Rising seas will swallow New Orleans. People need to start relocating now
cnn.com
cnn.com
Likewise, the flood plains of Texas are cheap and nice to live in when there are no floods and when floods are imminent you have sufficient warning that you can evacuate and the federal government will compensate you. You can then go back and live there. This one is harder because it is unpleasant to move and you don’t receive the inflated price but it does incentivize some on the border.
Of course the fires in Malibu are a story of going too far in the wrong time. If they’d had a sympathetic administration in the federal government likely some kind of compensation scheme could have been worked out. So you have to work on the politics and the economics.
Wouldn’t plan it but sounds like could’ve been a solid strategy assuming trust in timely condemnations (out of homeowner control, I think).
Private insurers haven’t been willing to cover large parts of the south for decades. The NFIP was the backstop and already overstretched when Katrina hit New Orleans, which is when it first got bailed out. It’s been a downward spiral ever since.
I've no idea what the going rate for insurance is currently in New Orleans but it has to be crazy right?
The rational part of the economy has less leverage when the irrational information market is so large and well funded.
At the very least a moratorium on new builds and additions should go into effect immediately.
Go check out the "Maas-vallei" in the south of the Netherlands to see cities (10+) that really, really shouldn't be located where they are (medieval foundations were built on the shores and never replaced. They've eroded away decades ago and still aren't being replaced, plus they've got more plant roots in them than forest soil). And Belgium has it worse.
It isn't even the result of rising sea levels. It's just too many buildings. Too little places for the river to go in such flat terrain.
People live there, are unwilling to move, are unwilling to upgrade their houses, and every 10 years or so, a flood comes, things collapse, often 5-10 people die, government pays for the houses and bridges that collapse and nothing changes until the next flood comes. Sometimes the houses are "repaired" (never the foundations of course) and it's rented out, usually to young families who can't afford better. I'm over 50, and I remember this happening when I was 5.
Best of luck to New Orleans.
I guess in the US you could ask Cubans.
The southern third of LA has ground composed of spongy organic material deposited by rivers since the last ice age as opposed to solid ground largely made up of silicates and minerals covering bedrock.
Relative sea level rise = actual sea level rise + land subsidence
Cities like New Orleans are suffering a double whammy: not only are they subsiding (sinking), but the sea levels are also rising and so between the two they're in grave trouble.
But so is lower Manhattan, Miami, 60% of the land in the Netherlands, almost all of Bangladesh, along with numerous other places.
Now 3m-7m is vastly higher than any current predictions, but hey lets scare monger about a single city!
From page 1 of the paper: "Coastal Louisiana has been referred to as 'canary in the coal mine' with respect to climate impacts. As highlighted in the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the central US Gulf Coast is the single most exposed LECZ (low-elevation coastal zone) in the world in terms of projected relative sea-level (RSL) rise throughout this century."
> Notably it does not predict this
Again from page 1 of the paper: "The initial impetus consists of new evidence that RSL in this region is probably committed to 3-7m of future rise, with a shoreline bound to migrate as much as 100km inland. We argue that future RSL rise to this elevation – judging from field evidence rather than climate model output – is, in fact, a best-case scenario."
The 3-7m! Relocate now! stuff seems unfounded and irresponsible.
Using the Census ACS age brackets, about 20-ish% of louisiana's population is under 15, and another 20 is between 15 and 29. Everyone 30 and older adds up to the other 60.
So a hair over 60% are were at least 7.
But that's who lives there now not who lived there then. Between 2005 and 2006 the state population dropped by 6% and most of that displaced population never returned - people coming in from elsewhere weren't there for Katrina. So the fraction who were both living there AND old enough to remember it is considerably smaller than 60%.
So like I said, roughly half.
Like, there are entire journals and programs of study devoted to it. I’m not just guessing here.
According to this study, almost a third of displaced people returned to the same dwelling by some time in 2006. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4048822/
Today, numbers suggest that around 60%, almost two-thirds returned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_after_Hurricane_K...
I'm not sure it was a sign to leave the place so much as the levees should have been raised about 2 ft higher to deal with the pretty predictable water levels.
This current thing is also kind of bizarre saing there'll be a sea level rise about 10x reality. Why can't people do maths and realistic estimates and planning? I assume it's some kind of politics that requires the untruths? I'm not American and don't really get the politics and why they can't do sensible calculation on flood defences like the Dutch say.
And would this silt deposition actually occur at a rate that would fully counteract sea level rise, just as the huge rise in sea levels at the end of the last ice age did not mean that the delta disappeared?
If so, the danger to New Orleans would be entirely avoidable by changes in local land use.
Perhaps the fundamental issue is that river deltas tend to be dynamic, with the watercourse continually changing, which isn't really compatible with a city in a fixed location. (Hence the damaging attempts at stopping this.)
The river wandering is part of this. Since the silt can only be deposited where the water goes, for the delta to grow (or just maintain itself) the river has to go here and there all over it.
And yes, people die when this happens. But if you stop the river wandering, the silt isn't going to be deposited so as to maintain the delta.
Maybe it's not a good location for permanent human settlement.
On the other hand, the silt wasn't ever being deposited in large quantities in New Orleans itself, but more in other places. The delta is huge. New Orleans is famously below sea level and always has been. There's always been hurricanes. It's always been dangerous to live there and I'm not sure you can blame the dynamic nature of the river.
'Point of no return': New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level
I think the article didn’t talk enough about how Louisiana is far too poor to undertake a planned relocation without a vast amount of federal help.
Then, you’ve got the fact that Louisiana’s political leadership is some of the worst in the country. The article touched on it but arguably didn’t discuss it enough. These are not people who will do anything that benefits constituents. Arguably they aren’t even benefiting their donors by burying their head in the sand, although I imagine their donors have accepted that they’ll just leave New Orleans with their profits in hand when the time comes.
> The pump station complex, which is the largest of its type in the world, consists of 11 each 5,444 horsepower Caterpillar engines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Intracoastal_Waterway_Wes...
To what I think is your larger point, that project is a small part of the efforts at water control around New Orleans. But, so far they have generally been viewed as beneficial and the various governmental entities keep paying for them -- why should we expect anything different in the future ? Roads get repaved all over the country, bridges rebuilt, and the levees rebuilt. There's always an "infrastructure crisis" of the decade, the chatter is how we as a society judge the expense and confirm it's necessary.
Louisiana isn’t poor by almost any objective measure. They’re in the bottom half of US states by GDP per capita (not in the bottom 10), but they’d be in the top 20 countries in the world by GDP per capita if they were a country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
They’re just behind Denmark by GDP per capita and ahead of Germany, Sweden, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, and the UK.
Drive through LA and those places you mentioned and you'll see it.
Also, use PPP.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-local-tax-col...
Louisiana is 32nd for tax revue per capita.
The money in Louisiana is primarily in refining oil pumped elsewhere. There are definitely externalities that big oil unloads on the people of Louisiana, but the refineries inject a lot of money into the community.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-local-tax-col...
Louisiana is 32nd for tax revue per capita.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-local-tax-col...
Louisiana is 32nd for tax revue per capita.
However if you have look at average incomes and state revenue which represents the resources available, which was the what I was responding to.
Whether they chose to use those resources is a different question.
Also even looking at something like average or median personal income, Louisiana ranks in or near the top 20 counties in the world.
What you’re seeing is that America has a terrible safety net so the floor is much lower than most of Europe.
And anyone that could get out they left a long time ago very happy my parents decided to leave that part of the world, the best thing that could’ve happened to the south is that everything from Virginia to South Carolina is gentrifying.
The sad part is that a large part of the population don’t realize that the conservative upper end of the population is selling out the conservative lower end.
Louisiana ranks 43rd in per capita personal income. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_adjuste...
Please don’t post the same link & comment 5 times.
Income inequality isn’t the same thing as government resources available per person.
43rd in per capita personal income still puts in in the top 20 countries globally.
Correct. You clearly understand that your citing of averages papers over the poverty rate and conflates the gains of the rich with the plight of the poor.
Louisiana is literally ranked the #1 poorest state in the nation today counting the percent of people who don’t have enough to pay rent or eat properly.
“Government resources available per person” is cold comfort to the over one in four children in Louisiana who are living in poverty. How are those government resources actually being used, and if it ranks so well, why isn’t that reflected in LA’s health and education? “Government resources available per person” includes tax credits for oil and gas…
I’m arguing about available resources, not willingness to use them.
If you want to define poor purely by percentage of people who are living below the poverty line instead of median income, average income, gdp per capita or tax revenue, go ahead. But in the context of whether the government has the resources to do something, that’s not a good metric.
And beyond this scope if you look at average or median personal income, the average or median person in Louisiana is not poor, which is the metric I would use if I was going to call a group of people poor.
> if you look at average or median personal income, the average or median person in Louisiana is not poor
This is one to be more careful with. Neither the average nor the median inherently tell you anything about the state’s poverty rate, and having a poverty rate that’s the highest in the US and almost twice the national average absolutely supports the viewpoint that LA is relatively poor. When it comes to median household income specifically, the LA Budget Project says “These numbers obscure stark racial disparities” and points out that the median Black income is around half that of White non-Hispanic household income. (Page 9 - https://www.labudget.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/LBP-Cens...)
It might seem like the median $60k household income isn’t poor, but 50% of households are below “ALICE” levels and having to compromise on basic necessities. This doesn’t support your claim that the median resident of LA is not poor. https://www.unitedforalice.org/introducing-ALICE/louisiana
It highlights one problem with using percent of people below the federal poverty level as your metric. Median income doesn’t tell the whole story, but neither does percent below the poverty level. $33k goes a lot further in Louisiana than it does in New York.
https://www.unitedforalice.org/state-overview-mobile/new-yor...
You’re equivocating. Poverty rate is a much better metric for measuring poverty than median income is.
Louisiana has a higher poverty rate, and a higher child poverty rate, than New York State. New York’s ALICE level seems comparable because New York’s cost of living is so much higher, but it’s actually true that around half the people in New York (and Louisiana, and make other states) are struggling to afford all their basic necessities. Poverty rate isn’t ALICE, poverty rate is high probability of compromising on nutrition.
Come on, be honest, are you willing to live on $16k/year in Louisiana? (Or any state??) I wouldn’t want to, and I bet you don’t either. Are you really going to argue that’s not poor?
That’s my point. You’re the one who brought up ALICE as a metric to show how someone making the median income is still poor.
If it applies to Louisiana, it applies to New York as well.
> Louisiana has a higher poverty rate, and a higher child poverty rate, than New York State.
If you adjust for cost of living, New York and Louisiana have the same poverty rate.
> Come on, be honest, are you willing to live on $16k/year in Louisiana? (Or any state??) I wouldn’t want to, and I bet you don’t either. Are you really going to argue that’s not poor?
No but I’d rather live on $16k in Louisiana than New York. I’m not making a value judgement on what constitutes poor or not, I’m saying that if $16k is poor in Louisiana, then $22k is poor in NY.
Incidentally for big chunks of my childhood my family was below the poverty level in the Deep South, and so were many of my friends.
Cost of living is less applicable to the federal poverty line than it is to the ALICE threshold or the median income because the cost of food and several other basic necessities don’t vary geographically as much as the price of housing does. The poverty line of $16k/person is set in part because it’s the line where going below likely means you can’t afford enough food no matter where in the U.S. you live.
That’s not correct at all. The poverty level is 3x the amount of money it took to feed one person a nutritional diet in 1963 and then adjusted for inflation. They picked 3 times because food represented about 1/3 of a poor family’s budget.
Note that they use CPI-U for the adjustment, and food prices haven’t risen as fast as most is the rest of the goods in CPI-U so it’s closer to 4x the amount needed to afford the minimum nutritional diet.
If you look here, you’ll see that the “thrifty food plan” for the most expensive person (male 20-50) comes out to $3,800 a year.
https://www.fns.usda.gov/research/cnpp/usda-food-plans/cost-...
If you just think about it for a minute $16k or $43 a day is a crazy amount for the minimum amount of money to afford food. I don’t spend that much on myself on average and I ‘m making many times more than $16k a year.
Now I can try very hard to come up with the most charitable explanation for what you are saying and assume that you mean that $16k is the number that you need to afford other necessities plus food.
However if that’s what you’re saying then the number 1 other necessity is housing. Which means for an accurate comparison you need to factor in housing price differences.
To your point housing cost is the largest difference between states, but it’s also the largest part of nearly everyone’s budget, even people living on $16k a year, and it’s far from the only difference. Groceries a fair amount between states, and other necessities are somewhere in between.
You can’t just look at a flat number across the US, there’s no way around it.
I mean just look at average rent. It’s more than 2x higher in NY than LA. Even looking at another southern state, GA. Rent is 25% higher there. That’s a huge difference and it absolutely needs to be accounted for if you care about comparing poverty between states.
2- $16k / year / person is not enough in the US to live comfortably, regardless of where you live. Going below that does in fact risk compromising nutrition, and the fact that that is what is actually occurring among the poor is pretty well documented.
3- If you want to use cost of living, then as you point out, NY is not a valid comparison to LA. Compare LA to Nebraska or South Dakota or any of a dozen other states where the cost of living is nearly the same, and you will see exactly what is said all over the internet: LA has a much higher population of poor than other comparable states.
4- The fact that LA’s ranked 32nd for tax revenue and #1 for poverty seems like something to be rightly ashamed of.
We’re tilting at windmills and failing to convince each other, but Louisiana is widely considered to be one of the poorest states in nation, and trying to argue otherwise on HN certainly won’t change the mountain of evidence or the summary at all.
It does however provide a link 3 paragraphs down that does tell you how the “poverty threshold” is calculated. A direct quote:
“The current official poverty measure was developed in the mid 1960s by Mollie Orshansky, a staff economist at the Social Security Administration. Poverty thresholds were derived from the cost of a minimum food diet multiplied by three to account for other family expenses.”
https://www.census.gov/topics/income-poverty/poverty/about/h...
Can you acknowledge that the risk of comprising nutrition on $16k a year is higher in a state where rent is 2x higher and groceries are 10% more expensive?
Literally every anti-poverty group in the country acknowledges that the failure to update the poverty threshold by region is a terrible failure in the way the United States handles poverty.
If you want to come up with a tortured method that only compares Louisiana to states with 85%+ white populations in order to fit your preconceived regionalist prejudices then have at it.
Let’s rank states by number of homeless people while we’re at it and see if that’s at all useful.
Maybe instead we could look at the percentage of people who can’t afford food, shelter, and basic necessities in their state on their income. As far as I can see the only major downside to doing that compared to other methods is that it doesn’t support the way you think the world ought to work.
I offered up two states that have comparable cost of living. There are actually around 14 or 15 states that have lower cost of living than Louisiana, and all of them have a lower percentage of people below the federal poverty line than LA.
> Let’s rank states by number of homeless
Seems like another straw man to me. There are more people below the poverty line in Louisiana than there are homeless people in the entire US.
> Maybe instead we could look at the percentage of people who can’t afford food, shelter, and basic necessities in their state on their income.
That’s what ALICE is, we already talked about it, and the ALICE threshold is FAR higher than the federal poverty line in all 50 states.
OH, BTW, guess which state ranks highest on the ALICE poverty list…
> it doesn’t support the way you think the world ought to work.
You have a vivid imagination. I’ve been trying to avoid snark here, and appreciating that you also kept it low as well until now. I will mention that your interpretation of what I said about thresholds was not in any way ‘charitable’ let alone realistic. I would love to see your budget that stays under $43/day without compromising on food. Show it to me and I’ll list a few things you forgot you need that blow your budget. I don’t know how to live on $43/day assuming I don’t pay any rent.
Here’s a summary of exactly what happened. If you want to research that yourself I’ll include a link to an overview, but I know what I’m talking about.
1. Start with the 1963 base thresholds developed by Orshansky.
2. Apply the 1969 revision:
-Keep the 1963 nonfarm thresholds as the base.
-Change the inflation adjustment method from food-plan costs to CPI.
-Change the farm adjustment.
3. Every year thereafter:
-Take the prior threshold and adjust it by the relevant CPI. (Originally CPI-W, then CPI-U after about 1980.)
4. Apply a few technical revisions in 1981:
- Remove farm/nonfarm distinction.
- Remove male-headed/female-headed distinction.
- Expand family-size categories.
That’s it. The numbers are still based on the data from 1963 adjusted for inflation each year. There are differences in that we no longer look at the gender of the head of household and farm families no longer have lower multiple applied.
But the number is just the calculations from 1963 based on a multiple of the amount of food needed carried forward.
Most other countries use a relative benchmark for poverty and most other counties use COL adjustments by region. The US does not. It is stupid that we don’t. And using the resulting measurements from this flawed system is horribly misleading.
As to whether you can live on $43 a day minus rent. Louisiana has expanded Medicaid coverage, so someone making $16k a year will get free healthcare. Assuming a single person with no kids, they’ll also get about $180 a month in snap benefits which covers a little more than half of the $333 usda thrifty food plan. So how about you tell me how this hypothetical person can’t survive on $1,333 a month with rent, healthcare, and half of their food covered? If you can’t imagine being able to survive on that you must living in a very high cost of living area.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-pa...
Then don’t. Use the cost-of-living metric you’ve been arguing for to answer the relevant question here. When accounting for cost of living, you will discover exactly what we already know: Louisiana’s population is the poorest in the nation.
New York, California, Mississippi, Alabama, New Mexico, West Virginia, and Louisiana all have % below ALICE thresholds between 46 and 50%.
Based on that I think it’s very likely any one of those could have the highest percentage of people under a COL adjusted poverty threshold. Either way they’re so close that’s there’s no meaningful difference.
The real question is why would you use the percent of people under some threshold as your primary factor when deciding to label their entire popular “poor”.
I certainly wouldn’t use COL adjusted poverty rates to say that New York or California is poor, or that the populations of those states are poor.
Let’s say hypothetically that we constructed a rich threshold, say it’s $500k a year COL adjusted. And some hypothetical state was both number one for percentage of people over the rich threshold and number one for percentage of people below the poor threshold, would you say that this population was the poorest in the nation or the richest?
You can continue to equivocate about other states that are close, it doesn’t really make a relevant difference here. Louisiana has the most poor people by “stupid” absolute percent below the federal level, it has the most poor people by cost-of-living household-size adjusted ALICE level, the third lowest median income, and the third lowest number of billionaires per capita. By multiple objective metrics, including the one you asked for, Louisiana is most definitely poor.
If you want to just look at ALICE as what qualifies a state to be called poor then sure let’s do it, but if that’s the case then if Louisiana is poor at 50%, then New York is a poor state at 48% and California is a poor state at 46%.
If that’s the argument that there is a big group of poor states all over the country including California and New York that includes Louisiana then I’m not gonna argue. I wouldn’t make that claim but I can see how someone would.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/louisiana
Subscores:
* Crime 50th * Economy 50th * Education 46th
and on and on. In fact, I can't find a single top line number when they AREN'T in the bottom 10.
There’s a difference between “there exists people there who are poor” and the state and local governments are poor.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-local-tax-col...
Louisiana is 32nd for tax revue per capita.
They're also, once again, dead last in economic oppurtunity.
Frankly, I call bullshit on your interpretation. Have you ever set foot in Louisiana? I've lived in the deep south my entire life.
The entire south, outside of a few cities is generally pretty poor, but Louisiana/Arkansas/Mississippi is just a different level. That's what happens when you elect a bunch of MAGA morons.
PS: The local governments are doing everything possible to NOT help their citizens.
That region has been impoverished since the Civil War, and even before.
Most of the rural south is indistinguishable from rural Pennsylvania or most other rural part of the US. The main difference in the Mississippi Delta region is that the population is mostly Black descendants of former slaves who are still suffering the after effects of slavery and subsequent generations of sharecropping.
But the state still has plenty of resources compared to just about anywhere else in the world.
>less than $1000
$1000 is 20% of the entire per capita amount. Louisiana is only $1000 behind Colorado and Rhode Island.
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/me...
Or here...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lowest-income_counties...
14 of the 20 poorest counties in the country are in Alabama, Louisiana, or Mississippi, and other than one in South Dakota, none of the 30 poorest are outside the South. Only 4 of the top 50 are from outside the South.
It really is a different level of poverty.
>Most of the rural south is indistinguishable from rural Pennsylvania or most other rural part of the US. The main difference in the Mississippi Delta region is that the population is mostly Black descendants of former slaves who are still suffering the after effects of slavery and subsequent generations of sharecropping.
Then you have me a bunch of example counties in that region as proof that I was wrong.
Which I assume means you either skipped over what I said or didn’t comprehend it.
Uh, by the objective measure of my own two eyes? You can trot out all the fancy numbers you want, I’m not blind. The resource extraction that goes on in Louisiana does not necessarily trickle down to its residents nor even stays in the state.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-local-tax-col...
Louisiana is 32nd for tax revue per capita.
Huh? Your link shows them between Chile and Portugal.
Edit: better video
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-026-01820-z
It appears that if you go through the link in this Guardian article, you will get free access to the full paper:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/04/new-orleans-...
take some of that $1 BILLION PER DAY being used to bomb innocent kids and civilians in Iran, soon Cuba, and help innocent people in your own country relocate
if the current administration is in charge the week New Orleans is about to go undersea they will "solve the problem" by banning FEMA from doing anything or just defunding it to $1/day
I've no reason to doubt this is absolutely true.
that's not what they're gonna do though....
> The region has “crossed the point of no return,” the paper’s authors wrote, adding New Orleans “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century.”
sorry, Gulf of what ? /s