THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, December 3, 1994 TAG: 9412030330
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY MARYANN HAGGERTY, THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: KITTY HAWK LENGTH: Long : 112 lines
Real estate is different here. For one thing, it moves.
Look at one short stretch of beach in Kitty Hawk. Unlike much of the rest of North Carolina's Outer Banks, it has no dunes to absorb the steady pounding of the waves. Even on a calm day the surf curls up around the pilings that hold the old wooden houses above the water. One cottage - named Drift Away - stands with a cockeyed deck. Its floor is broken at an angle, as if its spine had been cracked. Nearby are rubble-strewn empty lots, their boundaries marked with little stakes, where not long ago other houses stood.
People around the country watched over and over as TV news broadcasts last month replayed the collapse of those houses in the winds of Hurricane Gordon. To outsiders, it may have looked like a disaster, a homeowners' nightmare.
But listen to Marty Hampton, code-enforcement officer for the town of Kitty Hawk. ``Normally, when a house falls down . . . it washes it out and it lands in Kill Devil Hills,'' the next town south. ``This time, the waves came straight in, picked them up and put them on the road.''
Normally?
To those who live on these skinny little islands, that's just the way things are. The sea erodes the beach at about four feet a year. Houses that are too close to the water are in danger. Bad weather is inevitable and unstoppable - and so is the human desire to live by the beach.
The conflict between those two forces shapes how people think about houses, whether they own or are considering buying. The Outer Banks, a string of barrier islands along the North Carolina coast, are becoming increasingly popular as a vacation destination and second-home site.
Real-estate agents in Kitty Hawk complain that television film like that of Hurricane Gordon is sensationalized. They say it makes the whole area look endangered when a storm threatens only a few houses already perilously close to falling in. But they also say that Gordon will have no effect on the home-sales market.
``Most buyers are coming because they've been here for years,'' Barbara Mallory of Hudgins Real Estate said. After many a summer of renting, vacationers decide to become owners.
``I don't think I remember ever having a rental owner who wanted to sell a house because we had a storm,'' Mallory said. ``They were aware when they bought property down here.''
Mallory said, ``Most buyers, if they're looking at oceanfront or oceanside property, it's going to be one of the first questions they ask. We'll go into ocean overwash, frontal dunes, all that. Their primary concern is, `What's the insurance?' ''
That explanation is full of terms that don't show up in mainland real estate: ``Oceanfront'' means directly facing the water; ``oceanside'' means there are houses but not main roads between the house and the sea. ``Ocean overwash'' is when the water covers the land; and ``frontal dunes'' are the low, sandy hills that protect homes from the ocean.
And ``insurance'' - that's what makes much of the real-estate business possible on the beach.
Owners of beach homes buy fire insurance directly from insurance companies and wind insurance through a pool of companies. They get flood insurance - the most controversial - through a federally backed program.
That program aims to reduce government disaster aid by requiring as many people as possible in flood-prone areas to buy insurance. Many conservationists argue that the program encourages people to own houses in dangerous areas. This year, Congress changed the flood-insurance program to toughen it somewhat and put more emphasis on mitigating the damage from floods by planning ahead.
But you don't have to be the kind of conservationist who lobbies on Capitol Hill to see the effect the insurance program has in some areas. ``Nobody's going to take a house built in the '50s that's livable, buy another lot, get a (new) septic tank (and move the house away from the beach) if they can just sit there and use it until it falls in and get paid,'' said Chet Forrester, Kitty Hawk's building inspector.
Forrester and Hampton, along with other public-safety officials, watched the night Gordon took four houses and covered stretches of the beach road with sand. That was the worst damage in North Carolina from the storm, which earlier killed at least 850 people in Cuba and Haiti.
Nobody tried to save the Kitty Hawk houses. That's another way real estate is different on an island. It's North Carolina policy to allow nature to destroy private property in the interest of preserving a greater good - the beaches and the islands themselves. It's against the law to construct hard barriers, such as sea walls, to preserve homes. And it's against the law to rebuild except under the restrictions of a 20-year-old law called the Coastal Area Management Act.
Much of the philosophy behind the law is shaped by the work of Orrin Pilkey, a professor of geology at Duke University who for decades has studied the behavior of barrier islands. In their natural state, he says, islands move slowly toward the mainland as sand washes across them from ocean to sound. Dunes keep beaches stable. And development disrupts the whole system, hastening inevitable erosion.
Pilkey is accustomed to being unpopular with property owners who believe they should be able to preserve their homes without interference. And he's outspoken in what he thinks about building on islands.
``I think it is stupid to buy property on a barrier island, period,'' Pilkey said. ``However, if you are dumb enough to buy property on a barrier island, there are things you can do to make a relatively wise investment. The first thing is you don't want to buy beachfront property. . . . If you're stupid enough to buy on a barrier island, you want property back from the beach, you want property at a high elevation, and you want some woods. There is still property like that on the Outer Banks.'' ILLUSTRATION: DREW C. WILSON
Staff file photo
This Kitty Hawk house was demolished by Hurricane Gordon this fall.
Bad Outer Banks weather is inevitable and unstoppable - but so is
the human desire to live by the beach, it seems.
KEYWORDS: HOME SALES HURRICANE GORDON by CNB