When people ask me where I'm from and I tell them, “the Jersey Shore,” the first thing they usually ask is how much damage did I get from Hurricane Sandy. I tell them about how I lost some trees and how we were without power for a while, but overall, we got by. Since I live three miles from the beach and away from any inland waterways, our damage was, all things considered, minimal. Some of my neighbors weren't so lucky, as huge trees fell and smashed through their houses—but for the most part, my neighborhood did all right.

The next question I usually get is how the rebuilding is going. I tell them that it is uneven. The damage done to the shore was more severe in some places than in others, and the rebuilding efforts have been more aggressive and better coordinated in some places than in others. In my area, some towns look great; while their boardwalks were destroyed by Sandy, beautiful new ones now stand in their place. Just a few miles away, other towns still look very much as they did after Sandy made landfall; yards are covered with sand, businesses remain boarded up, debris lies uncollected.

That's when I usually get a comment about how they hear a lot of places aren't rebuilding because the insurance companies are getting in the way. The notion here is that insurers are requiring property owners to install measures to protect them from future storm surges and wind damage, or else their claim money won't go through.