On Oct. 10, as the sun rose on the damage that Hurricane Milton had inflicted on Tampa Bay, the consensus seemed to be that the region had gotten lucky. Initially, as it made its way east across the Gulf of Mexico, Milton looked potentially devastating. A direct hit would have inflicted catastrophic, region-remaking losses on Tampa and environs, due to NASCAR-speed winds and unprecedented levels of storm surge. Instead, Milton veered south, making landfall near Siesta Key and thus sparing Tampa from the worst-case scenarios that many had predicted. Yes, the roof of Tropicana Field was shredded, perhaps beyond repair, but the Tampa Bay Rays draw approximately 12 people per game anyway—so, honestly, what’s the difference? “Crisis averted,” said the world, and then the world stopped thinking about Florida and resumed worrying about the election.
Here on the ground in Tampa, though, it hasn’t been quite so easy to close the door on Milton. While life is slowly getting back to something resembling normality, the past week and change have been difficult for all but the very luckiest. Just because Milton didn’t apocalyptically decimate the Tampa Bay area doesn’t mean that it still wasn’t a full-fledged disaster for a region that was already reeling from Hurricane Helene two weeks prior. In addition to the widespread structural damage caused by the two storms, in addition to the lives lost and property destroyed, the one-two punch of Helene followed by Milton also carries other, subtler ramifications that will affect people’s lives here for weeks, months, and potentially even years to come. And, in some ways, it’s reasonable to wonder whether Tampa Bay will ever be quite the same.
Through a series of unusual occurrences, I now find myself spending a good chunk of my year in Tampa. It’s been a real culture shock. Half the people down here look like they’re itching to tell you all about how CrossFit changed their lives, and the other half seem too strung-out to even contemplate lifting a kettlebell. As for me, I’ve lived my entire life in cold-weather northern cities for a reason: I’m a bitter elitist crank who hates beaches, humidity, and outdoor recreation. Unlike most of the other people here, I don’t golf, I don’t like theme parks, and I don’t believe that the gaudiest billionaire on Earth is actually capable of making America great again, whatever that means. I am perhaps the world’s least likely Florida man.
But against all odds, I really like it down here. The state is authentically diverse, the people I’ve met are weird and fun, the beer is cheap, and the drivers are insane in a way that really keeps you on your toes. Plus, in a strange sense, it is also sort of fun to live in a state that’s on the edge. Florida under Gov. Ron DeSantis is officially inhospitable to most of the things that I’ve organized my life around, such as arts and culture, the written word, and liberal Enlightenment values. (The state cut all arts funding earlier this year, apparently after one of the governor’s more prudish advisors saw a sign advertising a Tampa Fringe show called “Captain Havoc and the Big-Titty Bog Witches.”) Liberal journalists and performers are a dime a dozen in New York—not a figure of speech, that’s actually the going rate. It matters more to write and make art in a state like Florida, where the governor and his supporters are actively hostile to both culture and journalism, than it does in a place like Brooklyn, where I once saw a grown man unironically wearing a propeller beanie.
Any guilt I may have ever felt about being yet another New Yorker semi-transplant to Florida was assuaged this week, as I spent pretty much every waking hour trying to deal with Hurricane Milton damage. The windows and patio doors failed in my apartment, sending water surging inside and saturating all of the rugs and much of the furniture. I spent Monday hauling furniture to a dumpster and cutting up sodden rugs with a kitchen knife—it was all I had—so that they’d fit inside contractor bags. I spent Tuesday scrubbing any traces of mildew off the floors and consulting with my landlords about getting a professional in here to assess the water damage inside the ceilings and walls. Wednesday and Thursday were spent at a business I help run down here, tearing out and replacing water-damaged insulation and ceiling tiles, hauling ruined stuff to the commercial dumpster across the street, and cleaning every surface over and over until my bloodstream was at least 15 percent Clorox bleach spray.
I drafted this piece last Friday from an apartment that was then still without internet service. I spent the preceding part of the week in a hotel, because I had to throw my mattress away and I’d been too busy to purchase a new one. I’m behind on all my work because of my Milton cleanup duties, and I’ve had to spend—and will continue to have to spend—a bunch of money from savings on temporary lodging and replacement furniture. I honestly don’t know if I’m eligible for FEMA aid, because I’m only down here part of the time.
The Tampa-based business I help out with, meanwhile, has lost the better part of a month’s revenue thanks to hurricane-related closures, on the heels of an abysmal summer. While grants and loans are theoretically available to help compensate for losses, the fact is that the business exists on a razor’s edge even in the best of times. Even with a grant or a loan, Milton and Helene may have sent the business into a spiral from which it may never recover. Maybe this means it wasn’t much of a business to begin with, but, then again, neither are most small businesses; they’re all just held together by duct tape and willpower, and hurricanes test the strength of both of those things.
In the big scheme of things, these problems are small problems, and I know that. But the point is that the cost of a hurricane can’t just be calculated by adding up the big problems. For millions of people down here, Helene and Milton didn’t destroy their lives—it just made those lives suck even more than usual, in ways that might lead to broader consequences further down the line. Millions of people were without power for days and days after the storm, which in turn meant no refrigeration, no air conditioning, no easy access to laundry or wired internet. (As of Sunday, some people I know were still without full power.)
The region’s streets and roadways have been rendered minor disaster zones. Countless businesses had their signs shredded by the storm; countless billboards were shredded, too, thus leaving local drivers with no idea of which personal-injury lawyers to call in the event of a car crash. Trees are down everywhere—and not just little ones, either, but big trees, old trees, the sorts of trees that people write poems about. On Idlewild Avenue in Seminole Heights on Wednesday afternoon, a massive tree straight out of a children’s book sat violently askew on someone’s lawn, resting against a downed power line. Further down the street, another tree had been uprooted so forcefully that it also pulled up a big corner of sod from a lawn. In Tampa Heights, on Floribraska Avenue, the hip coffee shop King State had already planned to close for good at the end of October; its impending demise was hastened when Milton sent a massive tree crashing through the building’s roof.
Across the region, curbs everywhere are heaped high with storm debris and ruined furniture, and these piles will likely remain in place for weeks as local authorities struggle to find the resources necessary to haul them away. Indoors, people everywhere are assessing interior wind and water damage and wearily calculating how much time and money it will take to get their lives back to where they were before the storm. FEMA money and insurance payouts are available, yes, but many people won’t bother, and those who do may find the payouts to be insufficient to cover the losses.
Business owners across Tampa Bay, meanwhile, are plagued with a separate layer of problems, involving lost inventory, lost equipment, lost revenue, and the delicate question of how to encourage a storm-weary population to come out and buy stuff at a point in time when people are tapped out both personally and financially. Many of these small businesses will fail over the next few months as an indirect result of Hurricanes Milton and Helene. Many residents and homeowners, meanwhile—facing damage from both storms that can’t be immediately fixed because tradespeople down here are busier than ever; the prospect of having to pay for major and minor repairs to their homes and replacements for many of their possessions; skyrocketing insurance rates; and the likelihood of having to do it all again next year—will just leave.
And maybe they should. The governance of this state makes it easy to engage in schadenfreude when Florida suffers. We all know that it’s sort of stupid to live in Florida in the climate change era, and that global warming will just keep making hurricane season worse and worse as the years go by. It’ll also make living here more and more expensive—which in turn will make it more likely that the only people who stick around are the assholes.
Who’s buying vacant homes in flood zones at high interest rates? More likely than not, it’ll be massive real estate investment trusts that will turn around and list them as vacation rentals, or lease them at extortionate rates. In turn, the available housing stock will shrink even more for actual residents, raising prices even higher. As small businesses fail because they can no longer successfully walk the razor’s edge, the enterprises that replace them likely won’t be new small businesses; they’ll be chain stores that can afford to lose a month or two of revenue each year due to hurricanes. This trend, in turn, will raise rents for small businesses, thus putting even more of them in existential jeopardy.
The losses of Helene and Milton and all the other hurricanes sure to come, in other words, will likely be felt over the long term by the people who still make Florida diverse and interesting: workers and fixed-income retirees and small entrepreneurs and artists who won’t long be able to continue to afford to be here. Their losses will be the assholes’ gain: the state’s current leadership and the very rich people who support and benefit from its head-in-sand policies; the developers and big-money speculators whose bank accounts and credit lines insulate them from true disaster; the heedless and the bullheaded; all those who would stamp out culture and diversity in favor of lucrative monoculture. Neither Helene nor Milton were death blows for Tampa Bay, no, but taken together, it is impossible not to see them as a warning shot. I’m grateful Milton wasn’t as deadly or destructive as first feared—but none of this is my idea of good luck.
