The answer lives in this podcast

Why have traditional seawalls failed — and how long has the industry gone without innovation?

August 22, 2026 Beyond Luxury · Anya Freeman

← Voir la fiche Beyond Luxury

The first seawall ever built was installed in Galveston, Texas, in 1904 — and its design has not meaningfully changed since. Traditional seawalls are flat, toxic, expensive, and destructive to marine habitats. They reflect wave energy rather than absorbing it, which accelerates erosion, causes overtopping, and triggers costly mitigation requirements like riprap boulder placement.

A 120-Year-Old Design Still Deployed on Miami's Coastline

When Anya Freeman, Founder & CEO of Kind Designs, started investigating coastal protection infrastructure, she found something remarkable: the industry had been running on the exact same blueprint for over a century. Men have been building seawalls this way since 1904, and until Kind Designs, no one had introduced a structurally different solution.

This stagnation isn't just an engineering curiosity — it has real consequences. As sea levels rise and storm intensity increases, a flat reflective wall does the opposite of what you'd want: it bounces wave energy back outward, scouring the seabed and destabilizing the very coastline it's meant to protect. The problem compounds over time, making each successive repair more expensive and each environmental impact harder to offset. This is precisely the failure mode that Beyond Luxury surfaces in its conversation with Freeman.

Flat, Toxic, and Requiring Expensive Environmental Offsets

Beyond their physical failure mode, traditional seawalls carry a significant environmental cost. Their smooth concrete surfaces are inhospitable to marine life, creating what amounts to a dead zone along the waterfront. Regulatory frameworks increasingly require developers to offset this ecological damage — typically through the placement of riprap boulders, an expensive and visually disruptive mitigation measure.

This is one reason why cities like Miami and Fort Lauderdale are now moving aggressively toward incentives for alternative designs. At the time this episode of Beyond Luxury was recorded, the City of Miami was already offering a 50% discount on building permits for projects incorporating a living seawall. Fort Lauderdale was voting on a 100% discount. The economic logic is straightforward: a living seawall eliminates the riprap mitigation requirement entirely, turning a cost center into a savings.

Freeman's entry into this space came not from an engineering background but from lived experience. She watched her Miami community flood while the legal and political system failed to produce practical solutions. The answer she arrived at — as detailed in this episode — was to bypass advocacy and build the infrastructure herself.

"I knew nothing about being a founder. I didn't know a single person who started a company, genuinely. I just literally Googled climate tech investors and started cold emailing them."

Freeman is also explicit about a dimension of this failure that goes beyond engineering: she is the only woman she has encountered working in coastal protection infrastructure. Men have dominated this space since its inception in 1904, which she argues is part of why the design conversation stalled. That context, and the broader stakes for luxury real estate along at-risk coastlines, are explored at length in the full episode on Beyond Luxury.