California can't save every burned town

The difference with major cities is

a) it's a lot harder to somehow abandon large populations than small ones, and

b) the cost vs benefit ratio is probably there for big cities in a way that it's not for small towns in the mountains. Spending a billion dollars to rebuild a town with a population that numbers in the hundreds is horrible economic value. In contrast, New Orleans is big enough to where spending billions on flood protection may be still be worth it on some level.

That said, it'd certainly be nice to find a way to have cute little towns in the mountains that wasn't dependent on enormous subsidies from other cities.

How are you sure these costs return to the communities? These towns have fewer than 1,000 residents. It's likely that builders would have to drive in from far away, trucking in materials from the largest metro area. Workers would have to drive 1-3 hours home, requiring higher pay, or you'd need housing onsite, both adding to costs. This is a lot of building all at once that they don't normally endure. You need outsiders.

> Insurance isn't mentioned at all in the article.

Yep. I am paying about $2000 a year for fire insurance for my summer home in Sierra Nevada. They promise to pay $350k estimated as the price to rebuild. Three major fires were nearby this year, about a 100 homes burned in the county. But thousands of (presumably) insured homes, including mine, survived. The deal looks pretty good for the insurance company.

I am also paying California and federal taxes. This girl talks about federal money as coming from nowhere. But they are not from nowhere, they are from my pocket. If they are that scarce, I would rather spend them on rebuilding California towns, than say Ukrainian ones.

>about as fair a question as whether Phoenix or Las Vegas or New Orleans should exist

Or Los Angeles. Bringing in water from halfway up the state? Maybe we should shut the place down instead.

> This is kind of a weird op-ed. It frames this as though the costs are all red marker, but the costs of rebuilding include labor and materials and help to reinvigorate local economies. I'm sure there is a net cost, but it has been serviceable so far.

This is a (literal, not figurative) example of the broken window fallacy.

> This is kind of a weird op-ed. It frames this as though the costs are all red marker, but the costs of rebuilding include labor and materials and help to reinvigorate local economies. I'm sure there is a net cost, but it has been serviceable so far.

The example given is $1B to rebuild a community of 300, or $33M/person. There's no way that community can ever pay back that loan -- and if they can, why are we subsidizing it?

> Insurance isn't mentioned at all in the article. WUI areas have become nearly impossible to insure, even if you're doing all the things right for making your property fire-resistant (and most homeowners in these areas aren't). As long as California's housing market stays red-hot, there will still be another sucker willing to pay for California's state-insurance-plan-of-last-resort, but someday, somehow, something's gonna change and all of a sudden a lot of people won't be able to afford homeowner's insurance, and that's going to gut a lot of the fire-prone small towns.

The formula is simple: if a fire is expected every X years, and the cost to rebuild is $Y, can you charge $Y/X + some margin for profit and bad luck? Private insurance is saying no. If public insurance is saying yes, it is only via some form of subsidy.

Should we be subsidizing the rural lifestyle in this way? We already directly subsidize rural roads, electrical infrastructure, hospitals, telecom, and more. We have many more indirect subsidies via higher electrical bills for the undergrounding of electrical transmission lines, agricultural subsidies, implied muni bond insurance, etc.

We've got to draw the line somewhere, and we can't afford for it to be at $33M/resident.

Remember in the 80's when republicans were aghast at musicians raising aid to help the starving people in Ethiopia, all the while screaming the Sam Kinnison line, "Nothing grows here you live in a f*king desert!!!"

"Have you considered moving" doesn't go over well when spoken to people getting priced out of SF. Are all people entitled to keep living in the same place indefinitely, or only some?

Upending your whole life and moving somewhere "safer" is no small thing, particularly when you have generational ties to the area. Doubly so when rural economies are dying, and you can't afford to move.

Native Americans have lived in these places for thousands of years. Much longer than cars, industry, datacenters and their resulting climate change. I'd fault the latter for this situation, not the victims.

I'm not unsympathetic. Until now, Americans have done better and better with every new generation. We're not used to seeing our standard of living decline. We're very much used to always having clean water when we turn the tap, always having power when we flip a switch, always having food when we go to the store, and watching our children grow into a better life than we've had.

It's going to be a long and painful process for people to realize things are changing. People are going to be very hurt and angry as it sinks in for them.

Even if it's not the state insurance will go up for everyone, building materials could go up, etc.

No man is an island right?

>I don’t think it’s wrong to allow people to take risks if they know what they are getting into. At the same time, there’s a point where it doesn’t make sense for the state to socialize the cost of rescuing / protecting people who choose to take that level of risk.

You just described how I feel about the entire state of Florida.

> Or would that money be better spent fortifying a larger, more urban community outside of a high-risk fire zone or restoring forests and watersheds damaged by wildfire, rather than, say, paying for new underground power lines and broadband internet service in the mountains of Greenville?

This question is entirely what the article discusses. Moral, economic considerations are discussed. You should read it.

It’s going to be an unpopular opinion, but caring about what people want is a luxury that we just won’t have (to anywhere near the extent we have it today) in the near future as climate change continues.

Many millions of people in the US are going to have kids and grandkids who have a drastically different life than they imagine for them. And not in a good way.

> I don’t think it’s wrong to allow people to take risks if they know what they are getting into.

The problem is that people always agree to this until their house burns and their child dies and then they feel like society didn’t do enough to protect them. It’s just the human condition.

Idyllwild, CA constructed and maintained substantial firebreaks, which likely helped save it from the Cranston Fire in 2018. It still feels very much in the forest.

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-new-cranston-fi...

> there’s a point where it doesn’t make sense for the state to socialize the cost of rescuing / protecting people who choose to take that level of risk.

I wonder if that opinion will apply to all the people that will be inundated by water in the bay area in the next century.

Rural people can still live in the forest and away from other people. They just need to be willing to cut down every tree within 100' of their home and use fire-resistant landscaping. The problem is that the trees are pretty.

This desire to live in wildfire prone forests bemuses me. Yes, trees are pretty, but... well, fires.

Australia's bushfires often destroy houses built in very similar areas, lovely and leafy, surrounded by trees that have evolved to burn.

I'm not sure if it's a holdover from the mindset that we can fully and effectively manage nature, or just because we prefer to live in hope, and the trees are pretty.

But damn, either way, how much effort and risk is taken on to protect people living in areas prone to fire out of choice?

In NZ, we've begun some "managed retreat", which is naturally contentious when it's your house.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matat%C4%81

I live in the WUI among trees. We've already spent $20,000 removing some fuels, and are spending $30,000 to remove more. This is in a county with a median annual income of $26,000.

We can only afford this because of my remote tech worker salary. My neighbors aren't as privileged.

The state could contribute more funds to these efforts, helping property owners reduce the fuels around their homes and improve defensible space.

Why not do the opposite and build homes out of soft wood, paper, and cloth. This should drastically lower the costs of construction, and it would place no imaginary illusions on the residents that their structures could survive a disaster. Therefore the residents would be inherently better equipped, both mentally and physically, to recover from the next disaster to destroy their homestead. Is it too much to ask people to adopt a more ephemeral, nomadic lifestyle in the face of changing conditions on the ground?

I don't think that - short of an underground bunker - there are fire-resistant structures that can survive a "serious" wildfire.

The classification of fire-resistant is usually 30/60/90/120 minutes, meaning that the structure should not collapse before that time, but norms say nothing of the residual structure integrity, and the cost of inspecting, assessing and repairing a structure affected by a fire can in many cases exceed the cost of re-building it from the ground up.

Set aside wood/timber, the other three common construction methods, steel, reinforced concrete and brick/stone masonry are all affected by the heat of a (large) fire (in the case of masonry it is the mortar that loses some of its properties), i.e. the structure won't have the same strength as before.

"You can’t on one hand be a libertarian turd" Even ignoring the slur (I have many disagreements with libertarians but don't see the need for ad-hom), where did you get this? Ctrl-F in the article for "libertarian" has 0 matches.

Can you quote one or two of those libertarian turds?

Hmmm. Who’s worldview does this sound like? Something something real america…