they saw in Hurricane Ian. I'm going to dig a little deeper to find out what's behind this, but to me that's inadmissible.

George Siegal: 8:48

Yeah, I don't know how somebody could move in there with any kind of comfort. You have an entire apartment complex that you assume. If there's a storm, hundreds of people in that complex need to evacuate.

Aris Papadopolous: 8:58

You would not want to be riding it out in that kind of structure, I mean we know that even with straps, even with metal reinforcement to kind of hold the wood together, any building built with two by fours can only max out at, say, 135 mile an hour wind speeds, and we need to be building things here to 165 mile an hour. So I don't know how they got permitted, but we're going to find out.

George Siegal: 9:28

And then? So how would you carry that forward to? I look at a lot of the houses around where I live in Tampa, where they're building some over by the water. That are six, seven million dollar houses and they put concrete on the first floor. That's elevated, but the second floor is made of wood.

Aris Papadopolous: 9:46

So if a cat, a four storm, comes by, that second floor is gone and you might as well have wasted anything that's on the first floor. So you haven't done anything to protect the house. So it's a total loss From a destruction perspective. They've exposed themselves to anything above. Let's say a cat too. They're gone.

George Siegal: 10:07

Well, we interviewed a woman this morning who lost her duplex that she had here. We interviewed her on a completely empty lot. Her life is completely upended and changed and she really directly said if she had it to do over she would not live here and she would not move back. Is that the mentality we need to adopt? Are we just making a mistake, trying to live in paradise?

Aris Papadopolous: 10:31

Well, paradise is always going to attract people and what we know is that you've got to be more diligent to live in this kind of risky place, because you've got to know this paradise, because it's pretty, it's close to the water, it's got a lot of natural beauty. But nature also has a dark side, and that dark side is the destructive power of the force of wind and water, and unless we respect that, we're going to see disasters over and over and over again until everything becomes uninsurable here, and the only way you can live here is if you're super rich and you're self-insured.

George Siegal: 11:14

Which is probably what's going to happen, is interesting with all these empty lots here. This woman, trixie, was telling us that people from out of state, a lot of families that have a second house, a main house somewhere else, like the idea of living in Florida, but they're not here all the time so they at least have another option to go on with their lives. If this is your primary residence and something happens, you're screwed.

Aris Papadopolous: 11:38

Yeah, definitely. If you've got the money, if you've got a second residence, if you can afford to insure yourself because you could rebuild with your whatever investment money you have, yeah, this is a nice place to enjoy. But if you don't, I'd say come and visit, Come spend a week here and then go back home to your safety.

George Siegal: 11:58

Well, let's talk about Build to Last, buy or Beware, because that's why we're here, and our film that we've teamed up on, hopefully, is going to be a wake-up call for people, first of all, to have a much better understanding of what you're living in. Well, we find anybody we talk to. We talk to a family that lived in Babcock Ranch that they didn't know what they were buying into. Do you think we're gonna be able to wake people up?

Aris Papadopolous: 12:22

It's gonna take time and a lot of education, but we gotta do it. We gotta do it at every level. We gotta do it at the adult level, but we also gotta do it at the level of our children. How are we gonna educate the future buyers, the future homeowners? And that's gotta start in school. So we gotta get this message.

George Siegal: 12:42

Do they teach much resilience in school? Do you think that's being offered much?

Aris Papadopolous: 12:44

I don't think they teach very much. No, they probably teach like evacuation how do we evacuate from the school? They're teaching a lot of things about conservation, which is great. I mean, that's kind of picked up over the last 20 years or so. I remember my own daughters checking on me when they were in their elementary school on whether I was doing the proper recycling. They had been taught in school what needed to be done and they were inspecting me the parent, okay. And I said, well, if they're already sensitive to that, this is not just a fad, this is a social movement. We've gotta create a parallel social movement for resilience.

George Siegal: 13:27

I would argue. A lot of the people that are environmentalists, though, might not know much more about their house than the rest of us. They just know how to throw out what they're done using. To me, it's more of a complete rethinking, because we've even talked about the things that I do wrong and I know better because I'm doing this as a primary means of what I do. So if the people it's like a doctor who smokes, it's like you know they, they should know better, but we just have this mentality that it's not going to happen.

Aris Papadopolous: 14:00

Habits are hard to change. You know habits are very hard to change and if you've gone through a long period, let's say where nothing Negative has happened, you assume nothing negative will happen going forward. You know it's human nature we judge the future based on the past. But if you take a bigger perspective of you know life and earth and you know the Environment, you see how much change has occurred over Decades. You see that things are not constant. You know the hazards. You know have been strong and have destroyed and changed. You know the coastlines and the landscape of. You know continuously.

George Siegal: 14:41

Almost every official I've ever interviewed always says hopefully this will serve as a wake-up call. Think, if we're not awake now, what's going to be the wake-up call? I mean, this area had it. Yeah, they're just rebuilding. They didn't raise the code. Did they raise the code to 165? Or they as high as South Florida?

Aris Papadopolous: 15:01

They. That's something I need to check, because sunny, sunny Bell Island, the this, the town, let's say Told us that they had unilaterally raised the code to 165 above Lee County.

George Siegal: 15:14

I'd like to go back and check a little deeper into what Lee County is doing and even if they did okay and let's assume we'll give them a minute for the doubt it because in Mexico Beach they did not. They only went up to 140 miles an hour. That's insane to me. They had their reasons for it. When you make a rule like a 165, are they going to let people Slide on that if they have money and are coming into the area? Are you going to turn down revenue over principle and safety?

Aris Papadopolous: 15:43

That's a question we're asking, you know, because a lot of development is encouraged, whether it's on vulnerable property or not, because Communities want that extra revenue. They want, you know, to pay more to their employees, they want to provide more services to their constituents. So all this drives development, maybe to an extreme.

George Siegal: 16:07

Yeah, I think Money may talk for rebuilding a community Quicker, but it also talks for who you let come in and do things in your community. Because you don't have the tax money from people, you got nothing exactly, yeah.

Aris Papadopolous: 16:21

But those same officials don't realize how expensive it is Later to fix the things that were done in a vulnerable manner, how expensive it is to rebuild, and that's what they're not considering when they're inviting and approving Development.

George Siegal: 16:38

That probably should not happen you know, a great example for not thinking for the future is a lot of communities when it's new and they have a freeway system there, and then once everything expands and grows out from the center of the town, they go we need to upgrade this, and they want to put in all those clover leaves and all the different exits and everything, because they didn't plan for it when they did it the first time. So when you first built that road, if you had done it the right way, it would cost a fraction of what it takes to then disrupt everybody's lives and fix a problem. Why don't we apply that to more things in the construction industry? Why aren't we thinking to the future?

Aris Papadopolous: 17:14

Well, because a lot of the building is still speculative in nature. In other words, there's a lot of development where the developer, let's say, only has like a three-year time frame. So the thinking is, how am I going to keep my costs down, how am I gonna, you know, complete this quickly and how I'm gonna have the features that are gonna, like the honey, attracting the bees, you know, or the flies, you know, will attract those buyers to come in. Look at the pretty you know cosmetics of whatever I've built by. And then, basically, I'll dissolve my special purpose development Company and I'll move on. You know, after the warranty period, my hands are clean, you know who's left to pay the bill.

Aris Papadopolous: 17:58

Well, the residents and the community, they're left to pay the bill. And all of us, you know who are paying into state, state taxes and national taxes. You know, all of us are paying for this.

George Siegal: 18:10

It would be so much easier if people were just forward thinking. And in the construction industry, what amazes me is the amount of people that say well, it's built to code. That's not really a great term to have to hear, yeah it's better than not built to code.

Aris Papadopolous: 18:24

Yeah, Definitely better than not built to code. But most people have never been told that code is only set at a level to get you out. It's not set a level to protect whatever you're getting out of. Yeah, so if you've put your you know money into a house and have put you know all your you know furnishings and electronics and everything we added the house you know, forget about the code protecting any of that you know. That's why they say, oh well, that's why you buy insurance. Okay, you buy insurance, but then you have your deductible, you have your cap, you have to wait until insurance pays you and there are things you can ever replace. So insurance is not a reason for us to be vulnerable and what a lot of people are telling us.

George Siegal: 19:10

Insurance may be something that you Feel you have, but it's not always easy to get them to pay you. Their goal Is not to pay you in many instances and to make it as long and drawn out as they possibly can.

Aris Papadopolous: 19:22

We're gonna be talking about that in the film too.

George Siegal: 19:25

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff we're gonna be talking about. We'll keep you updated on the progress of built to last buyer. Beware, we're going to Tampa next and we're gonna be up in the Panhandle of Florida. We're working on a lot of big things.

George Siegal: 19:35

I'm excited about where this is going to go Exactly. Yeah, thank you for joining me today. If you have a story about Construction or things that have happened to you in your house, good or bad, I would love to hear from you. Fill out the contact form in the show notes and, and let me hear about it, you might be a guest on an upcoming episode. Thank you again for listening. See you next time.