Texas law
Texas has a law to protect the citizens of Texas concerning beach ownership. In Texas, you cannot own anything seaward of the vegetation line. Many houses that survived Alicia in 1983 had to be torn down, because they were now in front of the vegetation line.
This sound cruel, but it's really not. Texas takes the stance that the beaches belong to everyone, and here, you can't keep people from using that beach. My grandfather lived in New Era, MI, just about 3 miles from Lake Michigan. Wealthy people, mainly from Chicago, bought up all the beach front property, built houses and fences, and made it so that we could no longer even get on the beach there. That is exactly what Texas has outlawed.
In this case, the beach itself may have moved back as much as a hundred feet or more. That's what happens on barrier islands, which Galveston is.
And just by the by, both Ike and Gustav were pretty puny compared to "Isaac's Storm," the hurricane of 1900 that killed at least 8,000 people in Galveston and still had enough force to sink ships after it had traveled completely across the U.S. and went back out to see over New England.