Worried that global warming will submerge your real estate? Here’s the solution the town of Galveston hit upon after they were devastated by a hurricane in 1900: the entire town was hoisted up on stilts, and new fill placed underneath. The photographs are amazing—it was an impressive engineering project, and it was all done with manual labor.
It’s also a little bit familiar. In my old home town, you could date the houses by their construction: the older ones were all built up on foundations that raised the floor a couple of feet off the ground, because the town was on a flood plain—my parents had photos of people canoeing down the streets when the Green River rose above its banks. There the solution was to build a dam on the river and control it that way, and that’s when the newer houses could have these peculiar things called basements.
Damming the ocean is a rather bigger problem.