For one man, being told that the dream home he wanted to buy would fall into the ocean was a moot point.
David Moot, 59, had been vacationing in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, for two decades and never imagined that he could afford to buy a beachfront house there.
Then he spotted a listing for a home with an asking price of just $395,000 – with a catch.
The home at 157 Brownell Road in Eastham was only 25 feet, or 7.6 meters, from a sand bluff crumbling due to sea level rise and erosion. The ocean was encroaching on the home at about 3 feet per year, meaning it could be eaten by the sea in a decade.
Still, Moot snatched it up.
‘Life’s too short, and I just said to myself, “Let’s just see what happens,”’ Moot told Bloomberg last month.
‘It’s going to eventually fall into the ocean, and it may or may not be in my lifetime.’
Eastham, which has been dubbed the ‘gateway’ to the Cape Cod National Seashore, is vulnerable to more storms driven by warmer ocean temperatures and climate change. Communities there are at risk of going underwater.
‘It’s just a matter of time before those property values go down,’ University of North Carolina Wilmington oceanography professor Dylan McNamara told Bloomberg.
‘How they go down, whether it’s a precipitous drop off a cliff or it’s a smoother unwinding, is still up in the air.’
Moot purchased the potentially doomed home at 67% less than the amount the seller listed it for in 2022. But he still faces high costs as its homeowner, including nearly $4,000 in property taxes annually and about the same amount in insurance that does not cover damages from erosion.
The Pittsburgh resident plans to front the bills in part by renting the house out so others will have ‘a chance to enjoy the serene property and the whole aura about a panoramic view of the ocean’, reported The Boston Globe.
Moot has decided to take a gamble and concluded: ‘There’s always pros and cons and negatives and positives in everything in life.’
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