An influx of Americans migrating to New England might incur a spillover north of the border into Montreal and Ottawa, which would only exacerbate their own housing booms[1][2] along with the rest of Canada[3].
Regarding Montreal - a year ago, we barely could find homes matching our needs within our budget within a ~1h, 1h30 radius around Montreal, let alone even get a single offer to stick. 50+ visits, 6-7 offers refused last I counted. We decided to stop looking for a while cause it's just getting ridiculous and impossible to manage - I can't in good conscience spend every single weekend driving around for hours with my 4yo just visiting homes...
Horrible moment to get into the market, unfortunately, but that's when we finally managed to cut down on student debt and put some money aside for that. Oh well, guess we won't own for another couple of years.
That’s a mischaracterization of what the paper says.
Quoting from it: “Climate change affects the severity of the fire season and the amount and type of vegetation on the land, which are major variables in predicting wildfires. However, humans contribute another set of factors that influence wildfires...”
To add to this point, wealthy people can afford to rebuild and insure, especially in areas that are highly sought after.
I lived near a coastal area that was a popular location for the very wealthy to own beach homes in. Hurricanes would regularly inundate the area, destroying homes and literally washing some of them away. However, like clockwork, the mansions on the beach would be rebuilt and by the summer it would be like nothing happened.
Meanwhile, in poorer adjacent neighborhoods, there are still abandoned remains of homes that were destroyed by hurricanes over a decade ago, because people couldn't afford to rebuild.
I was on a road-trip with my daughter when we drove past the (unfortunately named) Ashland, Talent and (also oddly named) Phoenix, Oregon on Highway 99 shortly after the fires had gone through. What a depressing thing to see. We just stared out the window at the embers of homes right off the freeway. It was unreal.
Pretty sure Google Maps is still showing satellite imagery from the fire.
With figures like a half million migrating from the North and New England to places like Florida [1], it makes the article seem a bit sensational. Florida is in no way a haven from the effects climate change.
It seems apprent that climate disaster is inevitable. Might as well experience coastal life before flooding makes the central/inner state areas the "new coast" haha
Isn’t the right answer “build as much housing/infrastructure in ‘safe’ areas as possible and do as little investment as possible on the ‘unsafe’ areas?”
People moving to Florida are doing the exact opposite of that.
My understanding is that the water will come up through the ground once Florida is below sea level. The geology will make it very difficult to prevent water from encroaching.
> The Floridian peninsula is a porous plateau of karst limestone
>It is one thing to celebrate science for its achievements and remarkable ability to explain a wide variety of phenomena in the natural world. But to claim there is nothing knowable outside the scope of science would be similar to a successful fisherman saying that whatever he can’t catch in his nets does not exist (15). Once you accept that science is the only source of human knowledge, you have adopted a philosophical position (scientism) that cannot be verified, or falsified, by science itself. It is, in a word, unscientific.
Mathematics is not a field of natural science, but it is a science too. I've seen it classified as "structural science" before. It operates on the same tenets of the scientific method (which, in one sentence, can be described as "methodically testing falsifiable hypotheses"). The only difference to natural science is that the testing does not involve interrogating the physical world through experiments.
There is also "political science" and "social science".
There are also those who advance the premise that mathematics is empirical, but for the context of the discussion I'm not sure that either is relevant.
Mathematical "testing" can be described as deduction.
We can present math axioms, but can we present scientific axioms?
Science as a religion or science as an all encompassing worldview is unscientific. This is better described as scientism.
If you examine the premises of climate doom, you'll find unscientific presuppositions. There are also necessarily moral implications to the goals of regulating consumption and population size. It becomes even less scientific for cynics who question if the climate scientist's "experiments" and models are incentivized to necessitate certain conclusions.
These are items which are best disputed in their respective arenas. "Believe the science" doesn't tell us anything about morality or the ideological progenitors of the climate movement. It narrows the issue while mischaracterizing science as a system of belief which can inform us on moral matters or the historical record of climate doom ideologues.
Forget your scare quotes around science. Just go on facts. Do you not accept the idea that we have terrible wild fires in the western us, that we had sudden and unexpected very hot weather in the west? Do you argue that there isn't a big change in the climate from human activities? Do you want to argue that the measurements of carbon dioxide growing in the atmosphere is fake, or maybe doesn't really affect the climate?
Or do you disagree that the level of the sea is rising as frozen water at the poles is putting more water into the sea? These are things that are reality. It doesn't matter if you think I have impure motives about something, am I stating things that are reality? You have prevented no information that these things are not reality, you are just arguing about mysterious dark motivations of people who are pointing out things that are really happening.
Estimates of when the next glacial period would naturally start range from about 2ky to 12ky, so too far away to worry about now.
The glacial transitions are somewhat predictable as they are triggered by favorable isolation conditions due to the eccentricity, obliquity and precession of the Earth. That's why we can have high confidence it won't happen in the next few hundred years.
People moving to Florida doesn't contradict anything. Florida has plenty of water, the whole state is designed around shade and air conditioning, and it's really rainy in the summer anyway. It's also not actually hotter than the other lowlands south of the Potomac/Ohio. (I grew up in Florida.) It's the places that suddenly need A/C to keep people alive that will have problems with buildings that aren't designed for it and tenants who can't afford it.
And yeah, there are hurricanes but at least the buildings are designed for it. The Northeast has sustained worse hurricane damage than Florida over the last decade, due partially to unprepared infrastructure and a migrating storm zone. (Three cheers for the Bahamas!)
> People moving to Florida doesn't contradict anything.
I wouldn't mind moving to FL, weather is great and I like the location for boating. But FL is very low and rising sea level is going to cause lots of problems, so I can't bring myself to invest any kind of money in real estate in FL if it's going to be flooding in a few decades.
Sea level rise over this century will be somewhere between 1 and 4 meters. That's bad for some places like Cape Coral. But most of Florida isn't that low. Sea level rise is a very slow, long-term problem. The major reachable consequences of global warming are heat waves and regional declines in precipitation. Also hard-to-predict ecosystem sensitivity questions (e.g. fires in California).
I'm not arguing that we shouldn't be concerned about the ocean, but it's a generational problem, not a personal problem, in the vast majority of cases.
And as the article above points out, Florida ground is porous, so even before sea levels rise enough to flood the street level, it is flooding from below which impacts both underground infrastructure and fresh water supplies.
The house I grew up in nearly flooded during Hurricane Frances and the surveyor lists the elevation as eight feet. If Florida's mean elevation was six feet, huge swathes of the state would be underwater every hurricane. Wikipedia lists the average elevation of Miami as 6 feet, which might be where that guy got confused.
I wasn't able to open the pro publica link. The second like has a thumbnail of the map, but I couldn't find a high resolution, zoom able version.
My takeaway from interpreting the thumbnail map is that the aquifer in the central valley of California and another big area in Texas is in trouble, mostly ok in the US otherwise.
So if I steer clear of the central valley and So Cal from LA all the way east to Texas or so (LA, Vegas, Arizona and texas) am I avoiding most of the trouble spots?
I'm just trying to get through thr fear mongering and get to brass tacks. Where can I buy a property that will likely still have a good well in 30 years, where can I not?
I've had trouble finding good data on this. Locally, farmers have had their water cut to the bone, upstream reservoirs are empty, and people are paying big bucks to drill their wells deeper. It's a notable change over 8 years. We're set for now as regular consumers, but I don't feel comfortable betting on the 15-year timeframe where I live now.
So we're eyeing the more sure things, e.g. far PNW, and NE US.
I certainly wouldn't move to an area that depends on the Colorado river, but that's just me.
And who knows--maybe something will trigger with climate change and Vegas suddenly gets rain soaked and verdant.
I can't talk about USA but personally I move from a major Italian city toward French Alps also (witch means, not only) for climate. My original city is not much suffering so far, floods happen sometimes but not in the part of the city I was living, but hot summer simply became too long and hot for my taste while winter rainy weather with now almost no snow is less and less appealing.
I have had various reasons, not just climate, I also want to live outside the city I consider about to became sky open prisons with density problems become so big and broad that they outweigh the benefits of being near, I also want nature etc. But climate was a part of the decision.
Not so many but others I know have made or are evaluating different relocation also for climatic reasons. So well, for us in the south/central Europe for now there is no much internal migration due to climate change, but start to happen and to be discussed not in talk show and interested lobby-setups but on casual middle-class citizens topics.
People are absolutely moving because of weather. The PNW has had terrible summers for about the past 5 years. Before there were decades of great mild summer weather, often July, Aug, Sept. These past few years there were smoke concentrations at deadly levels. Not just from one forest fire. Multiple fires every year. This is separate from the danger of a fire burning your house down. My coastal area wasn't right next to a fire, it was hundreds of miles away. The weather patterns were pulling air from the interior to the coast. If you live in Washington, Oregon, or northern California you were endangering your life if went outside. My nextdoor neighbor told me he was moving to get away from that. This was 2 years ago. Since then it has gotten worse. We've thought of selling our mountain cabin. Instead of the summer, people say our 4th season is the smoke season, only half jokingly.
At the same time, people keep moving here because we have so many jobs. There aren't that many people moving away, but lots more talk about it. I think about another 5 years will really accelerate the trend. We all know there have been historical times when there was some smoky air. Even Mark Twain wrote about it when he visited Seattle more than 100 years ago. Now it's happening every year, with severe impact. All my friends bought air conditions for the first time including me, and we also have air cleaners and air quality gauges for our inside air.
Most of the US would benefit from rezoning and a Highways Act-like deal to build stocks of affordable housing. Real estate investors and developers only seem to care to build relatively low-density 'luxury' housing, and fight affordable housing initiatives every step of the way. That seems to me like a market failure that could use some correction.
I am not a fan of more suburban sprawl which is what it sounds like you're advocating for. So, no thank you. Instead we should focus on building walkable neighborhoods that have higher density, less reliance on cars, and more emphasis on cycling+walking+public transit.
Affordable housing is housing that is passed down from generation to generation. We don't need to build "affordable housing". We need to build good high quality housing that will then get transferred down to other people through sales. (And with proper land value taxes - these will not be appreciating assets)
> Affordable housing is housing that is passed down from generation to generation. We don't need to build "affordable housing". We need to build good high quality housing that will then get transferred down to other people through sales. (And with proper land value taxes - these will not be appreciating assets)
This is just trickle down theory, but for housing instead. What actually happens is that old housing stock is bought by investors who then tear it down and develop it into luxury housing, and often that housing is then either used as speculative assets or bought by some of the world's richest people looking to store value.
Affordable housing doesn't mean "low-quality housing", it can mean high quality housing that is subsidized so that working class people can afford it, instead of just the adult children of the already wealthy, like many neighborhoods in cities are becoming/already are. Do it right, and that housing can become generational wealth, as well.
> This is just trickle down theory, but for housing instead. What actually happens is that old housing stock is bought by investors who then tear it down and develop it into luxury housing, and often that housing is then either used as speculative assets or bought by some of the world's richest people looking to store value.
Yet this theory is how actual housing has worked in many other places. Just because institutional investors have been manipulating the market in the US for a while doesn't mean it hasn't worked in the past in other places.
Again - land value tax + some other taxes like vacancy taxes would solve this issue. You wouldn't see the weird skyscrapers in Manhattan if such things existed.
Subsidized housing is not sustainable in the US. Fix the core issues like housing supply and this is a solvable problem. Things like subsidized housing just just fuck over the middle class more.
Housing as generational wealth is something we should also avoid. Just creates another aristocracy.
The laws of economics are real; increased supply will generally depress prices, damaging an asset's speculative value; increased prices will generally mean increased profits from building and thus attract more supply.
It is always something to find those who deny the laws of economics so vigorously, in the manner that many deny climate change. I am certain that you had a cold winter in Missouri last year, and I am certain that you have found a neighborhood where someone is renovating old housing stock into luxury homes which some weirdoes are renting unused. Nevertheless the general laws hold: the globe warms, and new supply lowers prices.
There are a finite number of people who will buy luxury homes of the sort you describe, they have finite amounts of money, many of them have alternatives in which to invest, and it is such a pathetically small and ineffective thing to make an campaign of class warfare against these people the centerpiece of one's housing policy, instead of simply encouraging more building by any reasonable means necessary, public or private, and removing barriers to that building.
> Real estate investors and developers ... fight affordable housing initiatives every step of the way
I don't think affordable-housing is actually considered a real "threat" to private developers in most of the nation, but suppose that it were.
Imagine that you had a business. The government says they'd like to fund a competitor.
It's not just any competitor! This new competitor will be empowered to use a ton of tax money to compete with you. This competitor will be headed by someone who is politically connected. The politically connected owner will be able to take a fat cut of this tax money, and donate it back to the political machine, to fortify their position. They can expect a cozy relationship with regulators and special approvals you can't get. If you're unlucky they will add legislation passed to support their business while hindering yours.
And, of course, their allies will insult you as villainous, greedy, and unreasonable. (Which you may be! And yet...)
Would you fight all of that, or would you embrace it?
— And if you think government projects aren't lousy with a corrupt politically-connected fat cats skimming money off the top, well, I have a delightful bridge to sell you!
> I don't think affordable-housing is actually considered a real "threat" to private developers in most of the nation, but suppose that it were.
My state has laws that say every new housing development must have affordable housing as a small percentage of the new housing that developers build.
Developers choose to ignore those laws completely, partially because the affordable housing is protested against by the people who live by, or plan to live in, the new luxury housing. They instead just build all of the luxury housing they want to, with none of the affordable housing required by law.
This has nothing to do with government projects, but stipulations for all new development.
> My state has laws that say every new housing development must have affordable housing as a small percentage of the new housing that developers build.
If your state is California, as I suspect it is, its housing policy is a miserable failure worthy only of derision and scorn. The price of housing is a bona fide humanitarian disaster, and the mandate you refer to is well known; it has solved almost nothing, what pathetically few solutions it has delivered are distributed by lottery (a key indicator of its abject failure), and — as your own description makes clear — it is just one more hurdle to make things more uncertain, drive up prices, and to drive away developers and the new construction they pay for.
You are attacking unicorns. My largish city also has similar requirements, I'm also not in California. We have a problem like a lot of large cities, there's not enough apartments or lower cost housing, thus we are losing our workforce step by step. We desperately need more lower cost housing here.
> No, I am not denying the climate changes, but it has always changed.
So you are denying human created climate change, which is basically what everyone is referring to when they say "climate change". Quibbling over semantics doesn't change the fact that you are, indeed, "denying climate change".
The previous phrase was "global warming". Unfortunately this didn't fit well with blaming cold weather events on a lack of regulation. Semantics indeed.
Anecdata but we moved to Ireland in part because it should fare comparatively well over the next several decades. Getting a second passport is useful too. My home, California, will probably look a lot more like Baja California by the time my kids are middle aged.
Both are big assumptions. Wildfires are already affecting the PNW and northern California extensively. SoCal does not have them because there are deserts in the east, not forest.
The reaction to Climate Change seems to be more along the lines of "pretend it doesn't exist" or "I'd rather die than change my lifestyle" than "let's hire a bunch of software developers to make sure this crisis doesn't end society as we know it".
You are the 2nd person to dismiss my Y2K example as irrelevant. The other one was deleted before I could reply.
Look up the Kuwaiti oil fires. They were supposed to burn for years and cause a global environmental disaster. We put them out in under a year and it has been essentially forgotten.
Okay, well we aren't putting out the metaphorical fire is my point. I wasn't trying to say Y2K isn't relevant, I'm just trying to say we understood what had to be done and did it. You can point to examples of disaster being averted, but that has no impact on the reality of Climate Change and our inaction towards it. Just because everything has turned out fine in the past doesn't mean it will this time, especially not how things are going now.
Can you elaborate on how easy it is? I’m ignorant about the space, but global coordination (agreeing to reduce carbon emission) of any kind seems quite challenging.
The last two wild fire seasons made it clear that, for (2), you'll need to move a lot further than a few hundred miles to avoid climate change. Most of the US will have severe (the type that kill people) climate issues according to current projections.
This was a terrible, very nearly statistics-free article (beyond one hand-wavey figure about possible future migration by 2100). It had about as much relevance and impact as stating that mounting fears of dog bites cause some to rethink living in neighborhoods with dogs. It's not even interesting as two case studies, if that was what it was attempting. This article was pure drivel.
That said, count me as one who is migrating due, at least partially, to fears of climate change, from a low coastal region further inland. There are other, and weightier, factors involved in the move, but climate change rendering my current town uninhabitable in the next few decades is one of them, and an important one. I would love to see the article this should have been, examining polling, statistics, and drawing possible inferences.
Build better homes and you won't have to really deal with the issues. Things like ERVs with HEPA filters and homes that are airtight make these wildfires a non-issue for breathing. Things like making defensible land and better housing materials also make wildfires mostly irrelevant. Same for energy concerns if power goes out due to PG&E cutting you off over here in SV - get solar + battery backup (upside - you pay less money to the fuckers at PG&E now too). Obviously you need to worry about a variety of other things but most things can be addressed by just making a better home.
Problem is - no one knows these things to start and then no one wants to spend the money or effort to do it. (I do not blame them on the money/effort front to some extent - contractors know that these things are something they can gouge customers on because the demand is high and the supply of installers is low) Instead of doing it themselves or what not though, they're focused on complaining and then trying to justify their move post-facto. Let's not ignore that where they moved from in Oregon is much more expensive now than where they ended up in NH - this likely had a serious cause with the pandemic going on full force. Their rental burned down and then they couldn't afford a home in Ashland anymore.
Do you go outside when it's raining? Blizzard? Hailing? Cat 4 winds? Probably not. Treat it the same. Go out for when you need to.
Idk why we treat smoke so differently than a blizzard or other such natural phenomena. I'm guessing it's because your home isn't airtight and so it actually affects you a lot more than when it's just raining - cause - surprise - homes are built to be watertight.
Yeah, I've experience both of those. I don't know what the long term impact of exposure is to that, but I'd be surprised if it's as bad as being exposed to toxic air.
California has been exporting poor people for years. Texas is one of the states they move to. Florida is a destination for retirees due to the temperate weather and tax policies, so could correlate to an aging population.
The weather in California is pretty comfortable year around which suits the homeless well. Many states are scorching hot or freezing cold some time of the year.
California doesn't import homeless people, it creates them through its special sauce of a white-hot economy and zero tolerance for housing construction.
I haven't been able to find data like that to show if they are poor or wealthy.
I suspect poor is the only demographic not moving, which is a general migration rule. Moving costs $. Folks like Elon Musk moving to Texas probably brought significant numbers of wealthy folks with him.
Not to mention, when work from home became an option. The elites of california moved to texas. Perhaps it was poor people before, during covid that changed would be my guess.
>2021 data or the 2020 census? The latter is frankly poor quality data. I wouldn't use it as a primary source.
What arguments do you have suggesting it's poor quality?
Also I'm not sure there's any good arguments. It's obvious covid restrictions easing in florida and texas quite early and might I say successfully will play a significant role in why this happened.
Not to mention the significant economic windfall that they will gain for having done so.
COVID-19 policies in different states is completely irrelevant to the 2020 census -- the census was done using pre-pandemic data. Hence why I consider the results highly misleading relative to our current world.
For Illinois a contributing factor is poor governance consisting of high taxes, massive unfunded state obligations, a single party legislature that cemented its power by gerrymandering districts, etc.
I would caution these people who are rushing to move to the Northeast without knowing what they signed up for. I was born in the Northeast, and I don't mind the high heat temperatures of the desert compared to the very real dangers of freezing to death during a blizzard or snowstorm.
These people are in for a rude awakening. They've never experienced what it's like when a massive blizzard buries all the roads in snow, and you cannot drive any further. Or the experience of walking 2 miles in the snow, abandoning your car during said blizzards. And hurricanes WILL knock out your power, sometimes trapping you indoors when trees are uprooted or worse completely flooding your house/apartment.
I lived in the mountains of California once. We have similar things like that happen too. The thing is, you can plan for snow, and you can plan for the power being out. It happened to me a few times.
In the coastal mountains, you can even plan for flooding events near rivers, as long as you aren't in a floodplain or literally next to the river.
Fire and water shortage, that's practically impossible to plan for. The former will wipe you out. The latter requires coordination at a state level – don't get started on water politics.
There are fireproof structures, people in eastern Washington are starting to build them in small numbers. Concrete building material, don't build it surrounded by trees and bushes. Fireproof window stuff.
Lived in Wisconsin for 38 years. I don't think I even know anyone who's had to abandon their car in a blizzard. I've heard of this happening in places that normally don't have snow, but never here. How does that even happen? Blizzards don't just show up out of nowhere. Usually the news is talking about it 24 hours before it hits.
I've never heard any person I know utter anything about fearing climate change. I call BS on "climate fears mount". If that were true we'd see very public figures who own ocean front properties sell them, and we'd see ocean front property prices plummet. Until that happens, I won't believe that "climate fears mount".
> If that were true we'd see very public figures who own ocean front properties sell them, and we'd see ocean front property prices plummet.
Humans are really good at ignoring problems until they come to a head. Even when that happens, they try to bargain around it - just look at flood plain insurance.
Leaders tend to be rich, and will do rich people things. Obama, Trump, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and the like can afford to relocate away from the coast when it becomes necessary. Or to lobby for government intervention like sea walls and bailouts.
The problems of climate change will disproportionately affect the poor. The rich will be fine, and their purchases will reflect this.
For wealthy people who can afford multiple properties, and to up and move whenever they please, why would rising sea levels matter to them? Both properties could collapse into a sinkhole tomorrow and it would be a mere annoyance. The fact they own them is no evidence they aren't aware that they might not be around in 50 years. For someone looking for a second property, closing on retirement, worrying about inheritance for their children, the thought process is entirely different.
Huh. Everyone I know in western states is extremely worried about climate change's current impact on their health and safety. Are you on the east coast or something? Otherwise, I'd think the smoke would be enough to make people worried.
For the record, I'm in ~northern Europe, and plan to eventually retire to warmer climes. Observing the intensifying weather, I am most definitely looking at how the change in sea levels, ambient temperatures and more powerful storms will affect my future choice of location.
Immediate sea front properties are out of the question. Same for low lands. Forest covered or at least shrubberied hills, outside of but somewhat higher than most port towns, are looking ever more enticing.
Something in common in these stories is that the people involved want to live out in the woods, or near them in the urban-wildlife boundary. Yes, fire is going to make that a thing for the rich – in California. Or just true hippie types who revel in impermanence, and (truly) owning almost nothing of monetary value.
The big thing that California needs to plan for is the water shortages. The states' cities are going to need desalination. Most of its people live in the cities or denser suburban areas like Santa Rosa and are in lesser danger from fire. There are "soft" effects too, like feeling like you're under siege every autumn, and a general loss of quality-of-life, but the water issue is going to be existential.
Oregon needs to consider that a great chunk of the state is dependent on logging for livelihood, and the changing climate is going to dramatically reshape those forests (if not just burn down half the stock of trees). The PNW has a much larger rural population than California by percentage, and for that reason, they will be increasingly exposed to weather-whiplash-induced wildfires, drought, and heat events.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] thread[1] https://montrealgazette.com/business/local-business/real-est...
[2] https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ottawas-housing-ma...
[3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/canadas-rate-hikes-jeopardize-h...
Horrible moment to get into the market, unfortunately, but that's when we finally managed to cut down on student debt and put some money aside for that. Oh well, guess we won't own for another couple of years.
[1] https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/
The EPA has "Climate Change Impacts by Region" that also breaks down information by sector and by state. [2]
[1] https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/
[2] https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/climate-impacts/climat...
https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/what-the-world-will-look-l...
Bill Gate's San Diego beach front home: https://nypost.com/2022/03/23/bill-gates-is-turning-43m-mans...
Obama's home on the coast of Martha's Vineyard (an island in the Atlantic): https://vineyardgazette.com/news/2019/12/04/president-obama-...
That's just "be rich", which is a solution to many problems.
Quoting from it: “Climate change affects the severity of the fire season and the amount and type of vegetation on the land, which are major variables in predicting wildfires. However, humans contribute another set of factors that influence wildfires...”
Obama's Hawaii property includes a seawall.
I'd also note that the rich can spend $25 million on temporary enjoyment in a way you or I cannot. For example: a $6 million quinceañera https://www.dallasnews.com/news/texas/2017/12/12/texas-attor...
I lived near a coastal area that was a popular location for the very wealthy to own beach homes in. Hurricanes would regularly inundate the area, destroying homes and literally washing some of them away. However, like clockwork, the mansions on the beach would be rebuilt and by the summer it would be like nothing happened.
Meanwhile, in poorer adjacent neighborhoods, there are still abandoned remains of homes that were destroyed by hurricanes over a decade ago, because people couldn't afford to rebuild.
That's not the case for Hawaii and Florida, for now. The Army Corps of Engineers is considering fortifying Miami, though. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/us/miami-fl-seawall-hurri...
Hawaii can move uphill in a way Florida and The Netherlands cannot. Disruptive and expensive, but possible.
A 10-20 foot sea wall will do just fine. It’s just expensive.
And again, these people live in a different world. One where you can blow $6 million on a quinceañera, with a value of $0 the next day.
Pretty sure Google Maps is still showing satellite imagery from the fire.
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.2414708,-122.7733287,616m/da...
Aka: the 5 people the journalist built the story around. Enjoyable read despite me being an eternal hater.
[1] https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/2022/02/08/covid-pa...
Isn’t the right answer “build as much housing/infrastructure in ‘safe’ areas as possible and do as little investment as possible on the ‘unsafe’ areas?”
People moving to Florida are doing the exact opposite of that.
I do wonder tho, like … the Netherlands exist. Is it not possible to do that in Florida (in theory?)
People always say “well Florida is under sea level you doofuses” but loads of cities build stuff below sea level or just raise the ground outright.
They already have problems where sea water infiltrates some neighborhoods. It basically creates salt water springs.
> The Floridian peninsula is a porous plateau of karst limestone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_Florida
The science does not support that. Your particular corner of the planet is not indicative of the world's changing climate:
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/does-global...
But science is now religion I guess.
I moved to warmer country to save on energy bills. Our politicians say hot shower is a luxury now!
https://sciencereligiondialogue.org/resources/what-is-scient...
>It is one thing to celebrate science for its achievements and remarkable ability to explain a wide variety of phenomena in the natural world. But to claim there is nothing knowable outside the scope of science would be similar to a successful fisherman saying that whatever he can’t catch in his nets does not exist (15). Once you accept that science is the only source of human knowledge, you have adopted a philosophical position (scientism) that cannot be verified, or falsified, by science itself. It is, in a word, unscientific.
There are also those who advance the premise that mathematics is empirical, but for the context of the discussion I'm not sure that either is relevant.
Mathematical "testing" can be described as deduction.
We can present math axioms, but can we present scientific axioms?
Science as a religion or science as an all encompassing worldview is unscientific. This is better described as scientism.
If you examine the premises of climate doom, you'll find unscientific presuppositions. There are also necessarily moral implications to the goals of regulating consumption and population size. It becomes even less scientific for cynics who question if the climate scientist's "experiments" and models are incentivized to necessitate certain conclusions.
These are items which are best disputed in their respective arenas. "Believe the science" doesn't tell us anything about morality or the ideological progenitors of the climate movement. It narrows the issue while mischaracterizing science as a system of belief which can inform us on moral matters or the historical record of climate doom ideologues.
Or do you disagree that the level of the sea is rising as frozen water at the poles is putting more water into the sea? These are things that are reality. It doesn't matter if you think I have impure motives about something, am I stating things that are reality? You have prevented no information that these things are not reality, you are just arguing about mysterious dark motivations of people who are pointing out things that are really happening.
There are limitations to science.
The thing you linked seems completely irrelevant to this discussion.
The glacial transitions are somewhat predictable as they are triggered by favorable isolation conditions due to the eccentricity, obliquity and precession of the Earth. That's why we can have high confidence it won't happen in the next few hundred years.
https://judithcurry.com/2016/10/24/nature-unbound-i-the-glac...
http://clivebest.com/blog/?p=7344
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/ipcc_far_wg_...
And yeah, there are hurricanes but at least the buildings are designed for it. The Northeast has sustained worse hurricane damage than Florida over the last decade, due partially to unprepared infrastructure and a migrating storm zone. (Three cheers for the Bahamas!)
I wouldn't mind moving to FL, weather is great and I like the location for boating. But FL is very low and rising sea level is going to cause lots of problems, so I can't bring myself to invest any kind of money in real estate in FL if it's going to be flooding in a few decades.
I'm not arguing that we shouldn't be concerned about the ocean, but it's a generational problem, not a personal problem, in the vast majority of cases.
See https://www.climatecentral.org/news/the-future-is-now-for-se...
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/us-states-with-the-lowes...
https://vacationidea.com/florida/highest-elevation-in-florid...
https://johnenglander.net/florida-is-not-going-underwater-an...
The house I grew up in nearly flooded during Hurricane Frances and the surveyor lists the elevation as eight feet. If Florida's mean elevation was six feet, huge swathes of the state would be underwater every hurricane. Wikipedia lists the average elevation of Miami as 6 feet, which might be where that guy got confused.
https://www.pewtrusts.org/trend/archive/spring-2019/a-map-of...
My takeaway from interpreting the thumbnail map is that the aquifer in the central valley of California and another big area in Texas is in trouble, mostly ok in the US otherwise.
So if I steer clear of the central valley and So Cal from LA all the way east to Texas or so (LA, Vegas, Arizona and texas) am I avoiding most of the trouble spots?
I'm just trying to get through thr fear mongering and get to brass tacks. Where can I buy a property that will likely still have a good well in 30 years, where can I not?
So we're eyeing the more sure things, e.g. far PNW, and NE US.
I certainly wouldn't move to an area that depends on the Colorado river, but that's just me.
And who knows--maybe something will trigger with climate change and Vegas suddenly gets rain soaked and verdant.
I have had various reasons, not just climate, I also want to live outside the city I consider about to became sky open prisons with density problems become so big and broad that they outweigh the benefits of being near, I also want nature etc. But climate was a part of the decision.
Not so many but others I know have made or are evaluating different relocation also for climatic reasons. So well, for us in the south/central Europe for now there is no much internal migration due to climate change, but start to happen and to be discussed not in talk show and interested lobby-setups but on casual middle-class citizens topics.
At the same time, people keep moving here because we have so many jobs. There aren't that many people moving away, but lots more talk about it. I think about another 5 years will really accelerate the trend. We all know there have been historical times when there was some smoky air. Even Mark Twain wrote about it when he visited Seattle more than 100 years ago. Now it's happening every year, with severe impact. All my friends bought air conditions for the first time including me, and we also have air cleaners and air quality gauges for our inside air.
This is an issue across the US. We need to work on this generally.
Why it's bad:
Suburbia is subsidized (many articles on HN similar to this video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
Climate change effects and other: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO6txCZpbsQ
Affordable housing is housing that is passed down from generation to generation. We don't need to build "affordable housing". We need to build good high quality housing that will then get transferred down to other people through sales. (And with proper land value taxes - these will not be appreciating assets)
> Affordable housing is housing that is passed down from generation to generation. We don't need to build "affordable housing". We need to build good high quality housing that will then get transferred down to other people through sales. (And with proper land value taxes - these will not be appreciating assets)
This is just trickle down theory, but for housing instead. What actually happens is that old housing stock is bought by investors who then tear it down and develop it into luxury housing, and often that housing is then either used as speculative assets or bought by some of the world's richest people looking to store value.
Affordable housing doesn't mean "low-quality housing", it can mean high quality housing that is subsidized so that working class people can afford it, instead of just the adult children of the already wealthy, like many neighborhoods in cities are becoming/already are. Do it right, and that housing can become generational wealth, as well.
Yet this theory is how actual housing has worked in many other places. Just because institutional investors have been manipulating the market in the US for a while doesn't mean it hasn't worked in the past in other places.
Again - land value tax + some other taxes like vacancy taxes would solve this issue. You wouldn't see the weird skyscrapers in Manhattan if such things existed.
Subsidized housing is not sustainable in the US. Fix the core issues like housing supply and this is a solvable problem. Things like subsidized housing just just fuck over the middle class more.
Housing as generational wealth is something we should also avoid. Just creates another aristocracy.
The laws of economics are real; increased supply will generally depress prices, damaging an asset's speculative value; increased prices will generally mean increased profits from building and thus attract more supply.
It is always something to find those who deny the laws of economics so vigorously, in the manner that many deny climate change. I am certain that you had a cold winter in Missouri last year, and I am certain that you have found a neighborhood where someone is renovating old housing stock into luxury homes which some weirdoes are renting unused. Nevertheless the general laws hold: the globe warms, and new supply lowers prices.
There are a finite number of people who will buy luxury homes of the sort you describe, they have finite amounts of money, many of them have alternatives in which to invest, and it is such a pathetically small and ineffective thing to make an campaign of class warfare against these people the centerpiece of one's housing policy, instead of simply encouraging more building by any reasonable means necessary, public or private, and removing barriers to that building.
I don't think affordable-housing is actually considered a real "threat" to private developers in most of the nation, but suppose that it were.
Imagine that you had a business. The government says they'd like to fund a competitor.
It's not just any competitor! This new competitor will be empowered to use a ton of tax money to compete with you. This competitor will be headed by someone who is politically connected. The politically connected owner will be able to take a fat cut of this tax money, and donate it back to the political machine, to fortify their position. They can expect a cozy relationship with regulators and special approvals you can't get. If you're unlucky they will add legislation passed to support their business while hindering yours.
And, of course, their allies will insult you as villainous, greedy, and unreasonable. (Which you may be! And yet...)
Would you fight all of that, or would you embrace it?
— And if you think government projects aren't lousy with a corrupt politically-connected fat cats skimming money off the top, well, I have a delightful bridge to sell you!
My state has laws that say every new housing development must have affordable housing as a small percentage of the new housing that developers build.
Developers choose to ignore those laws completely, partially because the affordable housing is protested against by the people who live by, or plan to live in, the new luxury housing. They instead just build all of the luxury housing they want to, with none of the affordable housing required by law.
This has nothing to do with government projects, but stipulations for all new development.
If your state is California, as I suspect it is, its housing policy is a miserable failure worthy only of derision and scorn. The price of housing is a bona fide humanitarian disaster, and the mandate you refer to is well known; it has solved almost nothing, what pathetically few solutions it has delivered are distributed by lottery (a key indicator of its abject failure), and — as your own description makes clear — it is just one more hurdle to make things more uncertain, drive up prices, and to drive away developers and the new construction they pay for.
So you are denying human created climate change, which is basically what everyone is referring to when they say "climate change". Quibbling over semantics doesn't change the fact that you are, indeed, "denying climate change".
If that’s the case, maybe a good real estate investment? (assuming low wildfire and rising seas risks)
There is a lot of fuel left to burn.
Look up the Kuwaiti oil fires. They were supposed to burn for years and cause a global environmental disaster. We put them out in under a year and it has been essentially forgotten.
1. Coordinate global action among 200+ countries to immedietely end the use of carbon emissive activities
2. Rent a u-haul and sign an apartment lease in a couple hundreds miles away
That said, count me as one who is migrating due, at least partially, to fears of climate change, from a low coastal region further inland. There are other, and weightier, factors involved in the move, but climate change rendering my current town uninhabitable in the next few decades is one of them, and an important one. I would love to see the article this should have been, examining polling, statistics, and drawing possible inferences.
It's Wired. The magazine for tech dilettantes who like bright colors.
Problem is - no one knows these things to start and then no one wants to spend the money or effort to do it. (I do not blame them on the money/effort front to some extent - contractors know that these things are something they can gouge customers on because the demand is high and the supply of installers is low) Instead of doing it themselves or what not though, they're focused on complaining and then trying to justify their move post-facto. Let's not ignore that where they moved from in Oregon is much more expensive now than where they ended up in NH - this likely had a serious cause with the pandemic going on full force. Their rental burned down and then they couldn't afford a home in Ashland anymore.
Compare prices in Enfield, NH (https://www.redfin.com/city/22657/NH/Enfield/housing-market) to Ashland, OR (https://www.redfin.com/city/803/OR/Ashland/housing-market).
It's all bullshit, IMO.
Unless you're one of those weirdos who... goes outside.
Idk why we treat smoke so differently than a blizzard or other such natural phenomena. I'm guessing it's because your home isn't airtight and so it actually affects you a lot more than when it's just raining - cause - surprise - homes are built to be watertight.
Because it turns the air into poison.
California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia are all losing representation in the house. Due to losing population.
Is it climate fears? I would tend to agree that those states who are losing people will also be the states in which they care about climate.
Or is it because of poor governance?
I suspect poor is the only demographic not moving, which is a general migration rule. Moving costs $. Folks like Elon Musk moving to Texas probably brought significant numbers of wealthy folks with him.
Not to mention, when work from home became an option. The elites of california moved to texas. Perhaps it was poor people before, during covid that changed would be my guess.
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.religion.scientology/c/0Uq5J...
Though certainly covid fostered migration of privileged remote workers as well.
What arguments do you have suggesting it's poor quality?
Also I'm not sure there's any good arguments. It's obvious covid restrictions easing in florida and texas quite early and might I say successfully will play a significant role in why this happened.
Not to mention the significant economic windfall that they will gain for having done so.
Also a very good point. I wasn't saying the covid restrictions factor was the only option.
And the climate.
Towns such as Lismore in northern NSW have been evacuated multiple times. As a result, many people who lived there have permanently relocated.
Maybe they are migrating to get away from the doomsday cult which has a negative outlook on everything.
These people are in for a rude awakening. They've never experienced what it's like when a massive blizzard buries all the roads in snow, and you cannot drive any further. Or the experience of walking 2 miles in the snow, abandoning your car during said blizzards. And hurricanes WILL knock out your power, sometimes trapping you indoors when trees are uprooted or worse completely flooding your house/apartment.
In the coastal mountains, you can even plan for flooding events near rivers, as long as you aren't in a floodplain or literally next to the river.
Fire and water shortage, that's practically impossible to plan for. The former will wipe you out. The latter requires coordination at a state level – don't get started on water politics.
Humans are really good at ignoring problems until they come to a head. Even when that happens, they try to bargain around it - just look at flood plain insurance.
The problems of climate change will disproportionately affect the poor. The rich will be fine, and their purchases will reflect this.
Bill Gate's San Diego beach front home: https://nypost.com/2022/03/23/bill-gates-is-turning-43m-mans...
Obama's home on the coast of Martha's Vineyard (an island in the Atlantic): https://vineyardgazette.com/news/2019/12/04/president-obama-...
Immediate sea front properties are out of the question. Same for low lands. Forest covered or at least shrubberied hills, outside of but somewhat higher than most port towns, are looking ever more enticing.
The big thing that California needs to plan for is the water shortages. The states' cities are going to need desalination. Most of its people live in the cities or denser suburban areas like Santa Rosa and are in lesser danger from fire. There are "soft" effects too, like feeling like you're under siege every autumn, and a general loss of quality-of-life, but the water issue is going to be existential.
Oregon needs to consider that a great chunk of the state is dependent on logging for livelihood, and the changing climate is going to dramatically reshape those forests (if not just burn down half the stock of trees). The PNW has a much larger rural population than California by percentage, and for that reason, they will be increasingly exposed to weather-whiplash-induced wildfires, drought, and heat events.
It will just export less food. There aren't enough farmers to influence Sacramento, and the farmers use the vast majority of the water.