Hi everyone!
Someone I’ve been interacting with online for quite a while lives in Asheville, North Carolina (USA) near the Swannanoa River and has had an absolutely brutal few months…
If you don’t remember what Hurricane Helene has done to that part of the country… I’m not sure if the video below will work, it was posted directly to Reddit I think… but if not, here’s the link:
My friend hasn’t worked in months, their house is/was filled with mud and mold and insurance nor Federal/State relief funds will pay out. The house isn’t habitable but a mortgage is still owed and the repair costs are more expensive than the house is currently valued at.
It’s been an absolute nightmare of bureaucracy and logistics and while I haven’t spoken to her in a while, she still pops up on social media occasionally with updates, and they’re all extremely frustrating.
Unfortunately the world has moved on from Hurricane Helen’s destruction to the California fires that are still ongoing…
There’s been lots of articles about State Farm insurance dropping household fire insurance a few months ago – and while it sounds like there might be State/Federal relief funds, you can see from the video above, some people might have lost everything and might not get any help.
I’ve written before wondering if home ownership might be dangerous in the future… and the above events and many more have me musing on it again. Of course, the obvious counter argument is that you have to live somewhere and landlords will take advantage of a disaster, ie, rents increasing in California right now.
The counter to the counter is….
… losing a house is more expensive than increased rent.
I’m start to wonder even further if owning more than a couple of bags worth of stuff is the way to go in a world where weather events are both more intense and more regular.
Photo by Veerasak Piyawatanakul
The main problem is insurance.
As extreme weather events become more regular and more intense, for-profit insurance companies are either going to have to pull out of areas altogether (like Florida or California) or limit the types of insurance they can offer (can’t offer fire insurance in California or flood insurance for Florida). They simply won’t be able to afford to stay in business otherwise.
It’s not just problem spots either, any area could have a freak hailstorm that destroys thousands of roofs and vehicles or something of that nature (ie, Iowa).
When insurance companies pull out of an region, those houses instantly lose their value.
They can’t sell their property because banks won’t lend out a mortgage without available insurance. So people can’t sell… but they also can’t afford to keep a property that’s been damaged either.
I can’t think of much worse than having to pay back a mortgage for a house no one can actually live in.
There is a genuine economic crisis looming… where people’s biggest financial assets are worth significantly less and entire regions overnight lose a huge percentage of an already housing.
As far as I can tell, 12,000+ homes have been destroyed by the California wildfires, in areas that were already suffering a housing crisis. Builders and tradespeople don’t appear from nowhere, all the effort that will go into rebuilding California means that somewhere else isn’t getting the housing it also needed.
So my thinking is that at some point, in some regions, owning a home will just be too risky. Even though you’ll likely have to pay more in rent than a mortgage, at least with rent you won’t lose a massive portion of your wealth if things go badly.
To double down on that… if you manage to actually only care about a bag or two worth of stuff, then you could theoretically move whenever disaster strikes. You could move to another region that won’t have to rebuild.
This might be a silly concept, obviously it’s not possible for people with kids in school or local businesses or a thousand different reasons… but it does feel like only a matter of time before we all go through a huge disaster, and so out of pure survival we just end up with minimal possessions and an enforced nomadic lifestyle.
There is, of course, a pretty likely scenario that after huge disasters, houses and infrastructure are only built in less-prone areas and built to withstand the likely extreme events of the area. A huge part of the devastation of Asheville is that no one ever expected flooding there. The hurricanes were extraordinary… and so maybe we’ll end up building houses and infrastructure that can handle floods and fires and hail and snow and heatwaves and earthquakes, etc etc. I just, ah, don’t know if that’s possible or feasible.
Where for-profit insurance companies abandon people because they cannot profit in high-risk regions, then either homes just don’t have insurance and can’t be sold… or the government has to step in and provide insurance.
Which sounds reasonable… maybe for-profit insurance doesn’t make sense when it comes to people’s homes… but that also means that everyone is paying to rebuild after a disaster. That’s our tax dollars that are spent on rebuilding homes and infrastructure… which is no doubt a worthy cause… but it also means those tax dollars can’t be spent on improving infrastructure or services.
With enough extreme weather events, infrastructure gets steadily worse over time as damages outweigh taxes.
The only sticking point in my theory about people adopting a more nomadic, less material existence is that the best way to survive extreme weather events is through building up your local community to look after everyone and harden and adapt everything for extreme weather. No one can survive for every long alone, and so staying in one spot and building with the community might be way smarter than moving around a lot.
Governments have mostly be captured by corporations, but communities are incredible because we’re better united.
I don’t know what the solutions are for ourselves and the generations that follow us… is this something you’ve put any thought into? No? Just me? Dang…
Thanks for reading!
Also shared to my personal blog : https://lifebe.com.au/opinion/is-a-nomadic-lifestyle-the-future/