I live in the Caribbean, and we get a lot of hurricanes. A few every year.
We build for extreme weather. Our building codes (and common sense) protect us. My house has 10" of concrete on all our exterior walls and 1" concrete shingles on the roof, with no electrical system below waist height. We have 1/4" galvanized sheets of metal in the shed that we can bolt over all our windows when a cat-4 blows through. Don't get me wrong - a cat 2+ is still a giant pain in the ass to live through, but it's not a long-term problem.
Also, most people don't bother with home insurance (unless they have a mortgage) covering storm damage. You build your house in anticipation of repairing it and thus build better.
A lot of our current situation is only possible because we had an island-wide reset in 2004 (https://youtu.be/NzzeDGICjbA), that may be what it takes for Florida.
> We build for extreme weather
Huh, apparently “wind is responsible for greater property loss than water” [1].
I'm fine with them living there as long as the rest of us don't have to pay anything to bail them out when the inevitable hurricane or tornado comes through. These aren't like earthquakes and volcanoes that are relatively rare. They literally have a hurricane season. Imagine if we had a volcano season.
How about the rest of the eastern US? Billion dollar climate disasters are hitting everything, not just coastal cities in Florida and WUI towns in California. There was just massive flooding in Tennessee due to Hurricane Helene - are they at fault for living in "hurricane country"?
Climate related disasters are intensifying everywhere. What's now "inevitable" may have been unthinkable when some of these folks moved there.
Tennessee? The one with the famous river valley that used to catastrophically flood pretty regularly?
Californias only serious risk is the big one earthquake, but that could hit anywhere on the west coast.
West coast best coast.
And wildfires in many areas.
the wildfires could be mitigated by controlled burns but knowing the gov in California, it'll never happen.
eventually seismic activity will pick up too.
The other problem is the government can’t force controlled burns on private property. And there’s a lot of private property.
I almost lost my fire insurance last year because my neighbor doesn’t keep his property up, for decades. The agent initially rejected my renewal due to pictures taken from an inspection they did that showed a ton of downed trees but they were across my property line.
Should we extend this logic to charging California climate tax every summer, when their inevitable wildfire pollutes the air for two states over?
There are wildfires that happen in Oregon as well, why shouldn't there be a special cooperation between the western states to divvy up burden? But that should be a cooperation between just those states and not a federal matter.
Also, federal assistance programs largely transfers wealth from "blue" states to "red" states. Proposing less federal assistance or some kind of "fairer" tax program isn't going to persuade in the direction you think. It's just going to mean more money for blue states to handle their own internal matters.
Unironically yes
As a resident of Idaho and former resident of Utah who has spent years having to suffer from the smoke, I have a similar tendency to take this suggestion seriously. Not as a punishment, but as an incentive to improve things. California has neglected things like electrical grid repairs (PG&E anyone?) and controlled burns for many, many years, and now others who had nothing to do with it are paying for it with our health. I know people who are sensitive to the smoke and are essentially trapped in their houses during those times, and have to spend hundreds of dollars on air cleaners.
So, it's an interesting idea to change the choice from: either "don't spend the money" or "spend the money on prevention and fixing our shit"
To: from "the money is spent either way, might as well fix our shit."
If there's also one state that has demonstrated a willingness to use economics to encourage "correct" choices/behavior in consumers, it's California, so they should be real sympathetic to this idea :-)
I don't know if I'd support such a proposal or not. That would require some serious analysis and consideration of the details, but I don't think we should just dismiss the whole idea.
But even if everybody moved out of California, there would still be wildfires that blow smoke two states over.
For the fully natural wildfires, yes of course. It definitely happens.
But there are plenty of things that can be done to reduce the number of wildfires. Remember the fires caused by old and poorly maintained PG&E lines?
Honestly yes, particularly if the source is human, e.g. arson or PG&E. There is also a negligence factor in Sacramento avoiding controlled burns because they sold building permits up against every forest.
RE housing, I think it makes sense to price in some of the real risk factors tied to location. I have a friend whos is a wildfire behavior analyst and occasionally is paid to speak with mountain communities.
They are under strict orders not to say the blunt truth as they put it "you have one exit and in the middle of an unstoppable fuel load. in case of fire,you are all fucked and will die".
Instead they have to say something along the lines of that they should do everything within their economic power to reduce their fire risk.
On the part of pollution from wildfires, I'm much more ambivalent. A smoke filled West Coast was the norm in fall prior to California fire suppression.
> smoke filled West Coast was the norm in fall prior to California fire suppression
Genuinely curious for the evidence on this, if you have it.
What if we just federalize assistance and help everyone, regardless of where they live and what disasters they must contend with?
The right question is, what should the role of federal vs state vs local government be in natural disasters, especially those that occur often in an high-risk area?
Personal insurance must cover 100% of personal property loss, not governments (at any level) which are obliged to serve the population fairly and uniformly. Local government alone is responsible for rebuilding lost local infrastructure -- roads, power, sewer, and schools. Presumably state government would marshal emergency response from outlying communities, and perhaps coordinate financial resources to rebuild.
Federalizing recovery will pass along the cost of disaster recovery to everyone, not just those who build homes in the paths of hurricanes or in low lying areas which flood frequently. That is the role of personal property insurance. The companies who insure against flood, fire, and wind damage are a far better source of indemnifying the risk incurred by each home and neighborhood than is any government. Then the homeowner can choose to insure or not. But no government should pass along the costs of higher risk by some to others who chose a lower risk. That would clearly be unjust.
> What if we just federalize assistance and help everyone, regardless of where they live and what disasters they must contend with?
We get this mess. Local governments selling building permits in flood and wildfire zones because they get cash in the short term while others pay in the long.
We’re seeing in Florida, for example, a recapitulation of the financial crisis, down to bogus ratings of undercapitalised insurers allowing risky mortgages to be passed along to banks, Fannie and Freddie [1].
[1] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/24-051_f1329bc3-...
If anything, we should spend that money to help people willingly relocate, not encourage more people to move to increasingly dangerous areas. Hurricanes are getting worse and will continue to get worse for the foreseeable future.
What you are suggesting is subsidizing people to live in economically impractical regions, specifically regions we know will get worse and more costly. I don't see the logic there at all.
And well for both earthquakes and volcanoes the effected areas are now well known. It could be set that simply any new building moving forwards is not covered. There is plenty enough space in areas with lower risks, so people should be directed towards there. Eventually this will naturally empty the risk prone areas.
In California, we have a fire season.
For second homes, mansions on the beach... totally. There are a lot of impoverished people in the area that won't be able to move though. I have no idea what will happen, but short of some sort of assisted mass-relocation, it doesn't look good.
> a lot of impoverished people in the area that won't be able to move
Instead of providing assistance to rebuild, if the property is in a fucked place, provide money to move.
IMO it is wrong to sell this land to people. It is debt-laden land that will crush most people. It's like I sold you cheap land and you later find out you're going to get cancer there and insurance won't cover you.
How is this any different from selling people exploitive loans to desperate people?
It amazing that governments gives new building permits in such areas. Applies both is USA and Canada. Some areas near Montreal are know to be in the flood zone for centuries, yet I see new constructions popping here and there. Not a lot, but not zero. And then we, as all taxpayers, foot the bill.
Permits = tax dollars for the city directly. Most cities can only survive by further expanding their tax base and new growth put under long term bonds are one of the easier ways to do that.
And still building houses out of toothpicks.
No. This is not true at all. For the last 30+ years (basically post-Andrew) new building codes are pretty strict regarding structural ability to weather our storms. I feel safe in my home (built 2017) up to a Cat 4. Cat 4 is the magic number where I am going to worry a little beyond the loss of some lanai screening and roof shingles. More from flying debris.
Generally when you see major home destruction post hurricane those homes were built prior to the ‘90s or washed out by surge.
Those of us in Florida know…it’s not so much the wind we worry about, it’s the water from the surge. Helene’s damage in the Tampa Bay Area was mainly storm surge…the wind, which did occasionally gust beyond 65mph, wasn’t as much of an issue.
I don't understand this sentiment. Modern construction with lumber is great. It's cheap, relatively easy to fix/replace as needed, and a renewable resource.
It's part of the general sentiment that you see ancient buildings built out of stone in Europe so Americans building houses out of wood (of which there are plenty of examples that are hundreds of years old) are stupid.
I think this is reinforced by the stereotype of walls being generally punchable in the US(provided they are not load-bearing).
I have drywall in my apartment, but I would hurt myself trying to punch any of my walls.
This is more a drywall/sheetrock vs plaster thing. Plaster walls are much harder than drywall, but are more expensive to install with little practical benefit.
Those USA ones would be a 2-3 centuries old at most, no?
When living in EU, there was a church about 5 minutes waking distance that was ~900 years old lol
My house is over 200 years old which isn't really rare for the area of the country where I live. Yes, it's had a sequence of renovation/expansion work over the years--the last of which this summer actually involved chimney brickwork. Why should I care if it lasts 900 years or not?
Toothpick houses aren't like other lumber constructions, you can build sturdy with wood. Trees are extremely sturdy, thin branches are not.
Is rebuilding houses every 30-50 years eco friendly?
There is no need to rebuild lumber framed houses every 30-50 years. What gives you that idea? My house is 30 years old and in great shape. There are 100+ year old wood framed houses all over the US.
Water is the primary enemy of wood, keep the water out and wood frames houses will last generations. Modern pressure treated lumber lasts even longer.
Modern housing can survive very high winds, nothing can survive the flooding though. Look up the regulation changes post Andrew if you’re curious about modern housing in hurricane areas.
And what is that going to do about flooding and storm surge?
I've read this style of comment a lot lately. I'm an amateur wood worker, carpenter, and occasional framer; to call a wood structure toothpicks is a bit misleading. Houses are primarily composed of "sticks" aka 2x4s that are themselves composed in a series of frames. The frames put together are part of supporting the load of the forces put on top of the house, while beams distribute that load evenly. Places where there's peak load they'll reinforce with metal bracing. The last structural components of a house are sheething and siding, which are equally important.
The concept isn't dissimilar to timberframing which uses all the same mechanisms but leverages wood joinery instead of metal brackets and would still use stick framing and sheething. Timber frames have stood for hundreds of years.
Frankly, just because your house is built from solid structure masonry doesn't mean that it will withstand hurricane level forces or dense flying objects at tens or hundreds of mph.
Only house standing in Hiroshima was made out of stone. Stone is far superior as a material to withstand extreme winds, no hurricane comes close to a nuclear bomb. So there is really no reason to argue wood can be as strong, it can't, you can of course make a stone building that is as brittle as wood though.
https://www.expedia.com/Atomic-Bomb-Dome-Hiroshima-City-Cent...
Yeah, US housing does feel reminiscent of the “three little pigs” story. Except that the wolf is now an actual hurricane.
Does also explain why housing is relatively cheap - just not very durable.
Anecdotal personal aside: My wife and I considered moving to Tampa some years ago but what scared us away were sinkholes. Hurricanes, etc. were a concern, but when combined with the threat of sinkholes and other natural disasters, it made the home owners insurance more than what we wanted to pay, and so the decision not to move to Tampa became easier.
Its crazy to see the NY times talking about how people are thinking of leaving Florida. In reality people still are leaving NY state - we're down a million people since Covid started, Florida is up 1 million in the same time.
No word on home insurance rates? It's already completely insane in the SE (and other regions of the country) and can only get worse. I don't see how it's possibly sustainable or what will be done. With the current state of insurance, it's "normal" for your mortgage payment to jump every year or two to compensate for insurance increases in your escrow account.
In Florida insurance companies outright refuse to cover some places.
This is also true in Alabama, California, Louisiana, and Texas. In all of these states, the government has been forced to pick up the slack and offer insurance where none of the private insurance companies will.
40% year over year premium raises aren't sustainable. Are they justified? I don't think so because the legislature essentially eliminated protections against bad faith claim denials under the guise of deregulation and "tort reform" while inviting in fly-by-night insurers.
That's because the legitimate insurers ran the numbers, and concluded that they can't provide insurance at a price anyone can afford. So they left the state.
You get what you vote for, and Florida has been consistently voting for denial and corruption and mismanagement.
Instead of doing it's job, and doing anything to mitigate these disasters, or making hard decisions about where people should not be building, the government's too busy attacking homosexuals and the 'woke'. Its what the voters want, it's what the voters get.
The 'price of living in paradise'.
All of this bullshit about wokeness and sexualized books succeeded in distracting from the need to mitigate and from the thing you mentioned: Rampant corruption and mismanagement (and much more). And it's really blatant corruption and favoritism. The people at fault keep getting votes and claim supermajorities that remove all hope of fixing the faults.
Same, my home insurance in the SW is roughly $5000/year and then another $5000/year for wild fire insurance, and another $1000/yr for earthquake insurance... so about $11,000/yr for full home insurance. My home isn't unusually large for the area or anything like that: 4 bedrooms, no basement. We live below our means, so I don't know how most other people afford it.
We need some kind of insurance reform. Insurance works best when there is one extremely large pool of consumers to offset the risk of a catastrophic event in one small area of that pool. The risk pools keep getting smaller as private insurance companies stop offering high risk insurance in markets that suffer from floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and wild fires. Several state governments have been forced to pick up the slack by offering a small pool of high risk (and therefore high cost) insurance to those residents.
I get it, private insurance companies want to make as much profit as possible and those markets are killing their profits. They should have the right to pull out of those markets if they want, but I would propose that if a private insurance companies should not be able to selectively offer different insurance in different risk markets.
So, for example, if State Farm wants the privilege of selling auto insurance to California's 39 million residents, they also have to offer home/fire insurance (nearly all private insurance companies are not writing new home insurance policies in California due to high risk of wild fires, but they do offer other types of insurance). In other words, it should be all or nothing if they want to participant in any geographic market.
If they still don't want to offer it after such a law, that's ok because then the government's insurance pool can pickup the lower risk insurance (car, home, life, umbrella) to help offset the cost of the higher risk fire insurance (in the California example). The same would be true in other states that have single vertical government pools for different natural disasters (Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama).
I'm sure there are better ideas, but this is just one option that comes to mind.
Maybe insurance should be changed. Everyone has to get insurance, money goes to pool. Then claims are processed. At end of the year totals are tallied and if there has been more claims than paid in extra bill is send to everyone next January. If less claims than expected next years insurance is cheaper.
Right to run scheme for say 10 year period is auctioned off to lowest bidder.
You've described mutual insurance, except for auctioning scheme. When I moved to Florida I routinely got small checks every year from State Farm mutual on my auto policy. That went away a long time ago, like 20 years or something.
My mem and pep moved back to New England from around Tampa because insurance was killin em.
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You are grossly underestimating the force of sustained 250kmh winds (cat 4 hurricane), let alone the 400kph winds present in an F4 tornado. Even if your 900 year old building's walls could withstand that it would likely have no roof and be unlivable for an extended period of time.
Modern residential buildings in Florida etc are built to withstand these kinds of forces with hurricane glass and beefed up structures.
I’m thinking more of buildings from the mid and early 20th century, which are almost entirely concrete except for the windows.
Flooding is often the bigger problem.
We had a test of this when a tornado hit Czechia some time ago.
I think only the smaller commie blocks remained structurally sound.
For those of us who are unfamiliar with the building materials and styles of the area, what was different about those blocks that made them more structurally sound?
The square-cubed law. They're all reinforced concrete, but for the same wall thickness a smaller building will be stronger.
They're built out of large slabs of concrete with steel beams in between and have flat roofs - that's about it.
Terrible to live in, but neither a car at speed nor a falling tree can punch a hole in them.
Also they weren't built as close to each other as modern buildings are, so debris from one mostly don't reach the other.
Drill baby drill.
Under the infallible leadership of Chairman DeSantis, it is the best of all possible worlds.