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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the relevance of nearby high ground. Assuming you can't build levees, doesn't the cost of losing a city come primarily from losing the buildings (which must be rebuilt), not the transport cost of moving items inside the building to a new location? In other words, if your house is in the path of a tornado, learning that there is a nearby patch of land guaranteed not to be hit is not useful.

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The difference is that the sea level rise happens over decades, and the city will gradually move inland and upward as its (newly) beachfront property recedes. China's river delta cities can't.

Venice. Air, Sub and Boat-traffic.

It's not clear to me that this is less costly than moving across the country. You'd have to look carefully at the network effects, but from an infrastructure perspective you still end up building a whole new city.

In other words: what's the advantage of building San Diego II a few dozen miles from San Diego, even slowly, rather than just expanding Denver by moving people there.

(Note that I agree it's better than building a new city in the middle of nowhere; the question is whether the network benefits of San Diego II can be mimicked by Denver. In this sense, I agree that countries with cities that are almost all on the coast would benefit from having high ground nearby their doomed coastal cities.)

In the case of New Orleans, some of that high ground is within the city itself. If flooding eventually becomes frequent enough that the federal government decides to relocate flood insurance claimants and stop funding the Army Corps of Engineers' improvements to the levees, then the city can retreat to its pre-1930 borders. Most of those areas did not flood in Katrina and could get by with a much smaller flood protection system that might be justified by the city's economic productivity.

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