Taxpayers pay for fools, drunks, and people who buy vacation homes on barrier islands

Assumption of risk? That’s for chumps.

Two houses that risk being washed into the sea along the Outer Banks of North Carolina are snapped up by National Parks Service for $700,000 - and both will be torn down

The East Beacon Road homes in Rodanthe, North Carolina, along the Outer Banks were in danger of collapsing due to beach erosion. 

For $700,000, the feds bought the homes with immediate intentions of tearing them down and turning the land into public beach access. 

'The four-bedroom and six-bedroom homes have stood on  wooden stilts since the 1980s but plans to demolish them come after five privately owned beach houses collapsed in Rodanthe since 2020. 

North Carolina’s Outer Banks, just like Long Island’s South Shore, are barrier islands, so they are constantly moving: eroding, growing, and disappearing entirely. If someone wants to buy a house on a barrier island, fine; but he shouldn’t be able to be bailed out by taxpayers when the inevitable happens. The house pictured below, for instance, was purchased for $380,000 in 2021, one year after two neighboring homes were washed out to sea. Now we’re paying him $471,000 to rescue him from his folly? Madness.

It’s not just rich vacationers in the south who are being held harmless for their reckless purchases of temporary beachfront; Long Island’s billionaire weekend Hamptons crowd is just as well treated by their friends in government. I recommend this article for further reading: Long Island’s Dynamic South Shore — A Primer on the Forces and Trends Shaping Our Coast.

It’s happened (many times) before and it will happen again.