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Unfortunately though, the solution isn’t that easy.
For one, if you own property there, you’re basically either caught holding a bag with life changing amounts of money lost, or trying to pass it off to another sucker which just feels unethical.
For two, families and communities make it hard for people. Many rely on their friends and family as support systems. Elderly for example, may only have their family taking care of them and their poker night friends are the only ones they have left - if they go somewhere, that system becomes fragmented and people get left behind. Maybe you are the main caretaker of an elderly relative, so you can’t leave them behind, but if they follow you then they lose the rest of their network.
I’m sure there are tons of other reasons but just knowing there’s an imminent threat at some vague point in the future is sometimes not enough for people to willingly go through all of the suffering that I mentioned above, and more that I’m not metioning
• The state identifies neighborhoods that will need to be abandoned in a few decades and puts them in a program to turn them into retirement communities. A person who owns a home in such an area can sell it normally if they want to anyone who will buy.
• If an elderly retired person is interested in a property in that area they have the option of instead of buying it themselves from the seller having the state buy the property, and they then pay the state. The state gets title to the property and the retiree gets the right to live in it until they die.
• If the retired person wants to leave before they die (or has to leave because they can no longer live on their own or the time has finally come that the property must be abandoned), they are offered free room and board for life at a state managed assisted living community.
• If they left for a reason other than that the property has to be abandoned the state opens it up to another retired elderly person on the same terms. The new person pays what a similar property in a place not under threat would sell for, and they are now set for housing for the rest of their life as long as they stay there or transfer to state managed assistant living.
• To further make these properties attractive to elderly retirees the residents should not have to pay property taxes and utility rates should be capped. Maybe also toss in a free shuttle service to minimize the need for cars so people don't have to leave just because they are no longer able to drive safely.
People in New Orleans have affordable flood insurance?
Usually there is no insurance.
The insurance industry, for all of its other faults, is one of the few left that still deals in reality instead of vibes so they aren't going to give you affordable insurance against floods/hurricanes/etc in these areas with any real coverage.
I have a house in Louisiana (up "north") - outside of a couple tornados every few years, and the heavy rains of a hurricane every few years, it is a fairly "safe" place. Never been a claim against the property, or any immediate neighbors. We aren't in a floodplain of any sort, and are on top of a hill that is around 120 feet above the closest creek.
My premium has gone up 250% over the last 3 years (after being steady for a decade). Shopping around, they are even higher. I think they are finally starting to catch up with where they needed to be for years, but I can't help but feel I'm offsetting the people "down south" with their more expensive property that is literally underwater.
I am not sure about Louisiana, but you very well may be.
State insurance commissions sometimes promulgate onerous regulations that effectively require cost shifting. For example, if it's profitable to keep operating in a state overall, but you can't raise premiums or drop policies for the riskiest properties, then you just raise premiums across the board and let the less-risky subsidize the unprofitable policies.
And rising reinsurance premiums mean that everybody pays more to account for increasing risks and costs in the insurers' portfolios, which may be concentrated in riskier areas far from your own property.
every day you wait this gets worse and I am not sure what is unethical about selling a home. many people have to move (e.g. for work) but if it would put you mind at ease (ethically speaking) you can put a disclaimer on the listing. of course you also have an entire political party followers who believe all this is a hoax so you can put that on the listing too /s (last sentence)
I mean, yes, in your seller's disclosures you should tell the truth, including about the flood risk. If people want to take that, eyes wide open, I'm not sure what's unethical about selling to them.
The flooding and inevitable destruction of the city is decades away. It's still abstract. Some people might even think it is preventable.
I don't think it's unethical to sell. People have their own motivations. Maybe a buyer just wants it for 5 years, who knows. Probably the risk will get baked into market price. What does need to happen though is the federal government needs to step up, because they're the only ones who can, and guarantee they will buy it for a certain percentage of appraised market value. I would imagine that percentage will decline over time until they declare the city a total loss, after which your property is declared worthless. If they do this now, they can make it possible for people to leave with some semblance of dignity and mitigate hardships.
This sort of puffery is relatively minor and is thus not tremendously unethical, but it is unethical.
what exactly is a lie in this context specifically I wonder?
Is this so difficult that you can't even detect your own lie specifically constructed as an example of it?
> Is it unethical for me to sell my Condo which is in “up and coming area” which never upped and never came and has a very high crime rate (with/without disclaimer)?
That would be lying in order to sell something, and thus unethical.
You then expressed confusion over what exactly would be a lie here, despite you very clearly stating what the lie is in the above quote.
but notice people can gain life changing amounts of money by lucking into real estate that soars, but there's no sense of injustice.
if you allow people to take risks and reap the benefits, but shield them from loss, you end up with a subprime mortgage crisis all over again.
if people wanted to be protected from loss they should have to sign up on the front end to risk pool with other people who want to be protected from loss, and together they can protect each other by limiting gains jointly
But it's not really a solution on a population level. For one, if everyone sold their house because it'll soon be underwater, who'd they sell their house to? Aquaman? For two, a lot of people just won't be able to afford an expense like that. A large portion of the US lives paycheck to paycheck, and it's not easy to "just save up" a few hundred thousand when that means giving up on basic necessities.
Why do people have these blinders where they can’t view any issue except from the perspective of the minority of people who don’t have any resources? Why are so many people moving to places like Florida that are threatened by climate change?
And people bring it up because a lot of folks in New Orleans couldn't afford to flee Katrina and 700 people died. It was kind of an enormous humanitarian disaster. If we don't talk about it, nothing will happen to stop it.
I believe its because these people are young and repeating what they hear or they are old but have lived an insulated life and assume that people really cannot handle any upset in their life.
You’re basically saying, why are you so worried about all of these people who will have their lives destroyed when there are a bunch of other people who will be totally fine? I hope that when it’s put that way, you can see how ridiculous it is.
New Orleans is going to be underwater. That problem won't just affect poor people, it will affect everyone. So the first order of business is to encourage anyone who can do so to leave New Orleans to go somewhere that isn't underwater. That's the policy that's going to avoid the greatest amount of harm to the greatest number of people at the lowest cost.
Ah, right: it's a small percentage of the population, so we should just let them die, "and decrease the surplus population", right?
This kind of callousness is one of the biggest problem with the tech industry today. We learned to think in numbers, and some of us never learned to think about the people behind those numbers.
Yes, there are some kinds of problem where you really have to think about the numbers, and not the people, because if you try to save everyone you will end up saving no one.
This is not one of those.
The people who can move now, without financial hardship, get to make their own choices about when and whether to get out. The people we, as a society, should be thinking about are the people who cannot get out—either without financial ruination, or at all—because they are the ones we as a society must help.
Tragically, given the state of America today, we aren't likely to help them. And many of them are likely to die, whether by drowning when the next Hurricane Katrina inundates New Orleans, or by slow starvation and disease when they and everyone else in their community and support network are left homeless.
This is exactly the problematic thinking I’m talking about. Your obsession with using society to help those whose problems are the most intractable leads you to conclude to majority should be left “to make their own choices.”
But the most effective use of social action is helping the majority. They can benefit from social organization and their problems are tractable. Here, leaving the majority to its own devices is going to cause the most damage in the long run. Society should push them to make good choices and relocate in an orderly manner while there’s time.
Even for reasonably-stable middle-class people, moving—especially out of a place like NOLA—is going to cause financial hardship.
There will need to be a federal bailout to relocate everyone who needs help. The government should also probably announce a policy that there will be no future disaster relief that involves rebuilding, only relocating.
New Orleans will be the first, but not the last American city to collapse. Miami is probably next. Salt Lake City could very well run out of water, nevermind the increasingly toxic lakebed. Phoenix too. In the next hundred years people are going to learn why environmentalists use the word "sustainability" so much.
In any given year, 15% of the population moves, and 40% of them move to a different county. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/why-people-mo.... It's insane to say that most people wouldn't be able to make a once-in-a-lifetime move just a couple of towns over sometime over the next few decades.
We aren't discussing this particular group because we're a too emotional to think straight. We're discussing this group because it's the one that will bear the brunt of the suffering and it's the one where there isn't an obvious "just let them figure it out and it'll be fine" solution.
It’s not why are you so worried about all of these people who will have their lives destroyed when there are a bunch of other people who will be totally fine
It’s Why aren’t you worried about everyone having their life destroyed, if we can encourage people to move it may be challenging for them but it will save their lives.
I have no expectation that we’ll be willing to invest in our neighbors, though.
It doesn't even matter, really.
Suppose one person follows the sage advice of the HN glibertarians, sells his house and moves out. Good for him. But does this solve the problem? No, because now there's someone else there. Possibly a more desperate, poorer person. They can't all follow your advice, no more than they can all be best in their high school class, run the fastest in the marathon, or being on the winning side of a prediction market bet.
The reason people don't move is that for the time being, they're much, much better off than if they move. Especially if they start moving in large numbers.
Then they will look for someone to blame. The usual scape goats are the government and society.
Society fucked up, and that fuck up is gonna affect a lot of people who are not able to move out. Some sort of bailout will be needed.
Like clockwork ;)