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This is kind of a weird op-ed. It frames this as though the costs are all red marker, but the costs of rebuilding include labor and materials and help to reinvi

• TulliusCicero 4y ago
  The difference with major cities is a) it's a lot harder to somehow abandon large populations than small ones, and b) the cost vs benefit ratio is probably there for big cities in a way that it's not for small towns in the mountains. Spending a billion dollars to rebuild a town with a population that numbers in the hundreds is horrible economic value. In contrast, New Orleans is big enough to where spending billions on flood protection may be still be worth it on some level. That said, it'd certainly be nice to find a way to have cute little towns in the mountains that wasn't dependent on enormous subsidies from other cities.
  • bobthepanda 4y ago
    The thing with cities is that they have huge sunk costs that are hard to move elsewhere. New York is prone to hurricanes and floods, but is also the landing point for probably most of the transatlantic cables. In a similar fashion, we spend a lot of money containing the Mississippi because New Orleans as a port and oil refinery hub represents nearly a fifth of refining capacity in the US. Those would be expensive assets to replace.
• carabiner 4y ago
  How are you sure these costs return to the communities? These towns have fewer than 1,000 residents. It's likely that builders would have to drive in from far away, trucking in materials from the largest metro area. Workers would have to drive 1-3 hours home, requiring higher pay, or you'd need housing onsite, both adding to costs. This is a lot of building all at once that they don't normally endure. You need outsiders.
  • thaumaturgy 4y ago
    I used "local economies" in an unclear, fuzzy way. I was just pointing out that the money doesn't just vaporize into the atmosphere, it buys gas and building materials and pays for wages and construction equipment and lots and lots of other things, and it's "local" in the sense that much of it isn't going to another country. It would be better if that money were being spent on affordable new housing development that wasn't just replacing low-income small communities, but it's still weird to talk about it as though it's a billion dollars in a winged suitcase that is set free to live its best life in some untamed wilderness, not a single Jackson of which will ever again grace a wallet.
• MikePlacid 4y ago
  > Insurance isn't mentioned at all in the article. Yep. I am paying about $2000 a year for fire insurance for my summer home in Sierra Nevada. They promise to pay $350k estimated as the price to rebuild. Three major fires were nearby this year, about a 100 homes burned in the county. But thousands of (presumably) insured homes, including mine, survived. The deal looks pretty good for the insurance company. I am also paying California and federal taxes. This girl talks about federal money as coming from nowhere. But they are not from nowhere, they are from my pocket. If they are that scarce, I would rather spend them on rebuilding California towns, than say Ukrainian ones.
  • bushbaba 4y ago
    2,000 per year is still low. Just look at Florida on how bad it can get. Not even sure 350k would cover your rebuild costs given the market. Heard some crazy costs in Sonoma from high demand and not enough construction workers. Hopefully that insurance covers replacement cost if labor triples or more.
  • Cd00d 4y ago
    Honestly, I'm having a hard time digesting your attitude that federal taxes should be allocated to your vacation home in a fire-prone region, than supporting the victims of an unjust war.
    • MikePlacid 4y ago
      I am having a hard time with your victimblaming ordinary Americans for forest fires, while keeping American politicians off the hook for the war in Ukraine.
      • Cd00d 4y ago
        I actually didn't blame you for your situation. I pointed out that I find it gross to prioritize federal spending for your vacation home over victims of war. Also, ordinary Americans certainly don't have vacation homes.
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• TigeriusKirk 4y ago
  >about as fair a question as whether Phoenix or Las Vegas or New Orleans should exist Or Los Angeles. Bringing in water from halfway up the state? Maybe we should shut the place down instead.
• esoterica 4y ago
  > This is kind of a weird op-ed. It frames this as though the costs are all red marker, but the costs of rebuilding include labor and materials and help to reinvigorate local economies. I'm sure there is a net cost, but it has been serviceable so far. This is a (literal, not figurative) example of the broken window fallacy.
  • axiolite 4y ago
    > This is a (literal, not figurative) example of the broken window fallacy. No it is not. The broken window fallacy is the misunderstanding that breaking windows seems to be a net gain for the economy. The comment you are replying to specifically said such rebuilding will still have "a net cost."
    • michaelmrose 4y ago
      It absolutely is. We could have obtained exactly the same positives by building new things. The net difference in benefits is the entire insane per resident cost. It's exactly as bad as it looks.
  • thaumaturgy 4y ago
    I added "I'm sure there is a net cost..." immediately after that line because I'm aware of the broken window fallacy, and I anticipated that some HN'er would want to pick that nit, and I was hoping to avoid the usual absurdity of absolutism vs. first-order-approximation. But, that doesn't seem to have worked for you and one other reply (so far). How would you have phrased this to prevent this misunderstanding?
• sagarm 4y ago
  > This is kind of a weird op-ed. It frames this as though the costs are all red marker, but the costs of rebuilding include labor and materials and help to reinvigorate local economies. I'm sure there is a net cost, but it has been serviceable so far. The example given is $1B to rebuild a community of 300, or $33M/person. There's no way that community can ever pay back that loan -- and if they can, why are we subsidizing it? > Insurance isn't mentioned at all in the article. WUI areas have become nearly impossible to insure, even if you're doing all the things right for making your property fire-resistant (and most homeowners in these areas aren't). As long as California's housing market stays red-hot, there will still be another sucker willing to pay for California's state-insurance-plan-of-last-resort, but someday, somehow, something's gonna change and all of a sudden a lot of people won't be able to afford homeowner's insurance, and that's going to gut a lot of the fire-prone small towns. The formula is simple: if a fire is expected every X years, and the cost to rebuild is $Y, can you charge $Y/X + some margin for profit and bad luck? Private insurance is saying no. If public insurance is saying yes, it is only via some form of subsidy. Should we be subsidizing the rural lifestyle in this way? We already directly subsidize rural roads, electrical infrastructure, hospitals, telecom, and more. We have many more indirect subsidies via higher electrical bills for the undergrounding of electrical transmission lines, agricultural subsidies, implied muni bond insurance, etc. We've got to draw the line somewhere, and we can't afford for it to be at $33M/resident.
  • rightbyte 4y ago
    How can there possibly be 33M USD properties per resident anyway? Just seems like a really bad procurement process from the state.
    • Jensson 4y ago
      Seems like corruption to me, someone is lining their pockets. That is way too much to just be a bad procurement.
    • votepaunchy 4y ago
      > How can there possibly be 33M USD properties per resident anyway? $1B/300 is $3M.