![]() Wright and other community leaders say if premiums are allowed to surge unabated, housing markets could crater and take down local economies with them. ![]() That stabilization is sure to include increasing premiums for property owners in flood zones across the country, but how much and how fast they’ll rise is an open question. The NFIP will come up for reauthorization on December 8, by which time its long-term fiscal outlook needs to be stabilized. Unless Congress acts, that moment is imminent. “We’ve tried to let people know about what’s going on, but we haven’t reached that critical moment.” Flood insurance is one of those bills you pay once a year and try to forget about. The following year, when premiums went up yet again, Wright got a few phone calls from property owners wanting to know what was going on, but the warning signs still weren’t registering. And I think the first year, folks probably opened their bill and were like, ‘Oh, it went up a couple hundred bucks.’ My sense is they didn’t really think about it.” We’re in our second year of those increases. Those are now increasing 25 percent per year. That means every downtown building with a mortgage is insured by the NFIP. “Our entire historic downtown is located within the floodplain,” says Wright. “You work it, you commit to it, you have to believe in it.”īeneath these efforts, however, runs a hairline crack that could crumble the city’s nascent revival. “The main street approach is a proven method,” says Wright. These green shoots signal hope in a downtown pockmarked with vacant storefronts. The old train depot has been reborn as a stylish medical marijuana dispensary, and at Lisa’s Legit Burritos I was served a lunch worthy of the restaurant’s name. On Water Street, downtown’s central drag, a hip craft brewery glows from within, lit by Brooklyn-approved Edison bulbs. “In order to thrive you need talented people who are attracted to a sense of place.” Gardiner’s low cost of living, its walkable downtown and its gritty authenticity form the core of this attraction.Īlready, you can see the strategy working. ![]() “We’ve focused on being a welcoming community as people get priced out of the Portland market and become more mobile,” says Wright, a Virginian transplant with an untamable orange beard. Like former manufacturing cities throughout the Northeast, Gardiner has staked its future on reinventing itself as a magnet for families, digital nomads and entrepreneurs. But in working-class cities like Gardiner, they could stall a fledgling economic recovery. For Miami McMansion owners with seven-figure stock portfolios, those rising premiums may be a nuisance. Virtually all of these policies are issued through the government’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), a deeply indebted entity that’s raising premiums to get itself out of the red. By law, every property in America that falls within FEMA’s Special Flood Hazard Areas must hold a flood insurance policy until its mortgage is fully paid off. It’s the city’s flood insurance premiums, the steady rise of which presents a far bigger threat to Gardiner’s long-term health. When it comes to flooding, the river isn’t what worries Wright. The last time it flooded the city was in 1987. ![]() When he finally arrived, he found the Kennebec River, visible through his second-story window, still securely within its banks. It took Patrick Wright, executive director of Gardiner Main Street, the nationally-accredited Main Street America program that works closely with the city of Gardiner, multiple attempts to navigate a route to his office that morning. Gardiner, it said, had been squarely in the path of the storm. The whole way, the radio crackled with dire updates. The next day, downed trees and power lines turned my drive to Gardiner, a small city in the Kennebec Valley, into a winding maze of endless detours. On October 29, a historic storm laid waste to Central Maine with drenching sheets of rain and wind gusts up to 70 miles per hour. Become a free or sustaining member to read unlimited articles, webinars and ebooks. This is your first of three free stories this month. ![]()
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