Mario Canario's phone is full of water. Salt water backing up through storm drains on Market Street, pooling until the road disappears, creeping toward the houses that line Belcher Cove in Warren, Rhode Island. He photographs the floods the way some people photograph their children. Regularly. Because the thing keeps changing and he wants proof.

His father, a Portuguese immigrant, built the family home on this cove. Built it the way you build when you've crossed an ocean and intend to stay. Mario never left. He bought the property next door. Two houses, one family, one piece of shoreline that now floods at least once a month.

The water comes up through the infrastructure itself, backflowing through underground storm pipes and bubbling out of a drain on Market Street, turning the road into a shallow bay. The park at Jamiel goes under. Emergency vehicles can't get through. Cars drive into it before drivers realize what they're in.

This is what Mario records. The tide on a weekday.

The plan that includes his house

Warren knows what's happening to Mario's street. A 2021 study projected the Market Street neighborhood stands to lose $126 million in business revenue and $86 million in buildings by century's end, including 541 housing units. The response was a plan called Market to Metacom, designed by town planner Bob Rulli: buy out roughly 400 buildings in the flood zone over 70 years, return the land to its natural state, and build new affordable housing on higher ground along Metacom Avenue. Displaced residents would get first access. Total estimated cost: $138 million across four phases. Mario's two houses are among the 400.

The plan was designed to keep families in Warren rather than hand them a check and scatter them. That distinction matters on a street where people built with the intention of permanence. But Rulli left the position in 2023. Nobody has replaced him. The plan's timeline, on the town's own website, reads "TBD."

No buyouts have occurred. An $18 million NOAA grant that would have started the process wasn't awarded. A USDA grant for storm and tidal flooding wasn't awarded either. Warren is a town of 11,150 people competing for federal dollars against cities with entire grant-writing departments. At a council meeting, member Louis Rego looked around the room and asked a question nobody could answer:

Meanwhile Mario's phone keeps filling. Each high tide adds to the archive. The plan exists on paper. The water exists on his screen.

Researchers walk his street

In fall 2024, the University of Rhode Island received a $1.5 million NSF grant to work with Warren on coastal resilience. Last November, researchers and community members walked the neighborhood together, tracing the flooding paths that Mario has been documenting alone with his phone for years. The project team plans to survey residents about what flood strategies they'd prefer and what they'd be willing to pay for.

Emi Uchida, the project's principal investigator, has acknowledged what everyone on Market Street already feels. Residents, she said, "do not want another study of a study." When the town council discussed yet another infrastructure study last May, members debated whether it was even necessary given how many similar efforts had already been conducted. They approved it anyway. One firm responded to the request for qualifications.

Warren's wastewater treatment plant sits on the shoreline. NOAA projects sea level at Warren to rise 1.6 feet by 2050. The math that produced the plan is sound. The money that would make the plan real has not materialized. Whether the URI project can bridge that gap, or become another layer of documentation on a street already drowning in documentation, is genuinely unclear.

What the phone holds

Every photograph Mario takes is evidence. An attendance record, too. A man standing in his neighborhood, proving what the water does to the place his father built.

I keep thinking about that practice, because there's something in it the plan can't contain. "Managed retreat" makes sense on a planning map. Property values, phased timelines, projected tax revenue from the redeveloped Metacom corridor. All of that is accounted for. But there is no line item for what it means to stand next to a house your immigrant father built with the specific intention of permanence and hear the most rational thing is to leave. Anyone who grew up in a family that crossed borders to build something knows the weight of that word, leave, applied to the thing that was supposed to be the arrival.

The plan is probably right. The water doesn't care about that. And Mario, who has watched it rise for years, who has the photos to prove it, who lives in Evacuation Zone A on a street that floods with the moon, is still there.

His phone fills with floods. He hasn't moved.