Should parts of CA or other earthquake prone areas be labelled uninhabitable?
What about areas where forest fires are routine?
Flood prone areas? Tornado prone areas? High UV? Poor air quality?
It makes no sense whatsoever to dictate that people cannot live on the coasts due to natural disasters which happen everywhere, all the time.
Frankly, being told where to live is more garish than being told what to think and what to say.
Are you saying that unmitigated flood prone areas _should_ be habitable? And the cost of that underwritten with public funds?
There are people who have their house rebuilt every ~15 years from hurricanes with public funds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Flood_Insurance_Progr...
>The NFIP is managed and administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) through the Federal Insurance and Mitigation Administration (FIMA).[1] The program is designed to provide an insurance alternative to disaster assistance to meet the escalating costs of repairing damage to buildings and their contents caused by floods.[2] As of August 2017, the program insured about 5 million homes (down from about 5.5 million homes in April 2010), the majority of which are in Texas and Florida.[3][4] The cost of the insurance program was fully covered by its premiums until the end of 2004, but it has had to steadily borrow funds since, primarily due to Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, accumulating $25 billion of debt by August 2017.[3][5] In October 2017, Congress cancelled $16 billion of NFIP debt, making it possible for the program to pay claims. The NFIP owes $20.525 billion to the U.S. as of December 2020.[6]
I think being that you're so ruggedly individualistic, maybe pull yourself up by your bootstraps and pay for your own repairs?
If you're footing the bill for fair market insurance, those places quickly get returned to the environment because it makes no economic sense to build there. Or it does, and the federal government still doesn't have to pay for it.
Major earthquakes happen an order of magnitude less frequently than major storms - but there's merit to reconsidering how much infrastructure we build right next to fault lines. So, possibly?
> What about areas where forest fires are routine?
Without appropriate fire breaks or building construction, possibly - if your house and property isn't constructed to survive a wildfire, then it's _going_ to burn. We can either adapt now or pay much higher costs later.
> Flood prone areas?
Oh jeez, yes, the fact that we build in flood plains is absolutely bonkers.
> Tornado prone areas?
Maybe, but it's a much lower risk than hurricanes. We really need to account for risks during building construction; our current approaches aren't working that well.
> High UV?
High UV is a bummer, not an repeated existential risk to all inhabitants.
> Poor air quality?
Poor air quality is also a bummer but is something we have more control over. Similar to high UV, poor air quality doesn't represent a regular, frequent, unavoidable, catastrophic risk to all of the inhabitants and all property in the vicinity.
> It makes no sense whatsoever to dictate that people cannot live on the coasts due to natural disasters which happen everywhere, all the time.
It makes even less sense to build in areas that are all but guaranteed to be destroyed several times per century. If you can build infrastructure that'll actually last or are willing to accept all liability when the inevitable occurs then by all means, build your house on stilts and cover the cost of reconstruction. But beyond freedom of choice, I don't understand why we think it's okay to assume obvious risk and expect society to provide compensation for a risk that's been known for decades if not centuries.
Does it matter if a place gets a powerful earthquake every 5 years or 20 years?
The entire premise of the suggestion is simply nonsense.
>It makes even less sense to build in areas that are all but guaranteed to be destroyed several times per century.
More people are killed in high crime areas than in storm prone areas, and they are killed daily.
Do we tell people they can't live there, either?
If you don't take any risk then you are not really living.
Free market insurance actuaries.
>Does it matter if a place gets a powerful earthquake every 5 years or 20 years?
Yes, of course.
>The entire premise of the suggestion is simply nonsense.
No, just needs more science and economics math on what makes sense and are reasonable lines to draw.
> More people are killed in high crime areas than in storm prone areas, and they are killed daily.
Do you have stats that back this up on a per capita basis?
> Do we tell people they can't live there, either?
If you can ascertain that the above is true per capita and that the federal government is footing the bill through social security survivorship benefits, maybe. The objection is not that people can't live and where they want - it's that they expect someone else to subsidize it.
Life insurance takes into account where you live. In non-FEMA flood insurance areas, flood insurance is significantly more expensive.
>If you don't take any risk then you are not really living.
The issue is they aren't taking risks - they're socializing their risks onto people who don't live in flood zones.
If they were actually taking the risk of having to rebuild, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
My response was to this comment at the top, where it was, explicitly and objectively, supporting a policy that dictates where people should live.
Folks have had their houses rebuilt with other people's money really often - and build it in the exact same spot, because the feds will come build it again. Even though it's going to get destroyed, again.
Entire communities, and their economic output, will vanish. A good example are communities whose entire existence is owed to revenue generated by commercial fishing. What do you do with all the fishermen who don't know any other line of work?
Teach them to code?
Long Island, NY is prone to flooding and wind-damage from hurricanes and nor'easters. Areas are routinely destroyed or heavily damaged. Notable years are 1950, 1954, 1960, 1986, and 1999.
Asheville, NC is prone to flooding, land & rock slides, and the occasional earthquake. It is probably one of the state's most natural wonders, and the country-side a lovely place to live.
During periods of heavy rain and tropical events, downtown NYC floods the subways and streets and doing expensive salt water damage.
I know of no place on earth that is without some susceptibility to natural disaster. So where do we draw the line?
Effectively, such a rule would define these and other places as uninhabitable and render them ineligible for both commercial insurance and federal disaster aid. That seems so foolish and counter to our tradition as a nation. Such a rule would see the splintering and end to many long-standing communities.
If the concern is cost, you may want to turn your attention to discretionary federal expenditures.
Surely we can find places to cut bloat, pork, and wasteful spending, particularly in areas that range from nothing to very-little to do with the United States, her citizens, or their needs and emergencies that are a part of living on planet earth.
It is almost like that 75 billion we printed for Zelenskyy could have been used to help Americans.
Lastly, where does it end? How do we define the formula for making these rules, and who gets the define and apply that formula? Best case scenario, if this rule was a thing, you'd be looking at consolidating large parts of American society into more 'manageable' locations and mega cities, which were decreed as somehow having the least amount of risk, and lowest possible expense...
...in a vain attempt at avoiding the risk and expenditures of natural disasters?
...that happen everywhere?
...routinely.
It just seems foolish when you work through it to a practical end.
Stop paying for them to keep rebuilding the house, give them the money to move.
>I know of no place on earth that is without some susceptibility to natural disaster. So where do we draw the line?
OP proposed twice, you objected. I think twice with no time horizon isn't useful. Twice in 50 years seems reasonable for someone who lives in a 100 year flood plain.
But these flood plains are growing with climate change. Storms are getting worse and more frequent. Just continuing to pay to rebuild is not the answer.
It's clearly not explicit or objective. "If you choose to live here you will not receive aid when your house is knocked down in a hurricane" is so clearly not the same as "You can not legally live here".
March 26, 1872. Lone Pine
April 18, 1906. San Francisco
June 29, 1925. Santa Barbara
March 10, 1933. Long Beach
July 21, 1952. Kern County/Tehachapi
March 22, 1957. San Francisco and Daly City
March 27, 1964. Crescent City
Feb. 9, 1971 San Fernando
Oct. 1, 1987 Whittier
Oct. 18, 1989 Loma Prieta
April 25, 1992 Petrolia
June 28, 1992 Landers
Jan. 17, 1994 Northridge
Dec. 22, 2003 San Simeon
Aug. 24, 2014 Napa
It seems that large parts of California are subject to ground shaking that is destructive occurring two or more times per decade with some variability.
Is it really time to take away their insurance and disaster aid?
1906 San Francisco
1911 San Francisco
1913 San Francisco
1922 San Francisco
1928 San Francisco
... then you 're in the neighborhood of what parts of Florida have been getting.
It's not that the whole state keeps getting hit by hurricanes. It's that individual locations have been hit multiple times in a decade. So no, California is not comparable.
A lot of federal disaster aid is just Californian's own money being used to help them when needed. This is true for other states like NY.
Lastly, California does indeed offer a very high deductible form of earthquake insurance, and it isn't federally subsidized like FEMA is.