Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

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Quite a lot of real estate is going to be impacted by shifts in the ability to occupy coastal land, by 2050. This isn't a South Cal. problem. It's a worldwide problem.

There are towns in the UK with words meaning Harbour, Sea, Coast which aren't at the coast because it retreated. Thousands of years ago. There are also archeological finds in the Dogger bank out in the North sea because it was above land, in human time.

Houses have been affected by coastal change since forever. Arguably, some people inland of the coast NOW in South Cal are about to find they own shorefront property and arguably, might win: assuming the remediation costs of dealing with the retreat don't become theirs by default as everyone else leaves.

Longterm insurance rates for coastal property will be very interesting. London has a problem, Amsterdam had a problem and knows how to fix it, Brisbane where I live has a problem which has been written about: "the river with a city problem"

i think the more interesting modern implications is that now in 2024 we have large layers of insurance companies that are now holding the bag, whereas before it was just kind of "get fucked." to probably the landlords and definitely the serfs.

at least in the US it's basically impossible to get a mortgage without home insurance iirc. but the banks and the insurance companies are already exposed via existing mortgages, so does that mean we start seeing insurance-instigated foreclosure and resettling?

No, you’re going to see insurance become more expensive and/or more difficult to get if you’re in an affected area. Some have stopped writing policies in Florida and California, for different reasons, but both climate change-related. (In California, it’s partially due to local rules that make it difficult for them to factor the actual risk of the property into their pricing, but those rules are supposedly going to be fixed soon.)

"For different reasons" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here; Florida's and California's situations are completely different. Significant fractions of Florida depend on the National Flood Insurance Program which has been bailed out by the Federal government to the tune of tens of billions of dollars since Katrina and will only get worse. The California FAIR plan on the other hand is completely funded from premiums and has recently survived several years of catastrophic fires without needing a single penny of state support. The power distribution companies have also completely overhauled the infrastructure state wide, reducing the probability of uncontrolled fires near populated areas.

The politics behind California's insurance regulator are a bit of a shitshow at the moment, but the insurers are leaving because of artificial price controls. In Florida, they left long ago because much of the state is fundamentally uninsurable.

It's my understanding that Close to elections, governments (state and federal) sometimes offer to underwrite the risk so the un-insurable can continue to live there (no insurance? no mortgage)

The end result is massive unfunded Civil Engineering burdens the corps of engineers have to design, and try to get built without stuffing up the hydrology for somewhere else. I think New Orleans may be an example of this: If there was will, then "forced depopulation" of the floodzones would be kinder and cheaper but I suspect there isn't will, and so instead the levee system.

In Australia, government mandated buybacks are immensely painful. People who want to stay have to leave. People who want to leave are 10cm above a threshold and have to stay.

In NZ, during the Christchurch earthquake aftermath, The state allowed stayers and goers to swap assets and payout, so a stayer in a condemned region could give their payout to a goer in a stay region, who didn't want to stay. Not a bad model.

Even if they take that particular risk into pricing, it will still lead to an increase of insurance prices for everybody because that's how stuff works. So everybody will contribute financially to subsidize at least in part the insurance price for the affected properties.

Florida's problems are way more due to scam roofing companies than anything climate related.

The scam roof companies roll around after every hurricane, which have become more frequent and stronger.

No, the insurance companies are going to go bankrupt, and tell their customers get bent while their executives fuck off to the Alps. Hopefully the hoi polloi have a government that's capable of bailing them out of such dire straits but the way things are going, that's been pillaged too and the only thing remaining for them is a fuckton of guns and ammo. But hey, Fort Knox is full of gold; that'll make for a raucous time until the looters figure out it's worthless once it's all circulating.

> There are towns in the UK with words meaning Harbour, Sea, Coast which aren't at the coast because it retreated.

Can you give examples of this?

Sandwich in Kent would be one of the best known.

New Romney? It's riverine, but I think they had to dredge it to keep it alive.

Kenfig in wales.

Dunwich.

Rattray in Scotland. covered in Sand, like Skara Brae maybe?

Faversham may have been, The isle of thanet is no longer an island

Tenterden -once part of the cinque ports. Also Lydd.

I would agree "meaning seaside" was a strech. I think most of these have mixed etymology.

Not quite seaside -> inland, but the area around Ely is still called the Isle of Ely because Ely used to be an island surrounded by marshy fenland, often flooded by the wash from the North Sea. The fens were drained in the 17th century onwards with the help of some Dutch engineering and Ely is now just a hill.

Not what you were asking, but the Adriatic sea, between Italy and the Balkans, takes the name from the town of Adria, which is now 10+ km from the sea (though that is mostly due to the work of the Po river).

>in the Dogger bank out in the North sea

aka Doggerland

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