This story is part of Betting the House, a pop-up climate newsroom bringing together independent journalists to cover climate and housing. Learn more, and read other stories from the project here.The dock of a waterfront home in Miami Beach, looking over the Biscayne Bay.I am not meant to be in Miami in August. The thick air, the searing cement, the tepid ocean—it’s all teaching me what scientists mean when they say some places are becoming too hot for the human body to survive. Is Miami technically one of those places? No. But my dripping knee pits don’t care about technicalities. I’m miserable here. I want to leave.Unfortunately, I have traveled to Miami with exactly one job: to pretend this is where I want to live forever.I’m repeating an experiment the writer Sarah Miller performed seven years ago. In 2019, she posed as a prospective homebuyer and toured several properties in Miami Beach’s most climate-threatened areas, asking realtors whether each place might one day flood, or worse, be swallowed by the rising sea.The resulting story, published by Popula, is one of my all-time favorite pieces of climate writing. Titled ‘Heaven or High Water,’ it shines absurd light on what it’s like to be an average buyer considering investing in deeply precarious real estate. As Miller toured high-risk properties, realtors confidently assured her that pumps and raised roads had ‘fixed’ the flooding; that Miami’s millionaires and billionaires wouldn’t allow large-scale climate damage to occur; and that in spite of all scientific projections, ‘nothing is going to happen.’Afterwards, Miller checked those assurances with actual scientists. You can imagine what they had to say.I have no intentions to match Miller’s prose (I could not if I tried). But I did want to rerun the experiment. Because even though projections have remained roughly the same (scientists still expect 10 to 17 inches of sea level rise above 2000 levels by 2040, and 21 to 54 inches by 2070), Miami’s climate reality has gotten darker over the last seven years. Since 2019, the ocean surrounding Miami has risen roughly another inch. Seawater is also rising through Miami’s porous limestone bedrock, pushing it ever-closer to the foundations of coastal buildings. In 2021, the 12-story beachfront condominium suddenly collapsed, killing 98 people; a University of Florida research center cited ‘severe seawater penetration’ as a contributing factor to the building’s deterioration. In 2024, a University of Miami study found that dozens of luxury beachfront condos and hotels in and around Miami Beach are sinking into the ground at ‘unexpected’ rates—a sign that climate change ‘is accelerating the erosion of the limestone on which South Florida is built,’ experts said.Source: Miami HeraldMajor players are also ringing louder alarm bells than they were in 2019. In 2024, real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield ranked Miami as the most climate-threatened city in the Americas. A year later, Realtor.com found that nearly $307 billion worth of homes in the Miami area faced severe or extreme flood risk—more than any other major U.S. housing market.Yet people just keep buying and buying. In July alone, 394 homes in Miami-Dade County sold for at least $1 million—15 percent more than a year earlier, according to the local Realtors association. Buyers also snapped up 1,026 existing condos that month, an 11.4 percent increase.So what’s happening? Are Miami buyers these days simply deciding they can afford to take on the risk of the ever-rising sea?Or could it be that buyers are still being told there isn’t much risk to take?HEATED is an entirely reader-supported publication dedicated to power-focused climate stories. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Absolutely, 100 percent, no puddles in Brickell KeyMy first stop today is a high-rise condo on Brickell Key, a manmade island in Biscayne Bay that holds some of the city’s tallest buildings.The realtor at the open house is young, debonair, and passionate about the island. Looking around, I can understand why: There’s a waterfront walking path, landscaped grounds, and a guarded entrance. The island is technically public, but has the feel of a gated community.And Brickell Key also has another unique quality, the realtor tells me: Unlike the rest of Miami, it does not flood. ‘Because this is a manmade island, they were able to install drainage,’ he says.’That’s awesome,’ I reply.Sure enough, as we walk on the balcony, I spy what looks like a giant shower drain in the middle of a courtyard. Since it’s been raining all day, the realtor is eager to show me how it’s working. ‘If you look around, you’ll see there are no puddles anywhere,’ he says. I do see some puddles, but I am not trying to argue. He points to the recreation area. ‘This is the grass tennis court, and that’s not even flooding,’ he says.I see several shallow puddles stretching across the playing surface. I hesitate, but I have to say it. ‘I mean… it is kind of flooding.’ A tennis court that is not flooding.’Yeah,’ he admits. ‘But it’s been raining since five o’clock in the morning. I’ll take that.’The puddles are truly not a big deal. I’m more concerned by how briefly I considered agreeing that they didn’t exist.More serious, it seemed, was the matter of the island’s seawall. The realtor tells me owners in this building have recently been assessed $6,000 apiece toward the construction of a new one to replace the existing one built in 1973. I ask: Is that because sea level rise is an issue?No, he replies. The only reason the seawall is needed is because a new Mandarin Oriental development is being built on the other side of the island, and it needed a new seawall to get approval.’We’re fine,’ he says. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the island. They did tests.’Tests or none, 92.9 percent of properties in Brickell Key face ‘extreme risk of flooding’ over the next 30 years, according to First Street, a climate risk data firm. The island’s manmade nature doesn’t protect it from that risk, said Kristina Hill, a professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning at UC Berkeley who also helped fact-check Miller’s 2019 story. ‘Artificial islands also have groundwater that moves upwards,’ Hill said, explaining that water doesn’t have to come over a seawall to flood the island. Manmade or not, the island is still built on porous limestone, meaning it can flood from underneath. ‘They can build whatever seawalls they want, and they can’t stop the groundwater from flooding behind it,’ she said.But according to the realtor, no one here in Brickell Key is really worried about that, or about climate change is general.’This building has been here since the 90s,’ he says. ‘Nothing has happened. It’s been the same since forever.’Subscribe now’A glass half-full kind of guy’This was a major theme of my weekend: The idea that, because nothing bad has happened before, nothing bad will happen in the future. The most surreal example came at a bayfront high-rise in Sunset Harbour, the same flood-prone neighborhood where Miller’s first agent had assured her the flooding was ‘fixed.’ By this point, I had started telling realtors I was shopping for my parents instead of myself. So when the agent told me the condo’s windows had no hurricane protection—no shutters, no impact glass—I imagined putting my parents in it. Expressing concern did not require much acting.’What would they do if there were a storm?’ I asked.’It hasn’t been an issue, and I don’t anticipate it to be an issue,’ the realtor said. He noted the last time a high-category storm hit Miami was Hurricane Andrew in 1992, a few years before the building went up. ‘But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen again, right?’ I ask. ‘I’m a glass half full kind of guy,’ he replied. ‘Hasn’t happened yet, so you’ll be ok.’‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Totally.’ Conversations like this happened at nearly every property I visited, mainly regarding flooding. ‘The previous tenants have been here three years, and nothing has happened.’ Ok. ‘The building went up in 2010, and nothing has happened.’ Great.When I told this to Hill, she was not surprised.’They could have said that about Surfside the year before it collapsed,’ she said. Surviving up to now is not evidence that a property is prepared for what comes next, she said—especially when the conditions around it are changing.But it’s very hard to talk honestly about how the risk is changing when you won’t acknowledge the risk that already exists. The ‘safe zone’: It’s everywhere!In Miller’s 2019 story, a major theme was how multiple realtors and residents told her that flooding had been fixed. But on my tour, the area’s multi-hundred-million-dollar resilience strategy almost never came up. Most just said flooding was never a problem in the first place. Take the ground-floor condo I visited in the Bay Harbor Islands. ‘This is not a flood zone area,’ the realtor said. ‘You don’t have to worry about it.’ Or the beachfront high-rise in South Beach. I mentioned that being so close to a rising ocean made me nervous. But the realtor said only the street would ever flood. ‘It won’t get into the building,’ she said.At a gorgeous single-family home in La Gorce, the agent told me flooding was only a problem in other neighborhoods. The grass might get some puddles during storms, but no more. ‘It doesn’t really get any flooding at all,’ he said. ‘You’re kind of in the safe zone.’The safe zone, it seemed, was whichever property I happened to be standing in. But mind you: I chose each of these properties because they were all in high-risk flood zones. Each of the nine properties I toured were in FEMA Zone AE—a Special Flood Hazard Area with at least a one-in-four chance of flooding over the course of a 30-year mortgage. And even that designation may understate the danger. FEMA’s flood maps largely reflect the risk that exists today, not how much worse flooding could get as seas rise and rainstorms grow heavier. First Street, whose model does account for climate change, rated all of these properties at either ‘severe’ or ‘extreme’ flood risk over the next 30 years.I understand that a realtor’s job is to sell a property, not compile a list of reasons I shouldn’t buy it. And I don’t begrudge anyone for leading with the ample closet space instead of the risk of disaster. But none of this stuff is going to stay a secret. These problems would likely surface in inspection and condo records, or become readily apparent from insurance quotes or a basic Google search or even Zillow’s new AI agent (which answers fairly honestly about climate risk, it seems).So while I’m there, why not simply acknowledge the risk when I ask—and try to sell it in spite of that?Subscribe now’A game of hot potato’Perhaps I’m truly naive, but I didn’t assume most of the agents were straight-up lying to me. At one property, a twin home in Biscayne Point, I asked about the risk of sunny-day flooding—the increasingly common phenomenon where high tides cause groundwater flooding with or without rain. The agent replied: ‘What’s sunny day flooding?’ It genuinely seemed like the first time she was hearing about it.But the way Hill sees it, sellers and agents are incentivized not to know about climate risk or communicate it. Everyone involved only needs the property to look safe long enough to pass it along: A developer needs to insure a project long enough to finish and sell it. An agent needs to find a buyer and close the deal. The long-term risk belongs to whoever ends up holding the deed.’It’s like a game of hot potato,’ Hill said. ‘They’re just trying to pass these units on and not get stuck with them.’This felt particularly true at a condo I looked at in South Pointe, where the outside windows were surrounded by black gunk. ‘Is this mold?’ I asked. The agent shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s just dirt.’When I showed Hill a photo, she laughed out loud. ‘That looks like mold to me!’ she said. ‘That’s ridiculous.’Hill said mold problems could become harder to manage in South Florida as rising groundwater increases moisture inside buildings. ‘Nobody wants to talk about it because you can’t sell a house that has mold,’ she said.Hill was willing to speak bluntly and on the record. But not every scientist I contacted felt able to do that. I called one South Florida scientist who studies sea level rise to fact-check some of the agents’ comments, but before we got very far, he asked not to be named. He explained that his current research depends on cooperation from county and municipal governments, which means he has to ‘tread very carefully’ when speaking about real estate development in the area. That made sense to Hill. ‘If we get in the away of developers, their attorneys can go after us through our universities,’ she said. ‘It’s not uncommon.’ For the most part, she said, silence about climate risk in housing is incentivized. Because if climate risk tanks a property’s value, she said, ‘everyone’s going to be pressuring everyone else not to talk about it.’Are you rich enough to afford honesty?There was, however, one corner of Miami’s real estate market where people seemed open to talking about climate risk: The corner serving the ultra-rich.Until the last day of my trip, I had limited myself to properties in the $300,000-to-$800,000 range. But when I asked about flooding, more than one agent pointed to continued investment by multimillionaires and billionaires as evidence that there was nothing to fear.’People are saying that in 20 years, everything here is going to be covered with water,’ an agent told me at a single-family home across from Biscayne Bay. ‘But if this is not going to be here in 20 years, why are people spending so much money?’Why indeed? So I went to an open house for an eight-figure waterfront home on a manmade island in Miami Beach to find out. Are they, too, being told not to fear?At least at this property, the answer was no. As I walked out onto the opulent, waterfront pool deck—acting as if this were something totally normal to me—I asked about the threat of the rising sea. ‘It’s definitely a problem,’ the agent said.I blinked. ‘Dang,’ I said. ‘Then how do you protect a place like this?’‘Really expensive insurance,’ he replied. ‘That’s the answer.’It sounded almost comically blunt. But yes: That’s the answer. And if I wanted to protect the house further, he said it could be an option to lift it further off the ground. He said a colleague of his was preparing to do the same, raising his nearby eight-figure home about 14 feet. I asked how much that would cost. Around $1 million, he said.’Not as much as I thought,’ I replied. (What am I even saying?)In addition, the agent said, raising the house could increase its value. It could create what he called an ‘understory’: a tall, ground-level space beneath the official living area. Technically, he said, you’re not legally allowed to air condition or finish the understory. But after it passes inspection, he said, owners sometimes convert that space into gyms, theaters, saunas, or car collections—adding hundreds or thousands of square feet. On one nearby property, he estimated, the additional space had added roughly $7 million in value.That space, the agent acknowledged, would be vulnerable to flooding and could not be insured. That was the gamble.But at this level of wealth, Hill said, a gamble would not be the end of the world. ‘They’re in a high-stakes casino environment,’ she said. ‘They can afford the loss.’Subscribe nowHas anything changed in seven years?The luxury house helped me put what I’d seen all weekend into context. At the very top of the market, climate risk could be acknowledged because the buyer presumably had enough money to insure against it, adapt to it, or simply lose the bet.Everywhere else, the risk kept getting moved just out of frame. Hill suggested one reason why: ‘It’s the people who are scraping money together to buy a condo who are at risk and don’t have the resources for either maintenance or insurance.’For those buyers, climate risk is not another expense to price into the deal. It could make the entire purchase untenable. And when acknowledging a problem might kill a sale, everyone involved has an incentive not to look too closely at it.Before coming to Miami, I wondered whether seven years had changed the way America’s most threatened real estate market talked about climate risk. After nine open houses, the answer seemed to be: not really. If anything, the conversation had become less concrete. I’m not sure what, if anything, will make the market talk honestly. Maybe seven more years of rising seas, deteriorating buildings, and non-flooded tennis courts will finally change the conversation. Or maybe, as long as there is waterfront left to sell, the market will keep finding ways to sell the gamble, without ever calling it one.Either way, I’ll be somewhere cooler. At least I hope. Subscribe nowThis story is part of Betting the House, a pop-up climate newsroom comprised of independent journalists—each exploring, though their own lens, why people keep buying, selling, and protecting homes in climate-threatened areas. The project spans Florida, Louisiana, Hawaiʻi, North Carolina, and Connecticut. Read and watch the rest of the series below.Buying on the Brink: As owners pour millions into Hawai’i’s crumbling coastal estates, private property rights are clashing with public beach survival. By Rachel Ramirez of The Confluence.Houses Built on Sand: Why coastal homeowners in North Carolina and Connecticut are spending big on small moves. By Ben Tracy of Climate Central.Too Attached to Leave: In New Orleans, who decides which communities we protect? And who gets left behind? By Chase Cain of Chase What Matters.