Louisiana may face a singular set of challenges in restoring its coast, but it is far from the only state being forced to confront the reality of global sea level rise and the problems associated with building on naturally shifting and sinking land.

Not long ago, I toured the beachfront communities of Ocean County, New Jersey, which was one of the fastest growing regions in the state before Superstorm Sandy tore through its coastal towns in the fall of 2012. “When they talk about Ground Zero, this is it,” said my guide, Stephen Acropolis. He’d parked his SUV outside the cavity of a house on a flooded-out street in Ortley Beach. Back at his office at the Toms River Municipal Utilities Authority, for which Acropolis serves as Executive Director, his colleague Len Bundra, the Authority’s GIS director, played me a video, shot soon after the hurricane, of a house that had been lifted by storm surge and deposited on the roof of a car near where we were stopped. The video recalled countless post-Katrina images taken in the Lower Ninth Ward and Lakeview, in New Orleans, and a year and half after Sandy, Ortley Beach didn’t look much better.

Stephens estimated 15 houses on the street would still need to be torn down. None appeared habitable. The main difference between the wreckage I saw in Ortley and elsewhere along New Jersey’s coastal plain and what I saw in post-Katrina New Orleans was the presence of sand.

“These are all man-made dunes here. They were all washed away,” Stephens said, pointing in the direction of the ocean. You couldn’t see the water because bulldozers were still hard at work pushing sand to rebuild the dominant form of storm protection in coastal New Jersey: sand dunes, which are essentially levees made from less solid material.

Communities like Ortley Beach, which is part of Toms River, and Brick, the town where Stephens was serving as mayor when Sandy hit, rest on or near the barrier islands and peninsulas that comprise some of New Jersey’s most expensive beach front property. If nature were allowed to take its course, New Jersey’s barrier islands would shift and disappear for many of the same reasons they do in Louisiana. Some wouldn’t appear on the map as they do today if they weren’t already so packed with homes and infrastructure.

“The similarity on coastlines throughout the world is that coasts are dynamic places,” said Tim Dillingham, executive director of the American Littoral Society, which is based on Sandy Hook, another Jersey barrier island. “They by their nature are always changing, whether that’s the flood delta of the Mississippi or the barrier islands off the Jersey coast.”

The Monmouth Beach Cultural Center, a forty-five-minute drive north up the Garden State Parkway, serves as a kind of interactive historical document to life on the shifting Jersey coast. The images on display in the few small rooms open to the public when I visited in February were mostly photographs, including one of a Monmouth Beach church as it appeared early last century, jutting out into the water. A Center employee told me the church eventually moved onto the dry side of the seawall that sits across the street, before eventually burning down in the 1950s.

“The sand was horrendous,” she said of Sandy, which flooded the Center. (The town library had yet to reopen.) “We had mounds of it everywhere. We still have photographs that are drying out upstairs.”

I drove north from Monmouth Beach to Sea Bright, for lunch. There were two people shooting pool in back of the storm-damaged Mad Hatter Pub & Pizzeria who informed me the kitchen had yet to reopen post-Sandy, and that the building would eventually be torn down. (I eventually found a slice in nearby Highlands, along with a number of still flood-shuttered businesses — not all of Highlands is on high ground.)

In Sandy Hook, built on a narrow barrier spit in Monmouth County, I stopped at the Sandy Hook Lighthouse. I learned from a National Park Service display that the lighthouse had been built in 1764 by New York merchants to protect shipping interests put in “constant danger” by the shifting sandbars in Lower New York Bay. The display included two map images, both of even lower resolution than Louisiana’s boot. One depicted the shape of Sandy Hook in 1764, the second what Sandy Hook looks like today. Their shapes are totally different. On the first map, the lighthouse sits 500 feet from Sandy Hook’s tip. Today, as the second map indicates, the lighthouse is 1.5 miles inland.