Jeff Trosclair hopped into his truck, coffee in hand, and placed his phone on the dashboard, anticipating the inevitable call from a crew member or customer.
He wore a crisp polo with his company’s logo, JAS Builders — one of a handful of companies in Tampa Bay specializing in hoisting homes into the air.
Business is booming.
After 2024’s hurricanes, residents searched for a way to stay dry but remain steps from the water. One of those ways: Go up.
The Tampa Bay Times accompanied Trosclair as he visited houses mid-renovation to see the complicated and pricey process of raising a home.
Climate change is swallowing shores and generating powerful storms, complicating the dream of living near the coast. The 2024 hurricanes made the need for solutions painfully clear. Climbing higher and away from water is a step toward resiliency, experts say.
State officials touted a program called Elevate Florida that was introduced soon after the hurricanes as a way to cut through red tape and get homeowners help for projects like raising their homes or tearing them down and rebuilding.
In March, the Times reported that, a year later, virtually no one had been helped. The state has since announced some progress, though only about 10% of the 3,700 Pinellas County households that applied for the program have moved ahead.
For many residents, it’s one of the few ways they can afford to stay in their neighborhoods, safe from floodwaters.
But for all the money, time and engineering — is it enough?
There’s no silver bullet, said Vince Seijas, former building director for Miami Beach.
“Mankind is flexing its engineering might,” said Seijas, who was named the state’s Building Official of the Year in 2024. ”To try and stay the line, as much as they can, for as long as they can.”
House elevating is on the rise
Trosclair’s childhood home in Louisiana flooded four times. After every rush of water, his father fixed it up.
Trosclair understands when residents say they lost everything. He has, too.
“I come from a very blue-collar family, and that was their only asset,” he said. “There was no backup plan.”
It’s how he was introduced to house lifting. Around 2007, a couple of years after Hurricane Katrina, his parents raised their New Orleans home and felt instant relief.
Before the 2024 storms, raising Tampa Bay houses was nearly unheard of, and in some cases, not tracked.
In St. Petersburg, the city did not separately keep up with home elevations before 2024, so data is sparse. That year, the city received five applications for home lifting. By last year, permits had jumped to 92.
Along the beaches, the story is similar. In Madeira Beach, home elevations were rare and often not noted by the city. Last year, the city issued 21 permits for home elevations. This year, 10 more were approved, with four more pending as of late April.
On St. Pete Beach, the city received 39 permits to lift homes in 2025, and another four this year.
Kevin McAndrew, the director of Pinellas’ building and development department, said the county issued 16 permits in unincorporated areas over the last year. Anecdotally, building staff told McAndrew that prior to the storms, they would approve one or two permits for lifting a year.
The hurricanes were a clear catalyst, McAndrew said.
Other states susceptible to flooding have taken to elevation.
Louisiana has been the largest adopter, according to federal data.
More than 1,100 households there have sought help paying for elevation from 1996 — the first year identified in federal data — to 2023, the latest year numbers are available.
Florida is closest behind with more than 380 requests during the same time frame, then New Jersey with around 290 and Texas with over 260.
A pricey choice to lift a house
Trosclair parks in a sandy lot in an industrial area of St. Petersburg, about a block from JAS’ offices.
Just a few hours earlier, about 30 trucks had come through, hauling away massive steel beams and wooden planks, then fanning out across Tampa Bay to dozens of construction sites.
“We actually bought out the entire state of 6-by-20 I-beams,” Trosclair said.
Around 2023, Trosclair estimates the company lifted maybe eight homes. As of June of this year, JAS has worked on just shy of 50 house elevations.
It’s a struggle to keep up.
Trosclair walks to a nearby warehouse. Inside are hundreds of what look like giant threaded screws.
They’re called helical pilings, and they’re a cornerstone of Trosclair’s business. The pilings dig into the ground, sometimes 60 to 70 feet, and provide a stable foundation to lift houses.
But it’s expensive.
House lifters may use other methods to raise a foundation that can be cheaper but not as secure, Trosclair said.
Trosclair estimates that elevating a home costs about $175 per square foot — and that’s without all the bells and whistles. For a 1,500-square-foot home, that’s more than a quarter-million dollar price tag.
Florida’s building code doesn’t require a certain method to get a home up in the air, just that it meets a certain height. Homes are required to go 1 foot above the base flood elevation, or the likely height floodwaters will reach in a 100-year storm in a given spot, but communities can adopt higher standards, Seijas said. For example, the base flood elevation at Madeira Beach’s City Hall is 13 feet, according to Forerunner, a platform partnered with the city to provide flood risk data.
In some cases, the cheaper option is to tear down and start over, McAndrew said.
Sometimes, permit numbers don’t paint a complete picture.
McAndrew said the 3,700 applications to Elevate Florida made by Pinellas households show the interest that residents have in raising their homes if they could afford it. About 360 of those applicants are moving ahead in the program.
The state-run program has had its own hiccups. More than a year after Elevate was announced, just 16 applicants had been approved for funds as of last month, according to the state.
In June, JAS, a contractor for the program, toured one of the first approved Elevate Florida homes ahead of submitting work proposals for the project.
That same month, Alethea Cummins, a Madeira Beach resident, told the Times that she was still anxiously awaiting to hear if she’d get help.
Her bungalow has sat vacant since Hurricane Helene. She’s done what she can to prevent more damage, but the once-flooded home has attracted termites.
Just a day later, she heard from the program that the federal government had approved her application. And while the timeline is iffy on when elevation may begin, it’s a major step after months in limbo.
A peek at Tampa Bay’s lifted homes
A drive winding through Pinellas beach towns shows communities still licking their wounds less than two years after the hurricanes.
Houses on any given street are in some state of renovation. It makes navigating around large trucks and dumpsters difficult.
Trosclair’s first stop is at a home in St. Pete Beach. It’s temporarily lifted using wood cribbing — interlocking blocks that make houses look like they’re balancing on Jenga pieces.
To get a home off the ground means digging tunnels underneath. In Florida, workers go trudging through water, mud and sand to place supports.
Jacking up a house is left to a business partner from New Hampshire. The switchboard looks like a series of buttons and knobs you’d find in a spaceship.
Another house a few minutes away is already heaved up in the sky on concrete pillars. The house has a massive blueprint, with room for an elevator shaft. The original house remains intact — even the concrete bunnies that sit on the front porch.
“Those bunnies took a ride,” Trosclair said.
At the last house he visited, Trosclair was unsurprised to find John Tressler, the homeowner, surveying the jobsite. Tressler is often around to see how the job is going, along with his basset hound, Cleo.
The butter-yellow house is meant to look as if it were always more than a dozen feet in the air. It will have towering garage doors, built to fit the scale of the tall home. On the side of the house is a wooden, winding staircase made just for Cleo’s stubby legs, leading to a doggy door.
Helene spilled about 2 1/2 feet of water into the St. Pete Beach house — enough to cause destruction, but not enough to receive a letter declaring the house substantially damaged that likely would have forced Tressler to choose elevation or rebuilding.
Still, he expects flooding will happen again.
There was little question that Tressler would stay — just look at the backyard, he said, pointing to Boca Ciega Bay steps away.
“It’s a million-dollar view,” he said.
But the process hasn’t been easy, Tressler said.
Permitting across Pinellas beach towns has been a headache for residents. For many, it took months to get the all-clear to start rebuilding their lives.
Tressler received his permit from the city to elevate around June 2025. By October, the house was lifted.
Permitting back-and-forths and misunderstandings with the city resulted in delays and sinking an extra $100,000 in the process, Tressler said. And while the house is in the air now, he’s unsure when final renovations will be complete, Tressler said last month.
Federal building requirements said Tressler’s home had to go up at least 14 feet. But Tressler knew he wanted to go a few feet beyond that.
This space is going to fill with water again someday, he said while standing in the hollowed-out area where his house used to sit.
“I’m a pessimist,” Tressler said. “Or maybe a realist.”
Is lifting homes in Tampa Bay the solution?
Trosclair often works into the night, scanning through spreadsheets or contracts. He doesn’t anticipate business slowing anytime soon.
But for all this work, will it be the key to a more resilient Tampa Bay?
He thinks so.
Resilient construction is the future of Florida, he said. Storms are getting worse, and the state should prepare. It’s a goal of the business ― to build things that will last.
Raising homes and infrastructure is one tool in the belt, said Cara Woods Serra, planning director for the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council. But it’s slow and arduous — not to mention out of many residents’ price range.
And yet Tampa Bay residents lack an appetite for moving inland.
Raising a home will likely keep a person’s property and belongings high and dry.
But “what about your car?” Seijas said.
Or electricity? Or clean water?
Raising newly built houses is an easy-enough move, but “what do we do with that existing inventory?” Seijas said.
There are other options that can be used in combination with going higher, like replenishing dunes, reestablishing habitats that reduce flooding or backfilling areas with dirt to raise up the ground.
“I don’t know how long that buys us,” he said.
A taller Tampa Bay is just now taking shape. How easily, and widely adopted it will be, remains to be seen.
This story was originally published by the Tampa Bay Times and shared in partnership with the Florida Climate Reporting Network, a multi-newsroom initiative founded by the Miami Herald, the Sun-Sentinel, The Palm Beach Post, the Orlando Sentinel, WLRN Public Media and the Tampa Bay Times.
