Domonique Tomlinson didn’t know much about the Shore Acres neighborhood of St. Petersburg, Florida, when she bought a house here four years ago, but she learned quickly about the repeated flooding and rising costs. Just a few weeks after she moved into her single-story teal home, a high tide overwhelmed her street’s drainage system and pushed water into her house.

The same thing happened again during Hurricane Idalia in 2023; she lost furniture and belongings worth thousands of dollars. Then there was just the everyday flooding to contend with. It happened more times than she could count, when she had to wade through calf-high water on her street to get to her teaching job, wiping herself with Lysol when she got to work.

Tomlinson and her husband were racing to install plywood flood panels and sandbags on Wednesday as Shore Acres prepared for a historic storm surge from Category 4 Hurricane Helene. As she loaded a Peloton into her car, she said she was fed up with repeated flooding and rising costs.

The following night, Helene delivered the largest storm surge on record to Shore Acres, pushing water not only into Tomlinson’s house, but into the houses of neighbors who had never flooded. Waiting out the storm on higher ground in downtown St. Petersburg, she kept up with reports from her neighbors who had stayed behind: The entire streetscape vanished as saltwater seeped in through sandbags and flood panels, filling up kitchens and living rooms.

“It’s just a really sad situation,” she told Grist. “We won’t rebuild, it’s not worth it.”

Even before Helene, Shore Acres looked like a casualty of sea level rise and faulty development. The waterfront neighborhood had begun to flood multiple times a month, even when it wasn’t raining, and residents were paying some of the highest flood insurance rates in the country, with the median annual premium in the neighborhood set to reach around $5,000. The city was racing to mitigate the flooding, but almost every street in the neighborhood had at least one “For Sale” or “For Rent” sign on it.

Read the full article about repeated flooding in Florida by Jake Bittle at Mother Jones.