It’s more than that. This was once a fine enough place to live but improper stewardship of the earth has made it a place unreasonable to build a major city, meanwhile we’re in a period where people build cities in places utterly unreasonable like phoenix. New York will occasionally get fucked by natural disasters, but what happened in LA where huge portions of the city need complete rebuilds, doesn’t happen there. Wildfires have become the norm in California and it’s one of the regions rapidly becoming uninsurable, alongside Florida.
The price of the houses is bad, but it’s the cost to replace what was lost that insurance cares about alongside the scale of the disaster and the expected mean and variance of time to recurrence. The housing is oversized and otherwise too high value in non-market ways, lacks fire resistance, and is likely to be hit by another wildfire before insurance can recoup what they paid out.
Except it really never was a “fine enough place”. Wildfires didn’t “become the norm”. They are literally a part of the very ecosystem of California. Various trees have even evolved to need them.
Sure we fucked the planet, but don’t blame “improper stewardship of the planet” on this one. This was hubris, like building on floodplains is also just plain hubris.
This is what happens when housing is grossly overpriced. The entire system collapses
It’s more than that. This was once a fine enough place to live but improper stewardship of the earth has made it a place unreasonable to build a major city, meanwhile we’re in a period where people build cities in places utterly unreasonable like phoenix. New York will occasionally get fucked by natural disasters, but what happened in LA where huge portions of the city need complete rebuilds, doesn’t happen there. Wildfires have become the norm in California and it’s one of the regions rapidly becoming uninsurable, alongside Florida.
The price of the houses is bad, but it’s the cost to replace what was lost that insurance cares about alongside the scale of the disaster and the expected mean and variance of time to recurrence. The housing is oversized and otherwise too high value in non-market ways, lacks fire resistance, and is likely to be hit by another wildfire before insurance can recoup what they paid out.
Except it really never was a “fine enough place”. Wildfires didn’t “become the norm”. They are literally a part of the very ecosystem of California. Various trees have even evolved to need them.
Sure we fucked the planet, but don’t blame “improper stewardship of the planet” on this one. This was hubris, like building on floodplains is also just plain hubris.
It’s both. There should be some wildfires, but we’ve made them worse with climate change and refusal to allow small controlled fires.