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That's one way to look at the data. At least among the two first examples - in both cases there was very valuable land with very not valuable buildings and othe

That's one way to look at the data. At least among the two first examples - in both cases there was very valuable land with very not valuable buildings and other stuff on top of it. In the third case, which was also sort of about land and the stuff on top of it, but "invaded by Napoleon" is so broad I'm not sure that tells us anything real. Anyway, when something happened that swept the buildings away - not strictly speaking all the people, just some, but all the buildings - a lot of good things happened. "Broken windows Bastiat" is kind of reductive because houses are depreciating, a house destroys itself without any intervention. There is a slow moving window breaking in every house. It is always declining in value. A house is a way to use land but it's not the thing that's valuable. It is the land that is appreciating. You could call "land getting more valuable" gentrification, but I think that's missing the point. If you wanted to advocate for a positive intervention in the face of disasters, provide displaced homeowners a temporary place to live so that they can keep their land. People aren't sophisticated, they don't realize the destroyed house on top of their land was actually decreasing the real value of what they had, but they are also desperate, they need to live somewhere. Without such a plan in place ahead of time, all it will take is that Cascadia earthquake to wildly reconfigure home ownership in California, because a ton of people thinking they are sitting on million dollar homes assessed at a tenth of their value will all be selling at the bottom at once, because they will need a place to live. Gentrification has nothing to do with it.

h0l0cube 5y ago
> Gentrification has nothing to do with it. Perhaps there something better to call it. But when Katrina comes and wipes the euphemistic slate clean, the poorer people that used to live in those houses aren't coming back to inhabit the same land, they go elsewhere. And the middle-class people that move to the new properties often leave somewhere behind too. It's possible that in the macro, it's just migration patterns, but in the micro there's been a rise in tax revenue, land value etc. in New Orleans.

h0l0cube 5y ago

> Gentrification has nothing to do with it. Perhaps there something better to call it. But when Katrina comes and wipes the euphemistic slate clean, the poorer people that used to live in those houses aren't coming back to inhabit the same land, they go elsewhere. And the middle-class people that move to the new properties often leave somewhere behind too. It's possible that in the macro, it's just migration patterns, but in the micro there's been a rise in tax revenue, land value etc. in New Orleans.