Hilton Head Island, SC – October 6, 2024
The Chapel Without Walls
Isaiah 5:1-7; Isaiah 5:8-17
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no more room, and you are made to dwell alone in the midst of the land. – Isaiah 5:8 (RSV)
As you may remember, not so long ago I preached a sermon called Is Hilton Head Doomed? There is an old saying which declares, “One gloomy sermon deserves another.” It has been repeated by gloomy Christians the world over for at least five thousand years. So here is Gloomy Gus once again to address a topic that inevitability shall precede the slow but complete climatological destruction of Hilton Head Island sometime within the next hundred years.
First of all, your instantaneous response will be, “So who cares? It won’t affect us.” If that is your response, you are the primary type of person to whom this sermon is addressed. It is short-sighted, selfish, and ultimately sinful not to care, even though the collapse of both the economy and our insular land mass itself should concern everyone who lives here right now. Though not a single person in this small, relatively elderly congregation will have to endure nature’s apathetic annihilation of this sceptered isle, possibly some of us may soon suffer substantial monetary losses because of the increasing strains to our local economy. As people who did well enough before we got here to get here, maybe that will get your attention. When self-interest and ethics combine forces, it can work wonders.
For decades climatologists have been predicting that climate change will cause trillions of dollars in damage to locales all over the world. We used to call this phenomenon “global warming,” but now we say “climate change,” because not everywhere will get warmer, and heat will only be one of the major concerns of climate change, as Hurricane Helene just reminded us. We were told the week before last that Helene was not supposed to affect us much at all. But she came ashore in Florida as a Category Five storm, and even though it was downgraded eventually to become a mere tropical storm a few hundred miles north, it was two hundred miles wide, and it dropped trillions of gallons of rain across much of the Southeast. As the meteorologists have been warning us, we may not have more hurricanes than we had before, but the ones that are coming will make the ones that have already passed look gentle in both wind and rain. Humans may never be able to change that.
For years in the land of the free and the home of the brave, millions of Americans and one of our two major political parties its candidate and its candidate in three presidential elections denied that climate change even existed. Many of our local citizens also denied it. Now, unless all of us do what we can to minimize climate change as much as possible, its effects will smite us sooner rather than later. However, that is not the thrust of this sermon, so you can breathe easy - - - for a few minutes.
Since the establishment of the tourist industry in the 1950s and 60s, tourism and real estate sales have been the primary basis of our economy, Hilton Head has also gained a reputation as “the weal of the wealthy,” a paradise of “the Really Rich.” Obviously not everyone here is rich, and hardly anyone lives in serious poverty, but we are probably in the top one per cent in per capita incomes out of all the zip codes in the nation.
Regardless of exactly how wealthy we are, we must admit we are way above average. But very soon, in five to ten years, our economy shall begin to drop, and surely within forty or fifty years, it will have completely tanked.
The prophet Isaiah lived in Jerusalem in the middle of the 8th century BCE. It was a time of unusual prosperity. Isaiah apparently came from a wealthy family who lived among the movers and shakers of the kingdom of Judah. But he was dubious of some of the values of his fellow social swells. They were so fixed on pleasure and enjoyment that they had lost one of the things the Torah, the books of biblical laws, frequently emphasized: a constant concern for “the poor, widows, orphans, and strangers,” the latter being poor people from neighboring nations who imigrated into Israel to find better working conditions.
In the fifth chapter of Isaiah, the prophet wrote what has since been called “the Parable of the Vineyard.” The parabolic vineyard was an idealized agricultural environment that God had planted as a place where everyone looked out for everyone else. Over time, said Isaiah, that changed, and now it was an everyone-for-himself-or-herself environment. “For the vineyard of the Lord of Hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are his pleasant planting; and he looked for justice, but behold bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, a cry!” (Isa. 5:7)
Then Isaiah made an observation that is so similar to Hilton Head, that to read it, it should cause a piercing sting in the heart and soul of everyone who lives here, especially the affluent, and most of us are affluent. “Woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no more room, and you are made to dwell in the midst of the land,” said Isaiah (5:8). When the Sea Pines Company started seventy-five years ago, Charles Fraser was begging tourists to buy oceanfront lots for five or ten thousand dollars. Now those lots are selling for a thousand times that much. Most of the houses back in those days were very nice three or four-bedroom upper-middle-class beach houses. They were better than many coastal dwellings in other parts of the nation, but they were not the palaces that were called “cottages” in Newport, Rhode Island, or Miami Beach, Florida, back in the 1890s. As Hilton Head became more popular, very wealthy people began to build much larger homes. “Woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no more room, and you are made to dwell alone in the midst of the land” (Isa. 5:8).
Much later In Hilton Head, as in many other coastal communities, people began to buy two or three contiguous beach homes, tear them all down, and build what were called McMansions. When that happened, the town started to purchase large parcels of land from anyone willing to sell them, among whom were native islanders who were land-rich but cash-poor. Those wooded parcels were to be held in perpetuity by the public to prevent the island from being overbuilt. The same phenomenon occurred five rows or or 500 Yards from the beach.
How can anybody object to any of that? That’s good, isn’t it? How could anyone, even a prophetic grump like Isaiah, find fault with that?
Here’s how: Many of the island’s workers, the lowest paid with the least yearly dependable income and the briefest longevity in their jobs, are forced to live off the island because they can’t afford to live here. Some of the island workers, with the longest longevity in their employment, have commuted here for decades from Bluffton, Beaufort, Hardeeville, Ridgeland, Hampton and even Allendale. For years they have gladly driven here or ridden the bus here because they are still better off financially making that long commute than trying to find a decent-paying job in those communities. But the commute adds hours away from their families every day.
Every workday, fourteen thousand people drive onto this island to work, and the same fourteen thousand drive off the island to go home, wherever home is. If you were a young person living in this tourist-retirement mini-metro coastal area, and you couldn’t afford to live on this island, where would you live? Probably in Bluffton or Hardeeville, which have many jobs that pay the same as Hilton Head, because these towns are growing at a much faster rate than Hilton Head ever did. According to a story in The Island Packet, between 2000 and 2020, the island population grew by 11%. Bluffton’s population grew by 2074%. You don’t have to think hard to know why there is such an enormous disparity between the two communities’ growth rates.
Now we are getting down, again, to an issue I have raised before, especially in the Is Hilton Head Doomed? sermon. Climate change will kill Hilton Head later than sooner, we hope, but the Hilton Head economy will kill this island sooner rather than later unless much more affordable housing, both private and public, is constructed, and unless all of us take action, now. I am very concerned about this issue, and I hope you will be too.
Atlantic City, New Jersey was a Hilton Head, South Carolina, a hundred-twenty-five years before the Hilton Head of today became today’s Hilton Head. In its day, Atlantic City was so swish that it was the basis for the board game Monopoly, one of the most successful and enjoyable such games ever. Boardwalk and Park Place were its most valuable properties, and if things went as every player who managed to purchase both properties hoped, they might establish a property monopoly, thus winning the game. Now Atlantic City is probably the lowest-per-capita-income community on the entire Jersey Shore. I was on a flight over it a couple of months ago, and looking down on it, it looked very down. It did not lose its initial allure because of climate change; it lost it because it no longer was able to attract “the right kind of tourists.” And who might they be? --- Sufficiently affluent ones who could go anywhere in the country or world to visit or to live in coastal or island communities that appealed to folks like - - - well, like us, when we first came here as tourists, whenever that was.
In my opinion, there are two main factors that bring well-off tourists here on vacation, Our twelve-mile beach is No. 1, and the way this island has been developed is No. 2. There are other islands in America with beautiful beaches, golf courses, tennis and pickleball facilities, and boating, but there are few islands that have as many trees and as few garish buildings or signs as this island. The town council recently voted to spend thirty million dollars to renourish our beach in several eroding spots. That is an absolute necessity for enticing wealthy tourists to keep coming here. In the long run, however, we must spend four or five times that much in public and private workforce housing ventures, and we must do it soon. I have said that before, and I’m saying it yet again.
If we don’t, here is what will happen: In five or ten years, scores of businesses will close their doors because they won’t have enough workers to stay in business. Because of what climate change is already doing to raise the price of homeowners insurance so drastically and so quickly, in ten to twenty years the only people who will buy any residential property here will be those who are wealthy enough to self-insure their property. If their homes are destroyed, they will just build another one. Already, at present one third of all residential property sales are cash purchases. Anyone who has a mortgage is required to have property owners insurance. In part because of that, eventually almost all sales will be cash transactions. That will quickly reduce our population, which will also adversely affect our economy. All of these factors are ultimately unethical, because they eventually hurt everyone, and surely God strongly opposes that.
Between 2022 and 2023, insurance on condominiums rose by 500%: five hundred per cent! The average sale price of condos is now $450,000, and for single family homes it is $1,250,000. That means that fewer and fewer would-be new owners will be able to afford to move here, and more and more average-income longtime owners will be forced to leave the island because they can’t afford the exorbitant insurance rates. And remember this: the insurance companies are not gouging the public; climate change is gouging the public everywhere, but especially those who happen to live in areas of frequent catastrophic winds or floods.
Isaiah may have concluded that after the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, they would head south and also destroy Judah. Were that to happen, he thought it would illustrate God’s deep displeasure with both kingdoms. Isaiah wrote, “They have lyre and harp, timbrel and flute and wine at their feasts, but they do not regard the deeds of the Lord, or see the work of his hands” (6:12). It appears to me that everyone and every nation have their ups and downs, but they bring troubles upon themselves by mistaken policies and actions, not by direct divine judgment. In my old age, I have come to believe that God directly causes nothing.
If I were you, in case you haven’t already thought it, I would be asking myself, “How on earth should any of this be the substance of a sermon in a church?” It is a sensible and obvious question. Here is how I would answer it. Unless the citizens of Hilton Head Island and its town government take more actions to enable lower-income workers to be able to live here, our community economy will precipitously begin to plummet, because such workers will seek employment in other nearby communities where they can find homes in which they can afford to live. When that happens, life here will change drastically from what we have previously known. People such as ourselves will then begin to move to the mainland, because while we are relatively wealthy, we are not “rich.” I don’t think anyone in The Chapel Without Walls is “Really Rich.”
I am certainly not preaching this sermon to cause you to fall into despair; far from it. Hilton Head is an island, it is a wonderful island on which to live, but because of climate change, at some point it will no longer be habitable. In the interim, before that occurs, in order to keep this community as viable economically as possible for as long as possible, our citizens, present and future, must band together for the good of all, but especially for our lower income workers. To help them is to help everyone. To neglect them is to neglect everyone. There must be businesses as well as residences, Otherwise, before long, there will be fewer residences - - - and residents.
Toward the end of his life, William Shakespeare wrote a play called The Tempest. At that time a hurricane had leveled the British island of Bermuda. The play was about that catastrophe, but Shakespeare chose to make the characters Italian nobles whose ship had crashed onto the rocks of an un-named island during the storm.
Near the end of the play, the main character, Prospero (note the meaning of the name) said this:
“Our revels now are ended. These our actors, as I foretold you,
Are melted into air, into thin air, and like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples,
The great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind.”
Thirty years ago, when our housing inventory was affordable for most of our residents, our economy served everyone rather well. That situation no longer exists. Therefore we must have a community-wide effort to assist our workforce by providing hundreds of affordable workforce housing units. In doing that, we will maintain a strong economy. If we don’t, our financial foundation will quickly begin to erode, For the good of our residents and our tourists, this is an investment we must not ignore. The decision is ours, not God’s.