A sprawling Florida mansion set beside a powdery white sand beach overlooking the azure Gulf of Mexico is currently the most expensive property listed for sale in the United States, yours for a mere $295m.
It is also in one of the most vulnerable places in the country to climate-driven disasters, and faces an almost inevitable flooding event in the coming years.
The nine-acre gated retreat in Naples – styled as “Florida’s most exclusive compound” and complete with two vast guest houses, a dock, a yacht berth and facing water on three sides – stands as an extravagant symbol of how the desire for a balmy Florida lifestyle is colliding with the climate crisis.
“It’s almost a certainty this property will experience a flood,” said Jeremy Porter, climate risk researcher at First Street Foundation, a non-profit flood analysis group.
According to First Street modeling, the $295m Gordon Pointe property has a 68% risk of flooding in the next 15 years and an almost guaranteed 95% chance of a flood over the next three decades. Its flood exposure is “severe” and its risk from winds is “extreme” according to climate threat ratings that now appear on Zillow property listings.
“It is a beautiful area, people here want access to the water and the beaches but it’s extremely exposed to flooding,” Porter said. “These are basically properties built on water.”
The pricey Gordon Pointe enclave was owned by the late financier John Donahue, who died in 2017, and his wife, Rhodora, and is now being sold by the family trust. It sits at the tip of the exclusive Naples neighborhood of Port Royal, which consists of low-lying, thin fingers of land carved by canals that dangle from the southern end of the city.
Mangroves, marshes and protective sand dunes have been swept aside here so multimillion-dollar developments can sit as close as possible to the sea, which is 6in higher than it was in the 1990s and is accelerating upwards due to the burning of fossil fuels.
The threat to this idyll has been starkly illustrated by the five hurricanes that have rattled the western flank of Florida in just the last two years, most destructively with 2022’s Hurricane Ian and, more recently, the rapid one-two punch of Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Naples has seen its streets inundated, its homes torn apart and its pier wrecked by storms turbocharged by an overheated Gulf.
“There has been building right out on to the beach, we are very low-lying, we don’t have good dune fortifications now and no one really thought about storm surge here until Ian happened,” said Michael Savarese, a geology and climate expert at Florida Gulf Coast University, about Naples’ exposure.
“The entire region is highly vulnerable to nuisance flooding and storm surge and if we keep having storms like the last two years there’s no time to catch our breath.”
This vulnerability has led to a jarring situation where the glittering crown jewel property in a destination state with booming population growth is threatened by climate-fueled disaster like few other places in the US.
“They are just buying time, borrowed time,” Savarese said of the string of opulent homes in Port Royal. “We are following the more extreme curve of sea level rise and nuisance flooding is going to be even more of a concern at every high tide. We haven’t addressed this well and we have been caught with our pants down.”
There may still be willing buyers for luxury properties along the Florida coastline but the climate crisis is increasingly rubbing up against the prevailing trend of hordes of Americans, many of them retired, pouring into the state for the promise of warm weather and no state taxes.
Home insurance rates in Florida, already the steepest in the US, rose by another 42%, on average, last year. Amid a cavalcade of disasters, at least a dozen insurers have fled Florida and a state backstop insurance system is now “not solvent” according to Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor.
DeSantis, meanwhile, has responded to this new era by deleting mention of climate change in state laws.
In Naples, this has meant that a city-drafted climate change vulnerability assessment had to be rewritten to remove the words “climate change” before it could be used to request state funding for upgrades to key facilities such as the stormwater system, so it doesn’t overflow into the streets during high tides.
“I just roll with it,” said Natalie Hardman, natural resources manager at the city of Naples, about this make-believe world she has to contend with. “It’s the game we play, I guess.”
Faced by fiercer storms and increasingly withering heat, Naples has tried to keep the water at bay by shoring up critical infrastructure and adding resilient design requirements for buildings, while also mopping up post-storm debris.
“Unfortunately, we are getting a lot of practice at this,” Hardman said of the clean-ups. “The hurricanes are coming with more frequency, we are learning lessons from each of them. At times it can feel very overwhelming but we are thinking ahead and trying to stop issues before they start.”
At a certain level of wealth such concerns can appear trivial. The grandest homes in Naples are stoutly built to withstand wind and many have their own pop-up flood barriers or seawalls, even if surrounding streets still fill with water and sand creating “island homes sitting in wasteland”, as Savarese put it.
Port Royal was established in the 1940s as the “the finest place in the world to live” and the main Gordon Pointe mansion – a hefty 22,800 sq ft in size with six bedrooms and 24 bathrooms – strives to meet this ambition with a craftsmanship designed to withstand all a supercharged nature can throw at it.
“This home was built with incredible building materials, it has almost indestructible qualities,” said Katherine Frattarola, who runs HUB Private Client, an insurance advisory service for wealthy individuals. Getting insurance for the property would “be very, very expensive; seven figures annually”, she added, but someone able to spend a third of a billion dollars on a single home is “in a very different strata”.
Such a person “isn’t really thinking about risk. They are thinking about how much they love Naples and, frankly, having the most expensive home in America,” Frattarola said. “They can afford any repairs easily.”
But those not in the billionaire class are starting to wince at the mounting cost of paradise, with clients able to spend $5m to $10m on a beach house now starting to eye the Carolinas or coastal Georgia instead for their purchases, Frattarola said.
“We are increasingly having more conversations about ring fencing assets to pay for personalized insurance premiums,” she said. “It’s now, ‘Oh, shoot, I have to find insurance and pay for it?’ People are starting to look at different geographies.”
Most Americans, of course, live far more modestly than this and often struggle to recover from a major disaster, even if they can meet insurance premiums that have rocketed in recent years. As storms scour the coasts of low-income people, those wealthy enough to cocoon themselves beside the beaches may be the last left here, until the tides completely swallow south-west Florida.
“The high climate risk areas have the richest people so it’s worth thinking about who the beneficiaries are when we subsidize flood insurance,” said Parinitha Sastry, a finance expert at Columbia Business School who has researched the fragility of Florida’s insurance market.
“It’s possible we see a sort of climate segregation due to risk-based pricing but the alternative is that we have a lot of vulnerable people in risky areas facing continual shocks,” she said. “Houses are a primary source of wealth so without that price signal you are making lower-income people even more vulnerable to losses to their main asset.”
The next hurricane is less likely to deliver such a life-altering jolt to the new owner of Gordon Pointe. Whoever buys the compound, secluded at the end of the peninsula with only the waves as neighbors, will be untroubled even by people: “There’s no traffic going by, no one is looking in your window,” as a promotional video puts it, calling the development a “rare and exceptional property”. The real estate firm selling the property didn’t respond to questions about its climate risk.
But is it, or any house, actually worth $295m? “A banana stuck onto a canvas can sell for $6.2m,” said Frattarola, referencing an eye-catching recent artwork sale. “If someone is willing to pay that for that then I suspect there are buyers for anything, at all sorts of prices.”