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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

You can't live in places where your home is going to get destroyed every couple of decades by wildfires, floods, or hurricanes. There are more of these places now because of climate change and a lot of people are going to have to migrate over the next century, like huge global migrations. Insurance can't/won't allow a bunch of people to deny this reality any more (or at least much longer). LA is going to be pretty uninsurable unless the local governments do a lot to mitigate the fire risk.

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As the 173 million strong population of Bangladesh can attest, they can and do live in such places.

"Each year, on average, 31,000 square kilometres (12,000 sq mi) (around 21% of the country) is flooded. During severe floods the affected area may exceed two-thirds of the country, as was seen in 1998."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_Bangladesh

Most of the world does not want to aspire to be Bangladesh, but humans have been living in extremely disaster-prone areas for millennia because the short-term benefits (rich soil etc) outweigh the occasional catastrophic losses.

Another example: Japan has many quakes per year and has a strangely high percentage of the world's active volcanos. People have lived there for a very long time, built to accommodate it (both traditionally, using timber and expecting to rebuild often, or with modern earthquake-hardened architecture), and is now a top five economy by GDP.

And, well, most of the US is just a hanger-on to California's economy.

> In 2023, California's gross domestic product (GDP) was about $3.9 trillion, comprising 14% of national GDP ($27.7 trillion). Texas and New York are the next largest state economies, at 9% and 8%, respectively.[1]

CA is a huge economy but by no means is the US just CA + 49 other states. Might be fairer to say it’s CA+NY+TX+FL but at that point you’re just aggregating the population.

[1]:https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-economy/

The cost of labor is extremely high in the US compared to Bangladesh, and that along with building standards, minimum lot size, minimum floor space requirements and required low density zoning (lmao) make these two case very different

What does it mean when a whole country has expensive labour? The highly-paid people of said country can afford each others' services. It basically means "low cost of materials" from a human perspective.

Yes and before they migrate due to climate change, they'll sell their charred lots to some fascist with the willpower to clear the brush, fill the reservoirs, and deploy fire fighting drones. Then everything will go back to normal. God protects only the strong.

You can; it's just expensive.

So is living on the sea bed. It's irrationally expensive and inconvenient, which is why we don't do it.

Living in areas in constant danger of flooding and/or burning and/or storm wind damage and/or drought seems like quite an eccentrically inconvenient lifestyle flex.

Unless you like disaster movies.

Where are you suggesting we live then? Most all of the US is at "constant" risk for at least one kind of disaster in your list or another.

Far enough inland that the rising sea levels will keep you 50 miles away from the coast for the next century anywhere east of a north-south line that runs through the middle of Kansas. These are places where it rains so you have local water supply and you don’t have a yearly wildfire season and the risk of hurricane destruction is far lower. Also just not in the floodplain of a local river.

This is like half of the country.

I can tell you home insurance is climbing in the Midwest from storms (roofs are apparently expensive to replace/service). I pay more in Nebraska than I did in California (although to be fair, I did not buy earthquake insurance in CA).

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