Perhaps the most interesting part of the article:
Man, this thread is reminding me that Lemmy is even worse than Reddit when it comes to being populated by people who have strong opinions about things they don’t understand at all.
I FUCKING LOVE MAGNETS
How so?
So many people here are speaking as if real estate insurance companies are doing something evil by pulling out of markets where it’s impossible for them to make a profit or even break even. The companies are not reneging on any obligations, just turning away customers they can’t afford to insure, and people here are responding by saying things like all insurance is a scam, and the insurance companies abusing their customers to enrich their shareholders.
I get the feeling they’re taking their opinions of the private health insurance market and applying them to insurance in general, and in doing so they’re demonstrating a lack of understanding of what insurance is for, why it’s required for certain purchases, and why people choose to do business with insurance companies even when they don’t have to
Yeah, this is why we shouldn’t allow for-profit insurance companies in the market.
This is what fucking insurance is supposed to be for. It’s not a way of making obscene profits. It’s a way of making reasonable profits providing a service people need.
The US government ought to require insurers to ensure everywhere had a reasonable cost, or get out of the fucking business. They ought to require a base rate everywhere across the nation. Let everyone see what these fuckers are up to.
In Florida the state insures the highest risk people. It’s the same damn thing. Should we let the insurance companies have the low risk clients while we the people fund all the high risk clients?
That’s bullshit.
It’s a way of making reasonable profits providing a service people need.
And 6 months ago they saw that they were likely to take major losses insuring homes in that area so they stopped renewing policies. So the options were to use the last-resort state provided insurance (FAIR Act), go uninsured, or move. A lot of people didn’t switch to the state insurance.
They’ve been collecting insurance payments on those houses WITHOUT LOSSES for many months. What happened to the money they paid over the years? Just consumed and forgotten by insurance companies? You pay $2000 a month for 360 months and then they decide to drop you and you have no coverage? That $700k+ you spent doesn’t count?
With life insurance there Whole Life, where you pay until you’ve paid enough to make the value of the policy and then you stop. This problem could CERTAINLY be fixed. It will have to be legislated, though.
That’s an entirely different argument, and your math is way off.
You pay $2000 a month for 360 months
I’m pretty sure the insurance is closer to $2000 per year. So $2000 per year for 30 years is $60000, which is not going to cover the total loss on a $300000 home. $2000 per month would be on something like a $10million home.
They’ve been collecting insurance payments on those houses WITHOUT LOSSES for many months.
If there had been no losses, people wouldn’t have needed insurance. There are 1000s of homes insured and some percentage of them will have had some amountof payouts from the pool of money. Insurance pays out for lots of different types of losses, and they have to weigh the risks. They’re not charities.
Don’t get me wrong, insurance is a racket and they will do everything they can to deny coverage and stuff the pockets of their investors. But if you want to force them to provide coverage when there’s pretty much guaranteed losses, they will just exit the business altogether.
I lived in a high risk area, in a $300k 1400 ft² home, and my insurance was 10k a year. I scaled the numbers up for California. You don’t think those people weren’t already paying through the nose? You think they were insuring a 3M home for 2k a year in a high risk area?
Pacific Palisades had 2 fires in 2009, nothing compared to this, and none of these houses were affected. No other major disasters.
I’m sorry, I want to respect your opinion, but you live in a dream world.
I didn’t say 3M home I said 300K home. https://www.policygenius.com/homeowners-insurance/california/los-angeles/
LIFE’S TO SHORT TO COUNT ZEROS!!!
How about no profit?
The US government ought to require insurers to ensure everywhere had a reasonable cost, or get out of the fucking business.
That’s literally what’s happening at the state level in California. And the insurers got out because they can’t cover their operating expenses while charging what the state considers a reasonable cost.
Louisiana be like, let’s add a few more refineries, and a ethane cracker plant for good measure
I’m sorry, are we just skipping over the regulations that caused these companies to pull out? Most of these homes would still be covered. They’d be paying a higher price, but they’d be covered.
When you put a legal cap on costs, the company will pull out.
Turns out when you say you cannot charge more than x for a service that costs y to provide, and y>x, no one can sell the service.
Insurance companies fucking suck, but too many think their profits are the ONLY reason there is a problem.
Yea that’s just basic economics.
Maybe we should have rules in place that provide more protection for actual human beings instead of prioritizing profit margins or pretending that “Basic Economics” is a universal law rather than a guideline of how people interact with each other. Sorry, I’m not mad at you, just the system we live in
We, did, they were pushed to the side. Those rules and protections were building more reservoirs, keeping those and the current ones full of water, continuous upkeep on fire hydrants, rehiring firefighters who were fired for not taking the vax, regular controlled burns, clearing out the undergrowth, not dumping water into the ocean after rainfall… So, so many that were completely abandoned.
You seem to think the prices for fire protection came out of nowhere, but they don’t. As these precautions were abandoned one by one, fire insurance went up, because the likelihood of a fire grew exponentially. When government put a cap on price, that effectively made it clear that the company would go bankrupt, completely, because they knew a fire was going to happen eventually.
We should be mad that those very protections put in place to help people were taken away by the government, not the companies.
Por que no los dos? The government is NOT faultless in this, but how often are those regulations removed because a company lobbyist
bribed themhinted very strongly that they would like that?
wow, its almost as if we should cut off the heads of insurance CEOs and nationalize them all into one low cost government plan thats paid for with pennies on the dollar in taxes.
lol, who am I kidding. Idiot Americans will always prefer paying 3000 dollars for bad coverage, rather than pay 100 in taxes for great coverage.
With climate change, there is no option for “low cost” plan, government or no.
You can’t constantly have massive losses like these fires in a single area all paying out claims and expect to pay them off with low premiums.
Did you pull a muscle? You know, stretching that hard to intentionally misconstrue what I said.
Seems to me that’s exactly what you said.
no, i said having a universal insurance would lower premiums significantly since there would be no corporate greed driving prices up for personal gain and everyone paying into a single pot.
But please, keep stretching. You are apparently treating this topic like a yoga class and gotta stretch stretch stretch.
Greed is bad, but its large losses in certain areas due to climate change-induced disasters that is pushing up prices far more than greed. You are the one that is stretching credulity more than a contortionist getting ready for their act.
And are you saying we should not have risk-based premiums? Sounds like you want the rest of us to subsidize living in a disaster prone area. I will gladly choose insurers that chops to drop clients in disaster prone areas so I can afford my insurance.
I haven’t seen it in the comments yet but this is just the death spiral of climate change. Everything will just get worse from here on out as long as society operates the way it does. To everyone’s “surprise” I’m sure.
Yeah, I really do wonder when the government and rest of the people start to seriously consider if it is worth it dropping $50 billion on places like SoCal and South Florida every few years or so. At some point you need to do the math and ask hard questions about whether it is worth it, and the answer damn well may be no.
Yeah the point flew way over that guys head
That is what confuses me. Nationalized Healthcare, even an extensively covered one (with dental, optical, and prescription meds included) will be much cheaper overall than the private bullshit happening now.
I never understood how privatization advocates so routinely get away with bullshit. How can anyone not see how public program failures are almost always the result of deliberate sabotage.
deliberate sabotage bought and paid for by the private industry, to increase public pressure to move more healthcare to the private sector, so CEOs can make more billions.
and i have no idea. americans are fucking stupid. “Do you want to pay an extra 100 dollars in taxes for great health coverage and no declining what you need?” "NO! I WANT TO PAY 5000 FOR COVERAGE THAT DENIES EVERYTHING, BECAUSE A POOR CEO NEEDS A NEW GOLDEN TOILET ON HIS 8TH YACHT "
BUT MUH TAXESS
Or, you know, tackle climate change. But both are equally unlikely.
You’d think that insurance companies would be on the forefront of pushing climate change mitigation and prevention specifically because the impacts of worsening climate change will have a massive impact on their bottom line.
Maybe they can counter some of the petro company propaganda with their own marketing.
They’re in the business of making money, not fixing problems. It’s easier to just pull out of an unprofitable area than fix the Republican party’s head-in-their-ass ideas about climate change.
And when they run out of places to profitably insure?
Their time preferences have been shortened to “this quarter” just like the rest of the economy. We would need to buy insurance plans that last decades and not renegotiate every year.
So long as we live in an economy designed to maximize GDP, this can’t work.
Why would they do that rather than just not offering plans in areas where they project they will lose money?
They’ll run out of places to sell insurance pretty fast if climate change isn’t effectively countered.
And that’s when you’ll start seeing the property insurance industry suddenly really give a shit about climate change.
TBH, if insurance companies started pushing for climate change policies it would probably make those policies less popular. If there’s an industry less trusted than Big Oil, it’s Insurance.
I’m thinking a death match between big oil and big insurance.
You had me at cutting off the heads of CEOs.
Guillotines go brrrrrrrrr
Woodchippers. Guillotines are too 18th century. Put em’ in head first.
In that case my vote would be feet first. But I think they’ve caused enough pain to deserve a little on their way out ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Risk makes insurance unaffordable or unavailable
Insurance should really always be available at some price if you don’t cap prices. It might be ludicrously expensive if insurers consider the area to be extremely risky – and this area has had serious wildfires in past months and years, and I’m sure is probably considered to be quite risky – but there’s going to be some price at which they should make a return, even if they think that there’s a pretty good probability that the house is going to burn in some kind of fire in the next N years.
What you propose is illegal in California. It seems like a mildly counterproductive law, but I can’t imagine it would make much difference if they were allowed to offer policies nobody can afford anyway.
If you don’t cap prices on something the insurer is expecting to be destroyed, wouldn’t they just set the price of the policy to be the price of the thing it insures, effectively making it worthless?
It most likely would just be a significant portion. Once a place is hit by fire, it takes a couple of years to be as susceptible again. Or, if it’s not been a recent hit, the odds of any individual place being hit in a given year is probably sub 25%.
So the insurance company would probably charge something like 20-25% of the value. Which, yes, is hugely unaffordable for 99.9% of people. But if you’re super rich is probably still worth it, as the reason the price is that high is that there’s a pretty good chance your house burns down in the next year or two, so you would come out ahead in that scenario.
Then again, once you’re rich enough to afford that level of insurance premium, you’re probably rich enough to just float the risk yourself. So yeah, probably pretty worthless across the board, even at levels fairly significantly lower than 100% of the replacement cost.
It’ll go up, sure. There’s nothing magical about the price of the property, though, as a line for making insurance worthwhile. You pay an annual rate, and an insurer will just expect that whatever you’re paying over the will pay for the cost of the property within the period of time until they expect the property to burn on average.
If it’s a hundred years, it might be – discounting, for simplicity, the time value of money – 1% of the property value annually. If it’s six months, it might be 200% the value of the property annually. The 100% mark isn’t a special line in terms of insurance making sense.
It’d certainly make the property more expensive to own as that percentage goes up, but that’s true whether you insure it and spread that risk over many houses or don’t insure it and pay for the loss of the thing yourself.
Isn’t it though? If my choice is to pay 200% of the value of the property annually or to not have insurance, why would I opt to have insurance? The best they could do is pay out less than I paid them.
Say I plan to sell the house in three months and want a three month term, maybe.
i kinda disagree. no business or government should be required to provide insurance just because you built a structure.
some things can just be not insurable.
Yeah. Insurance is for unexpected disasters. Building a house in a wildfire zone, tornado alley, or flood plain, those disasters are expected.
The challengee is (at least) two-fold: (1) existing homes that were once not in wildfire zones are now in them due to climate change, (2) some of the reason building is allowed into fire zones is to alleviate housing availability.
If there was no cap on insurance, the market would absolutely fix the “uninsurable” problem. It might cost $90k a month to insure your home, but since they fully expect it to burn down in a few months, they’re likely to take a loss on that insurance.
Tell that to the banks that won’t give you a mortgage loan without insurance.
Tell them what? Banks should not be offering mortgages on homes that are at to much risk to be insured. People simply should not be living in areas where wildfires are a near certainty.
I’m not saying that offering insurance to a given property owner should be mandated, but that there’s always some price at which providing insurance is worthwhile to an insurer.
Like, say State Farm’s model predicts – as it probably correctly did here – that a house is most likely going to burn in the near future. Say the next two years, on average. Your annual fire insurance might be half the rebuild cost of your house, but they can still offer it, even at those levels of risk.
This is starting to feel more and more like a planned property grab.
What? How is it a property grab if no one can live there? Only the stupidest and/or richest people would buy an uninsurable home. You can’t get a mortgage without insurance, because the banks want to make sure they still have an asset to repossess if you default. Even if you were that rich, why would you throw your money away on something that will almost certainly be destroyed, sooner rather than later, without a way to recoup any of the cost? If a company like Zillow comes in and snaps up all the uninsurable homes in these regions, they’ll be declaring bankruptcy within 5 years.
Maybe? They’re not sure if this guy is linked.
Warning: MSN link ahead:
Alleged Arsonist Arrested In Los Angeles Amid Deadly California Wildfires: What We Know
ETA: Also, 3 fires started all at once looks a little wonky in January.
Edit 2:
…though law enforcement officials have said they cannot confirm a connection between the arson suspect and any of the deadly fires currently burning through California.
One of the women involved in the citizen’s arrest, Renata Grinshpun, told local news he had a “propane tank or… like a flame thrower” and that someone saw him “behind a van, trying to light something on fire.”
Any spark that wasn’t dealt with immediately during Santa Ana’s that severe (60-100 mph gusts, constant wind around 40 mph), and during a severe drought, AND with humidity below 20% was going to blow up.
It is wonky that it happened in January, because historically that’s when we’re getting rain, but that hasn’t happened this water year. For all practical purposes we’re still in the dry season.
Yeah, but they caught a guy with a torch blower trying to start fires. I don’t know if it’s arson or not. I hope not, this is horrific.
Yeah, it sounds like he is responsible probably for the Kenneth fire, which started after the winds had died down a bit. Still enough wind to kick it off (regular 20 mph gusts), but it wasn’t hurricane force winds like Tuesday when the Palisades and Eaton fires started. I’m skeptical that any arsonist is fire happy enough to also get clonked in the head by flying debris.
I can see why you’re pretty confident, but I don’t think you can be 100% confident that these weren’t all started. We’ll have to wait and see. They’re usually pretty great about figuring out what happened.
That’s honestly really impressive. The majority of the evidence has been incinerated by thousand-degree fires and covered in sea water and firefighting foam by the time investigators get to it.
Not if their cameras were sent to the cloud before they were engulfed in flames.
I think it’s much simpler honestly: fires like these have been happening every year in California for the past hmm… at least 5 years, maybe more. Insurances are simply catching on and doing what any for-profit company would do in this situation, avoid losing money.
Wildfires are part of the ecology for basically the whole state. Most of the native plants here have evolved to actually depend on and co-exist with routine fire. It’s completely normal and natural for this state to burn. The problem is that for 100 years we decided that it should never ever burn at all, so there were many areas of the state that should have burned at least once every ten years that sat there and accumulated unnatural amounts of growth and fuel for ten times that long. So, when we got hit with a megadrought and a fire finally did happen in those places, it was a crazy slate-wiped fire that nothing survived instead of a manageable brush fire that plenty of things would grow back from next year.
Now, is it all bad land management? No, a bunch of shit came together at once to make this message:
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California was caught in a mega drought for the better part of a decade and we’re still years from our groundwater returning to where it was before the drought.
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The Japanese pine beetle killed a lot of pine trees, and that’s most of what there is in the Sierra range (yes, there are some oaks and other things, but, well, we’re getting there, hold on). So many trees died where they stood that dealing with them all was a nearly impossible task, and beetle-killed wood can’t really be used for anything (don’t ask me why, but when I was wondering why nobody had come to get all this basically free wood just laying around, that was the answer I got). So, you had huge, huge stands of beetle-kill just standing there, getting drier and drier, waiting for a spark.
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The drought also severely dried out lots of other vegetation. There’s people I know in the Sierra who said they didn’t even have to season their fresh-cut wood. Just chuck it right in the fire, no problem.
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Fucking PG&E decided they didn’t need to follow best practices because that costs money and spending the money your consumers pay you on stuff that isn’t bullshit makes PG&E a sad panda. So, they stopped cutting around their power lines. As someone who partly grew up in the southeast US, this fucking melted my brain. Georgia’s a pretty wet, green state, and Georgia Power clear cuts everything down to shin height for probably 50 meters to either side of their transmission lines. Humid-ass Georgia decided they needed it, but we’re totally fine to skip it in the Phoenix state, yeah, that makes sense.
So, is climate change to blame? Mostly, yes, climate change is a big, big part of why we’re here. Hotter, drier weather with shorter, more intense rain delivery means that the vegetation gets dry faster and stays dry. It means there’s less water to fight fires with. That said, it’s not the whole picture. There’s other ways we could be doing stuff better.
PG&E absolutely should have faced criminal charges for pulling that… I remember hearing it was also equipment maintenance, which the state even gave them the money to do, and they just gave it to their shareholders as dividends instead
Wonder if a nationalized or state-owned utility would have actually invested those funds properly.
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There was a wildfire in the area last month. A couple years ago, a wildfire burned down a bunch of Malibu, a few miles away. I would be very surprised if wildfires in the area stop happening.
I think that maybe the most-reasonable solution is for insurers to just ramp rates way up unless a home is built to be extremely fire-resistant – just assume that there are going to be wildfires that dump embers in the area sooner or later, and that if your home isn’t constrained such that it is able to withstand being showered with embers without going up in flames, that it’s going to be insanely costly to insure, because it’s likely to burn sooner or later.
Even if one specific house is a concrete bunker, if it’s in the middle of normal homes, the bunker still faces potentially 1000 degree temperatures from surrounding homes, and shit’s going to burn.
You could pave everything; put in some 100-yard paved firebreaks; who know what else. Or you could just accept that there’s going to be a lot of climate refugees fleeing high risk US states. All the heads-in-sand people thinking it was just Tuvalu and Kiribati at risk going to wake up and find out it’s LA and Miami, too.
and shit’s going to burn.
Having a house next door burn doesn’t entail that your house burns. You can see video from this fire of people walking around next to houses on fire – they aren’t spontaneously combusting. Heck, I had a relative who had exactly the not-burn thing happen to them in this fire – the house next door burned down, but theirs didn’t. And it’s not hard to see that that has to be the case, or once one house in a city burns, the whole rest of the city would too. That didn’t happen even in this fire, or there wouldn’t be a Los Angeles left.
You can constrain how your house is built. You can have one of those counter-wildfire systems that has large tanks of water kept on-site and a generator-driven system that sprays it out over the property in a fire. I’m sure that there are others. They aren’t necessarily cheap and some aren’t pretty, but you can do buildings that can pull though fires.
Yeah, one house on fire next to you is probably fine, although I’ve seen that melt the siding off neighbors. All the houses on your block, especially when those houses are only separated by 6 feet, is a completely different situation.
Insurance companies wanted to raise rates… The insurance commissioner said no. So a lot are leaving.
Same for cars, getting a lot harder to find car insurance in Cali was well.
The problem is that it just makes more financial sense to just not insure the area. The property itself is wildly expensive and then the owners are sure to lawyer up if they don’t get exactly what they want. Makes more sense to just not issue policies.
The problem is that it just makes more financial sense to just not insure the area.
There is always going to be some price at which it makes sense for an insurer to insure a property, as long as they are not restricted in what price they can charge.
They are restricted. California has an insurance commissioner who has to approve any rate increases. It’s probably easier to stop insuring then to get the rates up to the profitability margin their risk models are suggesting are appropriate.
Definitely more than 5 years. I still remember some fires back in 2009 that we’re jumping the freeways and I had to wait over a day and travel almost triple the amount of time to make it back home while being worried the whole time that my family’s house would burn down.
Yeah I said at least 5 years, cause I haven’t been here forever, and also it seems they’re getting worse in the last few years, though maybe that’s just my biased perception.
Malibu hills fires happened almost every year 20 years ago. Maybe not in areas with homes but it’s hardly surprising from the outside looking in. Still pity the folks.
Unfortunately whether intentional or not I think it’ll play out that way specifically for those who could not afford, with time and money, to re-build their homes and buy a new place to live.
For example, parts of Altadena, CA were exempt from redlining, so there is a majority black and brown homeowners in certain neighborhoods who have owned their homes for many years. They couldn’t afford their $1M+ house in today’s market. Insurance will pay them out, but there’s nowhere to live in Altadena now. Maybe some will lease while their home is being rebuilt, but I think many will cash out and buy a new home somewhere else, leaving a lot of opportunity for investors to buy up land and build for-profit housing.
Of course, we now know that insurance companies will not cover some of these properties so may not be a valuable investment, but the community will be forever changed, and I would be surprised if that didn’t include further gentrification.
Insurance, both property and health, is completing it’s morph into a parasitic value extraction tool with zero actual use. They are committing straight fraud at this point, daring people to sue them for contract breach, knowing many won’t
Always has been.
Health insurance yes. But property insurance has a use, but these companies have ceased actually providing that service.
I agree with the first sentence, but I don’t think there’s a lawsuit here as the contracts that you sign with them have a limited term and they are simply not renewing
deleted by creator
They do when you cram them full of black people and leave them to rot.
WTF‽
I was trying to respond to the comment I’ve copied and pasted below. Apparently Lemmy never lets you delete misplaced comments
So, projects? I would love to see a solution to home prices and the inequality they create but I think projects have been shown to work out poorly in the US.
Climate change makes risk unpredictable; risk makes insurance unaffordable or unavailable; no insurance makes mortgages unavailable; without mortgages property values crash
Why is it without mortgages property values crash? Is it because sellers are forced to sell to only people who can pay cash? I suppose that makes sense. And of course those won’t be “people”, those will be banks and investment companies, looking to rent the property out to tenants. So more large chunks of money are siphoned away from the middle class.
If a property is at risk and uninsurable, banks won’t provide good terms for a mortgage, because ultimately the property is at risk. This means they’re either going to lower the mortgage, or increase the rates. This means less money is available to purchase the property, which forces a lower price on the seller (because nobody else could buy, unless they use cash, but why would someone pay cash on an at-risk property?).
Right, but the quote from the article specifically says mortgages will be unavailable. So forget about insurance and mortgages. (If we follow that line of thinking.) so I assume that means only cash buyers.
Speaking of the Palisades fire, I’m not sure if anyone has looked into this yet, but they probably should:
Oh please please, keep em coming
It’s true. I read it on the internet.
Everyone is saying it.
Fact-check that, Sugar-Mountain!
Wow, really compelling stuff. Zuckerberg really is a monster
I think the curious aspect of this is that business is absolutely aware, and acknowledges existence of the climate change.
They should be putting in effort to reduce climate change impacts. It’s in their financial interest, even if they have no capability to have a moral motivation
I’m pretty sure these gamblers will profit all the way down.
If they run out of people/places that are profitable to insure any more, there won’t be any profits to make.
lol dude climate change has been in companies’ drawers since the 1970s, for example shell and such. they just acted as if they didn’t know to continue selling at record speeds.
Someone should adjust the silhouette to look like Mario bros Luigi
The exposure isn’t quite right and there are artifacts, but I am not a graphic designer so 🤷It’s beautiful lol, your skills are apt. I meant the Batman on the building silhouette but this is equally cool
I meant the Batman on the building silhouette
Aww dammit 😅
The insurance companies gotta keep their shareholders happy. That is the number 1 priority and fuck the customer.
I completely get the eat the rich mentality. At the same time, it really doesn’t make sense to rebuild some of these places. We’re all paying for it one way or another.
/a rub living in a flyover state that’s very boring from a climate change perspective, at least so far.
Absolutely, every single homeowner will pay for the insurance company losses. There are plenty of places that should have been left to nature. The entire Florida Oblast should be a National Park.
When your insurance drops your coverage, that’s your cue to GET THE FUCK OUT BEFORE YOU HAVE YET LOST EVERYTHING.
Those actuarial tables are designed from the ground up and refined over literally decades (up to around a century in some cases) to predict risk and while they’re not always perfectly accurate they are clearly ENOUGH so that they have made it possible for insurers to remain profitable.
IF THEY KNOW ANYTHING THAT YOU DON’T, THEY ARE DEFINITELY ACTING ON IT.
I know you can’t literally just drop everything, or fit absolutely everything that matters to you in your car in a pinch, but you WILL be better off if you’ve packed up and prepped for transport as many as possible of the things that would hurt you and/or inconvenience you the most to leave behind.
So for those of you who haven’t already experienced total loss, learn from this. Prepare yourselves. The people displaced by this will strain many other extant failure points in our society. Shit is about to get MUCH, MUCH WORSE.
The warning bell rang decades ago and we’re still ignoring it. There is no escaping or planning around what is to come. It doesn’t matter if you move somewhere less impacted by climate change. Those places can’t support anywhere close to the amount of people that will need to live there. We’ll ruin those places fighting over what scraps remain until there’s nowhere left to go.
I’m already in a place that is less susceptible to climatological ruin. I’ve resigned myself to the inevitability that billions will die. Regardless, my preparatory steps shall continue to be “make room”. I’m going to personally see to it that IF by some miracle I actually manage to survive, I bring as many people with me as possible; failing that, I hope to find a way to enable more people to survive EVEN IF it kills me.
The entire world basically just tried to ignore COVID and kept burying the bodies hoping everyone would stop caring. (BTW, excess death statistics are still horrifically higher than pre-2019 levels across the world)
Long COVID is a literal debilitating lifelong mental and physical disability but everyone has it now so we just don’t care.
It’s simple. The bourgeois must be eliminated or humanity dies.
I had to get out of Public Health because of the damage pretending covid was over was doing in almost every sense.
The problem is that people cannot simply get out at scale. The homes themselves are not portable and represent a significant investment that most homeowners cannot afford to lose. An individual can sell, but that requires there being a buyer, so doesn’t actually solve the problem.
What is needed here is a government funded relocation program. The government buys houses in eligible areas at market rate (locked in at the time the program starts, as market rate should collapse to 0). Then, the government does nothing, and saves money from not needing to subsidize the insurance market, and need needing to spend as much on disaster response and relief. Given that the disaster relief savings is largely born by the federal government, this program should receive federal funding as well.
This is a terrible idea.
We bought our present home 6 years ago. One house we looked at was in a low lying area, probably less than a metre above the high tide line. We didn’t buy that home because I’m not an idiot.
Since the dawn of time people have been building homes in silly places and losing their money as a result. It’s a shame.
In the next century there’s going to be a great many people displaced due to climate change. Let’s not start out by indemnifying those who pretended climate change wasn’t a thing.
When was that house built? What should the current owners do with it? If they sell, someone else needs to buy. Someone is going to be left holding the bag for a decision made decades ago.
And our current approach already indemnifies them, because their flood insurance is provided by the federal government as no private insurer will offer it. Then, when a flood hits, we all pay for it, along with the emergency response during and after the event.
The government shouldn’t offer insurance the market won’t. The person holding the bag is the most recent idiot.
What if they bought before the 70s? Before climate change was taught in schools?
Then they have PLENTY of equity to move to a place better suited to their risk tolerance.
We all know who’s responsible for it.
Petroleum companies, oil and plastics added so much pollution in such a short amount of time the planet couldn’t deal with it and it’s likely led to significant, global-level environmental impact.
Sure, but even they didn’t know they were destroying the climate until the 70s
I’m somewhat astonished that you think owners of this type of property ought to be indemnified in any way.
If I inherited such a property, I would absolutely try to find a “greater fool” to buy it.
I would point out though, properties like that aren’t going to be unsaleable over night. They’re just going to be less desirable than other properties.
It was always a terrible idea for the government to offer insurance when private insurers wouldn’t. It just forces everyone to subsidize the lifestyles of people who choose to live in disaster-prone areas. Perhaps it was necessary for a time to avoid major economic upheaval, but constantly rebuilding in areas where disasters keep happening should never have been allowed to become a long-term policy.
In the US, voters have shown over and over that they don’t care if a lot of people become homeless. Why would you expect them to care about people who become homeless because of fires than they do about people who become homeless because of economic conditions?
Why should my tax dollars be used to bail out someone who bought a multimillion dollar home in a high risk area? Why should home owners get all the profits from owning but get to skirt the risks?
That’s an easy one. Because the government let this happen by not reigning in the corporate pollution it knew was happenig. All so the economy would grow and grow which is what gave you the money to pay those taxes. So the tax dollars you are giving the gov are the reason these people need to move.
I think relocation (and getting people comfortable with their tax dollars going towards it) would work better if the US states weren’t so ideologically divided.
There is no way I want the average republican relocating to my state, let alone wanting to pay for such punishment.
A lot of things would work better if the states weren’t so ideologically divided. Lol But yeah, relocation is rough. Moving people away from family and friends means removing them from the people they probably depend on. And that just leads to more people taking thier kids with them to vegas, lol.
So someone has say 2 million in real estate and 1.5 million in other Investements. They are at risk of losing some of that 3.5M while still counting themselves wealthy and the government who can’t afford to provide a whole laundry list of shit for normal people just hands them a few million to ensure their bad decisions don’t cost them anything.
How about we don’t subsidize your insurance and if you suck up you just lose your money.
Likewise there’s a reason all the billionaires are building bunkers in Hawaii and New Zealand and investing in yachts, that Greenland and northern Canada have new geopolitical and economic importance, and that the Panama Canal is at risk of not being able to get enough traffic across. I’m tired of getting gaslit by climate naysayers.
“Everything is fine!” they say as they stockpile supplies and build secret locations to hide.
