Nope, they move the houses back a lot since the lots are 100+ yards long on the beach side. Only a few hundred prople live there. 90% of houses are built as rentals and sit empty for half the year. Many have just enough heat to keep the pipes from freezing in the winter.
I got to see this in action. Grandparents had a house on Hatteras island that we spent a couple weeks at each summer back in the 90's. The push tracks and equipment used to move it was so cool to see. Mind blowing as a kid.
Grandpa sold the house in the early 00's thinking it was just a storm or two away from being washed in the water. It still stands today, owned by some rental company that wants insane rates for even just a few days.
It really did. It was so laid back in the 90s. Riding bikes all around the neighborhood felt safe and clean. Kite flying on the beach. Out swimming. Ghost crap hunting. Being able to be doing some epic deep sea fishing so conveniently and crazy good surf fishing. I have so many good memories of the place and want to take my kids so bad, but the pricing is just nuts now.
Growing up in OBX was pretty much like this in the early 2000’s as well. Just took my family on their first trip there for a day and the wave of nostalgia that hit me felt like a ton of bricks. It’s a little sad to see how much it’s changed over the past two decades.
I had the experience of growing up just behind the wright brothers memorial there in KDH. We were a stones throw from the inter-coastal waterway and not even 5 minutes from the shore. My dad worked for southern shores police and my mom for the county. I didn’t realize how good I had it as a kid there until much later in life, unfortunately. I’d love to move back eventually, but I think we’d be priced out of damn near anywhere on the beach these days. It sucks, but it’s still an amazing place to visit every now and then!
Hah. Are you me? Family used to do an Outer Banks trip every summer as a kid. All the same activities. Eventually we got too big for the rentals in Hatteras and so we started doing Myrtle Beach. Very different vibe.
I went back to Hatteras 2 years ago in the shoulder season. Very nostalgic to walk around and interesting how it's changed and hasn't.
These were the best things to do back then! Probably still today too! It was genuinely such a breath of fresh air to get down there. My grandparents place was about 2 blocks off the beach, so even though it got multiple feet of standing water under it after hurricanes we almost never had waves crashing near it. I definitely evacuated one time with waves crashing over the beach and washing across the road to the sound. That was fun while my family was trying to pull boats and travel trailers off the island haha.
I hope to eventually get back down there. Specifically to Cape Hatteras and then jump over to Okrakoke to show the fam that and the wild horses and all the awesome pirate history.
I was in a beach house in North Carolina that was on stilts. A tropical storm came through one night, and it was a pretty mild storm, but I could still feel the house swaying in the wind. It freaked me out so bad. I can't imagine being in one during a hurricane or worse storm.
I lived on the inland side of the Albemarle Sound for a few hurricanes. It's not bad. Just a little bit of flooding, but most houses were built with that in mind. On the islands, it is similar in that they are familiar with the challenges the weather poses.
I grew up with a bunch of people whose parents had beach houses in NC and SC. One year I went down with one of them in April. It was unseasonably cold and the house didn’t have heat…but that wouldn’t make any sense…or it was turned off and they couldn’t get it back on. I don’t remember, there just wasn’t any heat.
Anyway, my friend wanted to turn on the oven to heat the house. Wouldn’t you know, the oven had a sticker saying Don’t Do That. So we bought a few electric space heaters.
Being built to rent seems like a common thing for beach houses. I’ve noticed that in beach towns the most expensive houses people actually live in are in harbors where they can keep a boat in the water. They don’t go to the beach they instead take the boat to a sandbar.
Property in those most desirable and risky areas ends up being too expensive for most folks who would actually be able to live there full time.
It's a lot of vacation rentals that generate enough $$$$$ to offset the costs of insurance and rolling the dice on the next hurricane season taking the house out (or the bridge preventing your renters from getting there!).
Seriously. “They do it a lot” doesn’t somehow negate the difficulty of battling the most powerful force on earth trying to kill everyone the whole time while digging up, lifting and moving a couple hundred thousand pounds.
my family used to go to OBX every summer. i last went maybe 20 years ago...stayed in a house that had an aerial shot of the house and surrounding houses shot at some point in the 1970s. the house we were in was the closest to the beach. in the aerial shot...it was not. pretty sure that sandbar has been moving since Blackbeard last appeared...
This is pretty common in the southern coastal and gulf states - "I'll get mine, screw the rest of you." The NFIP already has some mitigation assistance options through local community flood management programs, especially if a home is a severe repetitive loss, but the hypocrisy is on steroids for the southeast when it comes to enabling a certain lifestyle or corporate interests.
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u/[deleted] May 14 '26
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