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Comment by HarryHirsch | Hacker News Reader

The nagging suspicion is that it isn't the flood/fire risk that's the problem but that all desirable areas were built out 100 years ago. That leaves everyone without generational wealth to be pushed into risky areas. There's whole neighbourhoods and towns built where they shouldn't be, and with climate change it's only going to get worse.

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And try to build higher than 4 stories in already built up places like San Francisco. Local groups will do everything to stop you. The heart breaking thing is Bay Area environmental groups like the Sierra Club are aligned with the anti-development crowd. They actively fight infill, but won’t acknowledge or see that encourages sprawl.

I'm thinking of places like New Orleans. The original city was built on a river bluff but then it expanded into the river bottoms. You have that phenomenon all along major rivers, towns expanding from upland settlements onto agricultural areas that are 100-year floodplains.

Of course, when the inevitable flood comes and everything is under water the urge to rebuild is stronger than accepting reason and settling elsewhere, also because money is missing, especially for the flooded-out people.

I looked at purchasing a home in another cheaper locale and also came to this observation. This area has regular floods. New neighborhoods had flood problems. Old neighborhoods did not. The areas without flood problems, and close enough the to main job corridors, were priced high enough to defeat the benefits of moving for the sake of a lower cost of living.

New Orleans is even worse because the Mississippi ought to be changing course so it moves through downtown. They have an extensive series of levies to prevent this from happening.

I think you are over-simplifying.

Yes, poor people often incur environmental risk by inhabiting undesirable urban land that's risky.

But it is also very common for the wealthy to intentionally take on flood/fire risk so they can be in the most-desirable areas with natural beauty. Many of the big fire hazards are in towns filled with ski resorts, vacation homes, wealthy retirees with ranches. Many of the big flood hazards are wealthy people attempting to live too close to the ocean, or too close to a river, than is safe.

I get that this is true if you define desirable as “conveniently located close to natural beauty”.

But it doesn’t follow that all other areas are risky. They may just be less immediately appealing.

Indeed a lot the places that are at high risk of fire, are high end neighborhoods where relatively rich people bought because they are beautiful places to live.

If anything, I expect things to get better as people start to value less risky areas over more traditionally beautiful areas and we start to see some equilibrium.

If that's your definition of "desirable," come to Upstate NY—and the non-urban Northeast in general.

There's vast amounts of "natural beauty" here, nearly everywhere you could look. And while, sure, the lakeside real estate has a higher tendency to be owned by the wealthier people in the area, there's loads of land with fantastic views and easy access to beautiful woods, streams, hilltops overlooking wide valleys, etc.

The caveat is, of course, that it's rural—you can't have this sort of thing and still be 5 minutes' walk from four different top-quality restaurants, or even, in some cases within a half-hour's drive of a Starbucks.

Sure - it’s not ‘my definition’ it’s a common one.

You have provided another one which is equally valid and supports my point better than my own definition.

The comment I was replying to claimed that all the desirable areas were built out 100 years ago leaving everyone else with only risky areas to live in.

It seems like there are plenty of non-risky areas to build out. If the only problem is that they are rural, that won’t be a problem for long.

In the Bay and nearby all the fire risk is in desirable areas. Lake Merced is pretty safe from natural disasters as is Vis Valley. I think they aren't even tsunami zones.

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