Hurricane Ian, Unaffordable Housing and America's Voluntarily--and Involuntarily-- Internally Displaced Peoples

What if we didn't rebuild those areas which were hit by disaster?

At some point in your life — preferably when you are young — I highly recommend living in one of the fastest growing counties in America.

To live in a boomtown is to live inside a sort of environmental Ponzi scheme. It can’t go on for forever, can it? Things get built and they get built quickly and just as quickly, they fill up another parcel of land. If you build it — and if you market it — they will come whether to Scottsdale or the Villages.

Everyone — your neighbors, the new restaurant owners down the street — is hoping that this time will be different. After all, isn’t that why they moved? That here is better than wherever that last place was. Maybe it’s the taxes in that last place. Or the schools. Or the crime. Yes, the crime. Or the weather. Or that relationship that just didn’t work. Or you were simply priced out because the rent was too damn high.

Looking at this map it’s easy to see problem for what it is.

Rather than meaningfully deal with the problem — we don’t build enough houses, and we allow foreigners to buy up our most treasured places unhindered — there are a lot of lies about why you moved in the first place. The biggest lies you told to yourself.

Mostly you moved because you couldn’t afford where you were. And now, maybe we can’t afford your move to a hurricane prone area.

For a lot of people in that situation Florida was a kind of oasis to them. Many of the people affected by the hurricane moved to Florida because its a land of second — and perhaps third and fourth — chances. When you’re young this is tremendously exciting but as you get older it gets less fun to move. Can you imagine being a retiree from the Midwest moving down to Clearwater and watching as your beachfront property is stripped from you? Reuters estimates that they’ll be as much as 44,000 internally displaced Americans. Ninety people are thought to have been killed.

What does it say about a country that it won’t allow building in its most desirable places to live? What does it say about a people that ships grandma and grandpa off to Florida? What does it say about the U.S. that it’s one of very few countries which allows foreigners to buy whatever properties they want?

Not only that but we don’t require foreign landlords to rent out their properties. We let them have their Swiss bank account in the sky, no questions asked.

There’s a view that we can and will move people to America’s heartland but I can’t help but feel that maybe this, too, is a kind of Ponzi scheme, that doesn’t examine the real reason our cities are unaffordable.

I don't really know if hurricanes are becoming more or less common but I do know that a lot of people are choosing to live in their paths because they can’t afford living in the safer cities.

James Fallows posted this map:

The new Census story map doesn’t dwell on this point, but there’s an obvious correlation between where more Americans are choosing to live, and where climate-related consequences are worst: drought, wildfire, hurricane, extreme heat, etc. A great new geo-journalism project from the Washington Post illustrated this pattern in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian. Between 1970 and 2020, the number of people who lived in the path that Ian took across Florida rose by more than 600 per cent.

Maybe we shouldn’t rebuild Tampa and St. Petersburg. Maybe it’s time for your insurance premiums to be so high that you can’t afford Florida either. Maybe it’s time for the risk to be properly adjusted.

What if instead of spending billions rebuilding Florida we simply gave the refugees more money to relocate to the Midwest — the very place many of the folks who moved from in the first place?

You can already imagine the campaign: “Dear Floridians. It’s time to go home to the Midwest.”

There were, of course, bright spots in the conflict of the sky people versus the dirt people. Take this headline from CNN: “This 100% solar community endured Hurricane Ian with no loss of power and minimal damage.”

Maybe the sunshine state should build more solar power and fewer condos? Or is that too progressive?

Why did we decide to rebuild New Orleans after Katrina? Katrina sits under the sea level. It was only a matter of time and yet we rebuilt it. Why?