The Brief

Richard Foreman's home is stranded in the middle of the beach.

The stairs were ripped away by waves years ago, so there's no way in or out anymore. The house is 20 feet into the air, on stilts that were designed to protect it from hurricane storm surge. But there haven't been any big storms recently, just the rising ocean eating away at the sand year after year.

Just six years ago, the house was still a popular vacation rental in Rodanthe, North Carolina. Like many beachfront houses, it had a nickname: Sea 'n Delight. Today, the name is gone, and the house is uninhabitable. At low tide, the Atlantic Ocean laps at what used to be the driveway. At high tide, the ocean runs beneath the entire house.

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Foreman knows it will collapse eventually. Four neighboring homes have fallen into the ocean in the last two years. And more than 100 homes on North Carolina's barrier islands are at risk from erosion and sea level rise in the next decade, according to the National Park Service, which manages the area as part of Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

At least half a dozen of those houses are in imminent danger. In June, a high tide coupled with large waves was enough to bring down another house.

Yet there is no plan to remove most of the threatened houses or to empty them of personal belongings, because of perverse incentives created by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Bill King, the president of the North Carolina Beach Buggy Association, has traveled to Washington, D.C., to push for federal rule changes that he thinks could save homes from collapsing in coastal North Carolina.

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FEMA provides most residential flood insurance in the United States. The agency will pay homeowners after a house collapses, but not before. That means owners stand to lose tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars by tearing down a doomed house before the ocean takes it.

"The homeowner is incentivized to wait for collapse and get a payout," says John Ryan-Henry, a policy analyst at the Coastal States Organization, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of coastal state governments, including those along the Great Lakes.

And when homes collapse, they pollute the water and leave wreckage on the shore.

"Unfortunately, there's a lot of debris that comes with these collapses," says Lisa Sharrard, a longtime flood insurance agent in North Carolina who previously served as the chair of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, which is the trade group representing state flood-policy officials. "It leaves a legacy of hazard on the beach. It's almost impossible to get everything."

The National Park Service says it collected more than 480 tons of home debris from the area in the last 18 months alone, some of which washed miles down the North Carolina coast.

As sea level rise accelerates erosion around the U.S., there is growing alarm among waterfront homeowners, local officials and even members of Congress. Here, a damaged porch hangs precariously over the sand on the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

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Foreman's stranded house hasn't been emptied out.

"It looked like we had just left for dinner. I mean, everything is still in there," says Foreman. The couches, the refrigerator, every steak knife and beach towel — it's all waiting to fall into the ocean.

"If they would settle with me for the insurance, I would have it torn down tomorrow," he says.

As sea level rise from climate change accelerates erosion around the country, there is growing alarm among waterfront homeowners, local officials and even members of Congress. More than 30 homes have fallen into the sea in coastal North Carolina alone since 2020. Neighborhoods in Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Illinois, Virginia and California are facing similar threats. Just last week, erosion exacerbated by a storm caused catastrophic damage to multiple homes in Southern California.

"People should not have to wait for their home to collapse into the water before they can get help," says Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine. "That is just not a smart way to deal with the reality of climate change."

FEMA says it cannot change the rules for threatened properties unless Congress amends the laws that govern the National Flood Insurance Program. Such a bill was introduced by a bipartisan group of lawmakers in 2025, but it is stalled in the House of Representatives.

FEMA did not respond to questions from NPR about the cost to taxpayers of letting homes collapse.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency provides most residential flood insurance in the United States. The agency will pay homeowners after a house collapses, but not before.

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Plenty of warning, but no good option

Erosion is an inescapable problem for waterfront communities. Waves remove sand and rock from some areas and deposit them in others.

Climate change is accelerating that natural erosion unevenly. Although global warming affects the entire planet, sea levels are rising more quickly in some regions because of ocean currents and the complex dynamics of melting glaciers and ice caps. Some of the fastest sea level rise in the world is occurring on the East Coast of the United States.

Coastal areas are constantly changing. Barrier islands, like the ones that form the Outer Banks of North Carolina, are particularly prone to erosion, as the ocean removes sand from some areas and deposits it in others. Even stable-seeming dunes can disappear as the ocean shapes the land.

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In North Carolina, where thousands of homes sit on narrow, sandy barrier islands, sea levels are rising faster than the global average, and the rate is accelerating.

Rising seas exacerbate the erosion that usually happens on barrier islands, says Reide Corbett, a climate scientist at East Carolina University. In the last six years, hundreds of feet of beach have disappeared in Dare County, N.C., the current epicenter of erosion-related home collapses in the United States.

"There is no way to maintain homes where they currently are," Corbett says. He has delivered the same message directly to county residents at multiple public meetings in recent years. "The only solution is to back off that front line."

Clarke Lattimore, 8, looks out the window of his family's beach house in Buxton, N.C., in May. His great-grandfather built the house behind two rows of dunes. Now, it is threatened by the ocean.

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But removing homes from the front line is expensive. Tearing down a house costs at least $30,000, according to local contractors, and the price tag is even higher if the house is very large or difficult to access. The other option is to move homes farther away from the water, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Most homeowners do not have that kind of money. Many of the at-risk properties in Dare County are vacation homes, and their owners rely on rental income to pay for the mortgage, taxes and insurance. As the ocean encroaches, many houses get damaged and become uninhabitable, saddling owners with high bills and no income at the very moment they need cash to prevent their homes from collapsing.

Michael McDaniel is in that situation with his house in Buxton, N.C., nicknamed the Sea Star. He purchased it for about $500,000 in 2011, when he retired from the Navy. He planned to eventually move there full time with his wife.

When he bought the house, about 250 feet of dune were between the front porch and the Atlantic. For years, the house seemed like a good investment. The property value rose and hit nearly $1 million just two years ago. But the beach eroded, and today the home is uninhabitable.

McDaniel says he can't afford to move the house, which would be his first choice, or to demolish it. The house has a flood insurance policy that will pay out $250,000 if it collapses, plus up to $100,000 for lost belongings.

"If it's teetering, you've got to sit and wait for it to fall in the ocean," he says.

Foreman, whose house is stranded in the middle of the Rodanthe beach, is in a similar bind.

Extra sand has bought extra time for the owners of homes damaged by waves in recent years in Dare County, but the long-term problem of beach erosion persists.

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"Environmentally, it would be far better if they would allow me to tear it down on a beautiful day where all the debris is in one spot," he says. "But by requiring the waiting game for it to fall, it's going to fall in a storm, and it's going to be scattered for miles."

Taxpayers are on the hook for increasingly expensive cleanups. Federal and county governments together estimate that they have spent more than half a million dollars cleaning up debris in coastal North Carolina since 2020. Those figures do not account for the economic costs of closed beaches and polluted ecosystems.

County officials say they are frustrated by the federal government's approach.

"If there are waves breaking under the house, that's clearly threatened," says Dare County Manager Robert Outten. "It's money they're going to spend either way. It's cheaper to tear it down."

Their frustration is even greater because they say the federal government created a solution to the problem nearly 40 years ago — and then killed it.

Homes in Buxton were originally built behind multiple rows of dunes. Today, those dunes are gone.

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The solution that Congress hated

In the mid-1980s, Congress stepped in to help homeowners with threatened homes.

The result was called the Upton-Jones Amendment to the National Flood Insurance Program. The law, named for lawmakers from the erosion hot spots of Michigan and North Carolina, allowed homeowners to access flood insurance payouts before a home fell, to pay for demolishing it or moving it.

The law took effect in 1988, and homeowners immediately started using it to get their houses out of harm's way, according to partial claims records obtained from FEMA through a public records request and analyzed by NPR. More than 400 homes in 27 states were demolished or moved under the policy.

People fish off the pier in Avon, North Carolina.

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But Congress was not happy with the results.

The goal was to avoid having houses fall into the water. But in a series of congressional hearings, experts told lawmakers that some property owners were purposely waiting to remove their houses.

"They have chosen to repair the building as it stands, get another season's rent and then look toward the possibility of demolition at a later date," explained Spencer Rogers, who managed Upton-Jones claims for North Carolina, at a June 1990 congressional hearing. "There is no particular incentive that I can see for any early action."

Lawmakers and FEMA officials expressed frustration that there was no penalty for such inaction. The longer the owner of a doomed home delayed, the more likely it was that the home would be damaged by waves or storms, leading to an expensive insurance claim. And if the house fell before the owner removed it, they could still collect their full flood insurance payout.

"People should not have to wait for their home to collapse into the water before they can get help," says Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine. Here, homes in Buxton stand over the waves in May.

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"Policyholder benefits come at the government's expense," said then-Rep. Doug Bereuter of Nebraska at another 1990 hearing about Upton-Jones.

Lawmakers were also concerned that the policy could bankrupt the National Flood Insurance Program if every eligible home took advantage of it. After years of debate about whether Upton-Jones could be fixed, Congress repealed it altogether in 1994.

Now, Congress is considering reinstating a version of the same policy.

Under pressure from homeowners and local governments, a bipartisan group of lawmakers last year proposed resurrecting a version of the Upton-Jones law.

"For some homeowners in vulnerable coastal areas, relocation or demolition may be the safest and most practical option," says Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, one of the bill's co-sponsors. She says the bill "is about giving people that option before disaster strikes, not after everything is already lost."

The new bill attempts to address some of the problems identified in Upton-Jones back in the 1990s. If a homeowner fails to remove their threatened house before it collapses, they may not get their full insurance payout. And the process for determining whether a house is in imminent danger from erosion is simplified.

But the bill has not gotten enough support to move forward. The Trump administration's efforts to slash FEMA's workforce and budget have made it harder for popular bipartisan efforts to reform the agency to find traction in Congress.

Brian Harris runs the Buxton Civic Association in Buxton. In recent years, he has been pushing the state and federal governments to change rules that make it difficult to protect waterfront homes and to remove them before they collapse.

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FEMA never analyzed the full cost of Upton-Jones

Upton-Jones retains its reputation as a failed and expensive program three decades after it was repealed. But it's unclear how accurate that reputation is, because FEMA never conducted a full analysis of its cost-effectiveness. "There was never a really robust postmortem," says Ryan-Henry, of the Coastal States Organization.

FEMA's complete data on flood insurance claims are private, making it impossible to know how Upton-Jones ultimately compares with other federal programs for removing threatened homes.

But narrower claims data obtained by NPR through a public records request offers a clue. Adjusted for inflation, the average cost to demolish a home was roughly the same as the cost of a federal home buyout, in which the government purchases repeatedly damaged homes in flood zones at market value and pays to demolish them.

In higher-cost areas, Upton-Jones could even be cheaper. The proposed program would cap payouts at $250,000, while the separate, existing buyout program pays full market value. More than 90% of the homes that have fallen in Dare County since 2020 were assessed above $250,000.

Without long-term solutions available, many local and state governments are relying on expensive alternatives such as beach nourishment and seawalls.

Removing homes before they collapse costs tens of thousands of dollars. A bill pending in Congress would let homeowners access money through their flood insurance policies to help foot that bill.

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In Maine, a project is underway to build a jetty to slow erosion near houses in the threatened community of Camp Ellis in the town of Saco. And Dare County, N.C., has two multimillion-dollar projects underway: an $8.6 million jetty repair and a roughly $15 million beach nourishment project that will pump more than 2 million cubic yards of sand in front of the most threatened houses. The sand from the last beach nourishment in the area lasted less than three years.

"Beach nourishment is temporary," says Corbett, the climate scientist at East Carolina University. "You're buying sand to buy time. You can't simply buy time and not plan for what is next."

And not every neighborhood is getting sand or other protections. At this rate, Richard Foreman doesn't see a path to either protecting or removing his stranded house in North Carolina. "Which leads you to believe they're really just hoping [the homes] will fall instead," Foreman says. "It's nuts. It's absolutely nuts."

Additional editing by Neela Banerjee. Molly Enking of Maine Public, along with Sarah Knight and Katie Daugert of NPR, contributed reporting.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Republican Sonja Shaw conceded the race for California Superintendent of Public Instruction to Democrat Richard Barrera late Wednesday evening.

“Last night voters made their choice. I would be lying if I said my heart wasn’t heavy,” Shaw said in a statement shared on social media. “As a mother and a protector of children, I feel deeply saddened for the kids. They are the ones who deserve so much better.”

In her social media post, which included a photo of Shaw locking hands with her husband and two daughters, Shaw said her kids had motivated her to run for state superintendent. Shaw won election to the Chino Valley Unified school board in 2022, fueled by support from conservative parents.

“The problem is that for decades, the same people have had their hands on our education system while our children have continued to fall behind,” Shaw said. “I believe we had an opportunity to change that.”

The office of California superintendent of public instruction is nonpartisan, with no party affiliation listed on the ballot. In past races, it was not unusual for two Democrats to advance to the November election. But this year, endorsements, campaign funding and campaigning broke largely along partisan lines.

Shaw, a Republican and board president of Chino Valley Unified, emerged as the top vote getter in a crowded June primary that featured several Democratic state lawmakers. But she contended in her statement that her race didn’t have the “money or machinery” that her opponent did in the November election.

Shaw trailed Barrera by nearly 15 percentage points, according to the latest election results Thursday morning. Shaw’s campaign raised about $595,000 compared to Barrera’s $812,000. However, the California Teachers Association, the state’s largest teachers union and a heavy spender in state superintendent races, also spent $8.4 million to support Barrera, the board president of San Diego Unified.

That pales in comparison to the combined $50 million raised in the 2018 state superintendent race Tony Thurmond won against Marshall Tuck in 2018. The 2026 state superintendent race had the distinction of featuring two local school board members.

Shaw said she’s not sure what her next steps will be.

“I don’t know exactly what God has next, but I know He isn’t finished,” she said.

Shaw will not be returning to the Chino Valley Unified school board where she began her political career. Her husband, Chris Shaw, ran for her open seat and is trailing his challenger by 11 points, according to the San Bernardino County Register of Voters.

This story was originally published by EdSource.

The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over the 101 Freeway in Agoura Hills is set to officially open next month, but that hasn’t stopped some wildlife from already using it.

Cameras captured coyote footage twice — once last week and again on Thursday morning — making the mammal the first large animal species seen using the crossing.

“This is amazing — obviously, the wildlife are not waiting for our opening date,” said Beth Pratt, president of the Wildlife Crossing Fund. “The animals are already blessing this crossing and saying, ‘Yep, you got it right.’”

Construction of the expansive bridge began in 2022, aimed at giving wildlife safe passage between the Santa Monica Mountains and Simi Hills after years of research.

Pratt said it’s unclear whether the images of the coyote are of the same animal. The coyote in the most recent image from Thursday morning can be seen on the 101 structure holding a bone or a stick in its mouth.

“The coyote is validating that we got this designed right, and I think that there's something also about a coyote being first — kind of the L.A. mascot next to P-22,” Pratt said.

The National Park Service is installing more cameras along the crossing to document and study how animals use it. While images will be made publicly available, there will not be a livestream.

“We can't, for security reasons, because this is L.A., and if there's a mountain lion going across, somebody's gonna go try to pet it,” Pratt said.

Topline:

• How we got here: Roy held on to a strong lead over McKinney ever since polls closed and is currently ahead by more than twice as many votes. Roy will be a fresh face to the role after the incumbent city attorney, Hydee Feldstein Soto, was ousted in the June primary in a rare defeat of an elected city official. 

• What the candidates had to say: 
  
  • Roy said on social media Wednesday that election night was “a really good night for the people who believe that we should take care of one another, that we can stand up for our rights — even in what feels like an increasingly lawless world — and that we will achieve justice when we fight for it.”
  • McKinney posted on social media Thursday that he’s back in his old office at the Hall of Justice. “The run for City Attorney was an incredible journey, and I’m truly grateful for everyone who believed in me, supported me, and stood by my side,” McKinney wrote. "While I’m disappointed things didn’t turn out the way we hoped, I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything." He acknowledged Roy in a social media video earlier this week, describing her as a “hard worker” who put together a strong coalition of support. McKinney added that he would be “rooting for her.”
  • Neither campaign immediately responded to LAist’s requests for additional comment.
• What’s at stake: The city attorney runs an office of more than 550 lawyers representing L.A. in all legal matters, including filing lawsuits and defending against them. Roy, backed by powerful progressives like U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, has vowed to take on the Trump administration in court.
• Go deeper: Read more about the city attorney's role and what's on the table for Roy's first term.

Construction of the green metal fence around MacArthur Park will begin Monday, Nov. 16, with work scheduled to continue through fall 2027.

The city announced the start date Nov. 4, saying crews will install an 8-foot fence around the park’s perimeter. Nearby residents and businesses can expect some noise, dust and vibration during construction, although the city said mitigation measures will be in place.

Crews will work Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., and the park will remain open while crews are working. 

The fence is the city’s latest attempt to tackle longstanding problems at MacArthur Park, including drug use, homelessness and crime.

The city first approved plans for the fence in October 2025, and the proposal has since drawn both support and criticism from residents and community groups.

Some say they hope the fence will make the park safer, while others question whether it will actually improve conditions there. Police and city officials say the fence will give them more control over the space and make it easier to enforce the law.

Ana Luz Vazquez, a street vendor near MacArthur Park, said her main concern about the fence is what will happen to the unhoused people who stay in the park throughout the day and whether the city plans to address that issue directly.

She is also concerned that construction during the day could affect her ability to work because of traffic, less parking availability and loud noise.

Vazquez said she would prefer construction to take place at night so it would have less of an impact on street vendors.

“If they’re working in the day then how are we supposed to come here and who is going to help us survive,” Vazquez said.

Construction will happen in two phases

Phase 1

• Alvarado St. from W. 6th St. to Wilshire Blvd.
• S. Park View St. from Wilshire Blvd. to W. 6th St.
• Wilshire Blvd. from Alvarado St. to S. Park View St.

Phase 2

• Alvarado St. from Wilshire Blvd. to W. 7th St.
• S. Park View St. from W. 7th St. to Wilshire Blvd.
• Wilshire Blvd. from S. Park View St. to Alvarado St.
• W. 7th St. from Alvarado St. to S. Park View St.

Existing trees will be protected and monitored during the work, according to the Department of Recreation and Parks. Traffic control measures will be in place during work hours, and crews will post temporary “No Parking” signs near active work areas in advance.

Services at the park are expected to remain the same throughout construction. The schedule could change because of weather or other unforeseen circumstances, according to the city.

The city has allocated $2.3 million for the project, but officials have not said whether that will cover the full cost.

After the fence is installed, the city plans a second phase focused on adding decorative elements. Officials have said residents will have an opportunity to provide input on the design.

Residents with questions or concerns about the project can contact Recreation and Parks at RAP.PublicInfo@lacity.org or 213-202-2700.

The post MacArthur Park fence construction to begin Nov. 16 appeared first on LA Local.