Half the country is a climate danger zone at this point.
No. Can you name one place that is not?
Yeah it sure is cheap living in the bread basket of the world, the san joaquin valley. My rent is 334. I even have housing assistance. Ag ag ag is all I hear here, and everyone has no idea how unsustainable industrialized agriculture is. Plus the droughts, the toxicity, the general poverty, and also valley fever.
Ah yes, the tried and true people move to where the jobs are strategy. Worked really well for globalization.
In actually reality, humans would rather become desert nomads than abandon their tribe.
Except everywhere is a climate danger zone.
Some places are being hit harder than others. All else being equal, people should move to the places being hit the least.
Wouldn’t a side effect of that, if done en masse, be property values and rent ballooning out of control in the safer areas?
A side-effect? No. You’re just describing climate-safe housing being more valuable. It’s always been more valuable.
In a functional market system, higher rents will result in more housing construction in those areas. I’m not delusional enough to think that the housing market is functional, but that’s a can of worms that will exist regardless of the climate problems or not.
Or to rephrase a bit: yes, if people all try to move to more climate-safe areas, then we’ll need to build more housing in the climate-safe areas for them to move into. Obviously.
Yes, and this will start happening within the next several years due to climate refugees, whether we plan for it or not.
This is difficult. Yes we should discourage further mis-investment in unsustainable locations. Including whole cities, which may still be liveable for a few more decades, but not centuries. On the other hand, by pushing down market sale prices, this penalises people whose ancestors moved there, long before we knew much about climate change. So maybe they should get some compensation or help to move, although on such timescales there are plenty of other ‘bad-luck’ factors that society doesn’t compensate.
This is how I feel but I could not think much beyond that it is difficult. Its like we have got to stop building and rebuilding in bad places but people there can’t just be left high and dry. I do sorta feel there should be somewhat of a cutoff on single family homes though given the mil plus things built on waterfronts and on mountains and such.
I think maybe a better option would be to simply ban new development of disaster-prone land. Looking to build a new house or subdivision? Look elsewhere. And maybe disincentivize rebuilding on the same lot your house used to be on, eg. insurance only pays half if you plan to stay.
But what happens when all those tens of millions of people who can’t get housing in their current state flood into low COL places where we still have good water and forest resources, where drought and major storms are significantly less of a concern, but where people from high cost areas can very easily buy all the cheap houses and land, preventing locals from ever being able to buy ever? I mean even the housing inflation since 2020 alone has priced most people out of ownership in my state, cuz our wages are super low.
Do we start cutting everything down throughout the Midwest to build up the same giant cities the coastal areas have? Do we start pulling all the ground and surface water up to accommodate the populations of California, Florida, Texas, Georgia, etc. that experience fire, flood, earthquake, tornado, or hurricane on a regular basis? Cuz that’s going to lead to drought and fire, too, and then nowhere will be safe/safer.
I don’t think getting people to leave those areas, mass-migration style, is a particularly good option, honestly… it’s just going to cause the problems to move with the huge populations. The only good option long-term is fixing the mess the rich have created. Or rather, forcing them to do it.
It’s now decades too late to choose between climate mitigation and adaptation, we have to do both. This includes that more people will inevitably migrate to more ‘climate-safe’ regions. The challenge is to help that process be more gradual and equitable, which includes some issues you raise. For example development of new homes creates opportunities, including jobs, but older landowners may benefit disproportionally.
This is a global issue, not specific to USA, but given that context, while I also have little sympathy for billionaires with seaside palaces in Florida, such people are few, and it’s also hard to feel sympathy for populations in the midwest who collectively voted for decades for climate-denying politicians who blocked effective policies, even influentially on a global scale.
Insurance companies tried to adjust their strategies 10 years ago to account for climate disasters, and they still underestimated the impact
