The Bottleneck and You
The Bottleneck and You
How the "climate squeeze" is making it harder to find a home that's relatively safe, and why the problem will almost certainly get worse.
The higher ground is getting pricey.
That’s because how fast we go may be the world we get1, but where you live is the future you face. However successfully we embrace sustainability and decarbonization now, our previous inaction means we’re in for unprecedented climate and ecological upheavals. Discontinuity is now the most basic fact of our world.
We still treat that discontinuity as an abstraction2. But its impacts are landing everywhere in concrete, measurable ways. The seriousness of these impacts, though, will vary widely across the landscape. No place will be safe in coming years, but some places look to be relatively safer than the others. You need to be able to spot the difference3.
Geography matters. Getting yourself to relative safety raises your odds of being able to build the life you want, in a durable way, even as discontinuity rattles our civilization4.
Two important caveats, right up front: wealth and freedom.
People with plenty of money, living in well-off communities, have enormous abilities to buffer themselves (at least for a while) from the realities of this crisis, even when their communities are under threat. If you had to choose between being rich and crisis-smart, chances favor the overstuffed investment portfolio.
Of course, being poor and ill-prepared is the hardest way to enter a long crisis in a deeply unequal society. Many people don’t have the money to relocate or the resources to ruggedize their lives, even if they actually understood what’s happening to them.
Then, too, not everyone has the freedom of choosing where to live5. Some of us have strong passports, portable jobs (or migration-friendly skills), and large distributed networks of support: we can essentially live anywhere we choose.
Many others have very little freedom of movement at all, except by taking huge risks in the most desperate of circumstances. For (potentially) hundreds of millions of people hit by the worst transapocalyptic upheavals, access to safer geographies will be blocked by borders and laws and sheer distance.
This crisis is making the world even more unfair.
Even if life’s been more than fair to you, this is no time to breathe easy.
Even with means and freedom — even if we already live in the wealthier and more fortunate parts of the world — we are in danger of getting priced out of relative safety. Believing we will always have good options, no matter how long we wait to act, is luxury few of us can actually now afford.
To understand why, we have to remember that in order to ruggedize our lives, we have to find safer places capable of being ruggedized, and get away from places that are in trouble. There are fewer of the former than the latter.
How do we judge the prospects of places in the planetary crisis? I think that’s one of the most important questions we can ask. (It’s a question national governments should make the center of their plans and policies, but such policy discussions are still in their infancy, especially in America.)
We start with brittleness.
Brittleness is the condition of being exposed to sudden failures that are difficult to repair. Climate brittleness describes being increasingly vulnerable to damage from discontinuities (and not viable or valuable enough to be restored). We are surrounded by brittleness:
Everything people build is built with tolerances in mind. Part of living in a place is having a good sense of what is normal for that place — things like how much rain falls, how cold it gets in the winter, how often the ground shakes in an earthquake. You don’t see a lot of roofs in the desert that are pitched to hold six feet of snow; you don’t find a lot of air conditioners in northern seaside cities.
Larger systems are built with tolerances in mind as well. Bridges are designed to withstand hundred-year floods, but not built to be safe if a once-in-a-thousand-year flood comes. Powerlines can take high winds, but not category five hurricanes. Supermarkets can keep the shelves stocked if deliveries don’t come for a day or two, but if the trucks stop running for a week, most stores shelves will be bare.
As we make the world hotter and less ecologically stable, events more and more frequently overrun the tolerances for which our world was designed. … Places that are exposed to regular exceedance of built tolerances — and thus that are at risk of failing catastrophically — are brittle places.
In 2024, planning your future without reckoning on brittleness is like trying to build an electric car using only the manual of a ‘73 Chevy pickup.
I do climate foresight for a living, and these days what most people want to talk with me about is how to plan their own paths through discontinuity. (My next Crash Course in Personal Ruggedization begins February 29th. An announcement with early bird discounts will soon go out to supporting subscribers.)
Teaching, folks say, is the best way to learn. These classes and conversations have helped me sharpen my thinking by forcing me to explain as clearly as I can the patterns behind the apparent chaos. In explaining how to recognize brittleness, I’ve described a triangle of brittleness, a mix of endangerment, exposure and inertia that is wearing away the stability under communities and institutions.
Here’s the basic idea:
ENDANGERMENT
Destabilizing the climate and biosphere puts us all in harm’s way. The longer we take to cut emissions and build more sustainable systems, the more harm is headed our way.
We don’t yet know how bad we’ll let things get, or how much damage we may have set inexorably into motion (which is why people worry about climate tipping points).
We’d need to plan differently if we knew we’d be living in a 1.5ºC world than we would if we expected a 2.5ºC world. One problem is that we don’t know which future we’ll face, and so we have to do some cautious assuming of the worst.
This matters because, yes, the general level of danger facing humanity is worse in a hotter world, but even more so because the rates at which things grow more dangerous is not constant in all places. As temperatures rise and weather intensifies, we can foresee that some places grow somewhat more threatened, while others (low-lying coastal cities in the tropics, for instance) will likely be battered much more severely.
If we want to judge brittleness, we need to assess how much local danger there will be as the crisis gathers steam. This is still an imperfect art, but some broad and useful conclusions can be drawn.
EXPOSURE
The same dangers, though, will mean more in places with different geographies, histories, economies and governance. An atmospheric river, for instance, might deluge a flat riverside town, while leaving it upslope neighbor relatively unscathed. A sprawling autodependent community dependent on a single freeway to get anywhere is more likely to see people trapped than a more traditional city, built in an earlier area with more routes and more ways to get around. A town with a large percentage of people experiencing poverty, and more poorly maintained infrastructure will be at greater risk than an identical town in better circumstances.
INERTIA
No place is completely safe, and no place has done all it can to ruggedize itself for danger. Especially if the crisis is allowed to grow truly extreme, places will find themselves needing to spend more and more effort and resources keep risk at bay. Places in the worse shape often lack the government capacities, political will and money to invest in the scale of change they ought to, now. But timing matters, too: many of the ways systems and communities need to be improved involve years (or even decades) of applied effort. Starting late means getting less. Places that are moving slowly now — or in outright denial of the problem — are inherently more brittle than comparable places embracing change.
Thinking in terms of a triangle of brittleness helps us grasp that a lot of places are in for harsh futures. Just avoiding the most obviously brittle places improves your chances.
Trouble is coming for some places from all three corners of the triangle. There, repeated disasters and growing pressures threaten the functioning of critical systems. The location of housing and infrastructure leaves local communities exposed to destruction and operational decay. Local economic and governance capacities are limited, and political support for making rapid large scale investments in ruggedization doesn’t exist. Those places are lined up for a failing future6.
They will soon be priced accordingly.
THE BRITTLENESS BUBBLE
I’ve been talking about how global warming and ecological breakdown create brittleness (and spur the need for ruggedization) for almost 15 years now7.
In that time we’ve seen climate brittleness evolve from an extrapolation of future trends to a process we can see unfolding around us.
We now know that places where risk and disruption are concentrated are overvalued by people who assume continuity. People there stand to lose major money as the risks those places face are priced into the value of their homes and businesses. This is well-understood enough now to be discussed on the national news.
The story is bigger than people’s direct losses, though. These brittle areas are witnessing an erosion of their economic capacities. Loss of insurability, diminished credit worthiness, drops in local government revenue — as well as household economic loss and climate-worsened social precarity — undermine not just their cities’ capacity to function but the day-to-day ability of locals to make a living. We notice the flash floods, but not the flooded basements; the ice storm that brings down the power lines, but not the fridge full of food that now needs to be thrown away.
Every credible study we have points to a sharp rise in risk and loss in the coming decades. Indeed, most of the current debate revolves less around whether risk exists and more around the difficulty of modeling the magnitude of impacts8. (It is even more challenging to predict changes in the perception of risk, and the decisions of large, complex markets.)
In other words, we can already see losses of value in places that are now understood to have unaddressed climate/ecological risks. We also know that those losses will grow, in part because the threats are worsening, and in part because we are still doing very little to meet those threats. (At this stage, it’s not clear how many endangered places we could save — or manage into gentle retreat — even if we actually mobilized to do it.)
As I say, we don’t know the ultimate magnitude of those losses. The potential for brittleness losses to be large enough to destroy millions of lives and alter the entire economy cannot be dismissed. Losses at that scale render the problem effectively immune to restitution through government action. There simply isn’t enough money to pay out large sums of cash to everyone who may soon be ruined by the planetary crisis, even if we could agree politically to do it. Buy-outs are a myth. As adaptation expert Jesse Keenan says, “You’re on your own. Good luck.”
We also don’t know how the pattern of loss will play out. I’ve favored the metaphor of a brittleness bubble, which implies a sudden bursting, like the subprime crash. Recent conversations with colleagues, though, have me weighing the notion that loss of value may instead be something gradual, but unrelenting, like the fall of a water table during a decades-long drought. First the plants with shallow roots wither. Then the trees die. Then the river itself runs dry. Finally there’s only mud in the well and dust storms on the horizon. Folks find themselves displaced in large numbers. Things fell apart, but even in hindsight it’s hard for them to point out the exact moment when it happened. (It’s worth remembering that the Dust Bowl — when 2.5 million Americans became climate refugees — happened before the Earth had even warmed very much.)
We’re moving through a landscape of uncertainty. That’s precisely why brittleness demands our attention.
We gloss over foreseeable-but-unpredictable climate and ecological events — finding ourselves surprised when smoke from Canadian megafires chokes the air in communities a thousand miles away. So, too, we’re still failing to seriously imagine the implications of the vaporization so much brittle value.
When so many important systems are woven so tightly together, you don’t need to be personally swallowed by some great world-ending cataclysm to find yourself face-to-face with fierce discontinuities. When lightning strikes in brittle places, the thunder will be heard everywhere.
Paradoxically, those rumbles may echo the loudest in the least brittle places.
SAFETY BECOMES EXPENSIVE
We don’t talk about it — for a variety of understandable reasons — but not only are some places safer than others, but the safer places are also generally easier to ruggedize, further increasing their resilience to risk. We would all be better off on a planet that was not simmering in pollution and fraying at the ecological seams, but some of us will live in places where harsher realities are more manageable.
There is already a premium on properties in these places. People are already willing to pay more to live outside of flood zones, in more temperate climates, in places where you don’t feel an itchy sense of looming disaster whenever you wake up to a hot stormy day or smoke in the air. In a crisis that will last the rest of our lives, peace of mind is the ultimate amenity.
It’s not just vibes, though. Safer places are worth more in concrete terms. Avoided damage is money in the bank. The prices people are willing to pay for safety will likely continue to rise. There’s an argument to be made that we massively undervalue safe places, still, which means that — at least for most of the people reading this — it’s not too late to ruggedize your life.
They won’t stay accessible forever. A confluence of forces will act like a bottleneck as awareness spreads and demand grows. The climate squeeze is coming.
FORCE ONE: A LOSS OF LAND
“Land is a good investment, because they’re not making any more of it.” That old saw has never cut truer.
In fact, in a very tangible way, the area of land suited for human settlement is shrinking. As we continue to fail to act, it will go on shrinking, as oppressive heat, rising seas, worsening droughts and more catastrophic disasters make it less and less possible to live over broad swathes of the Earth. It’s not clear that such “lost land” can be restored and recovered in any realistic way.
We’re not just not making more habitable land, we’re losing it. A lot of what we’ll be left with may be able to support human life, but it can’t support stable jobs, home insurance and 30-year mortgages.
FORCE TWO: A SHORTAGE OF HOMES
Anyone who’s shopped for a home or apartment recently gets that we’re already in a housing crunch.
In the U.S. the current housing shortage is at very least 3.5 million homes — though some estimates are now as high as 12 million homes. Developers built about 1.4 million homes last year, but U.S. population is still growing at a faster rate than housing is being built — the country gained more than 31 million people since 2010. If immigration remains at record highs and/or life expectancy begins to rise rapidly again and/or desired household sizes continue to shrink, we could see housing demand grow yet more quickly. This will put upward pressure on home prices and rents.
That’s before we factor in the planetary crisis. This housing shortage will likely be worsened by the loss of currently viable housing as the crisis deepens.
Most obviously, many thousands of U.S. homes are likely to be destroyed outright in coming decades — washed away by raging floods, torn apart by howling winds, burned in megafires. Perhaps tens of millions more homes will be damaged. Many ruined homes will never be rebuilt, and many damaged homes may not be fully repaired, especially where insurance can’t be had at a reasonable price and traditional mortgages are impossible to secure. Recovery and rebuilding in the wake of catastrophes is less certain than people assume. Walking away from housing loss may become common, more quickly than we think.
Also, because the zone of habitability is shrinking, the number of places in which new housing can be built is also shrinking. As the crisis worsens, the “bullseye” of climate risk widens, making not only current homes and communities brittle, but making lenders leery of greenlighting new developments in (and near) those locations.
Risks rise, and so too do the costs of borrowing and commercial insurance for builders, meeting more robust building codes, and paying higher impact fees. High costs of building suppress housing availability. As the bullseye grows, the supply of financially viable building sites shrinks. It becomes harder to catch up to national housing shortfalls.
FORCE THREE: THE RISING VALUE OF FUNCTION
Traditionally, we think of housing as essentially fungible. There may be mansion rows and ghettos, there might be gated communities and burnt out cities, but for most working and middle class people, one decent house has been much like another in another city. For decades, a comparable job and a comparable home led to pretty much the same general outcomes in many places across most of the country. What we might think of as the dividends of residency were relatively evenly distributed.
In the last quarter century, that’s changed. The dividends are heavily tilting towards wealth, and for all sorts of questions — How good are the schools? How safe are the streets? How healthy is the air? — zip codes are destiny, almost.
The best zip codes are growing disproportionately valuable, because these enclaves offer not only nice homes and pleasant qualities of life, but increasingly better opportunities. Simply living in these places gives your family access to a host of better services and systems: AP courses in your kid’s high school, cops who show up quickly when you have to call them, good roads and nice parks, neighborhood friends who themselves have important connections and insight.
If you’ve wondered why anyone would pay two million dollars for an 800-square-foot bungalow, there it is: the purchaser is just not buying the building, they’re buying the dividends. Those pressures are intensifying.
FORCE FOUR: THE DURABILITY PREMIUM
We’re in the early years of an unprecedentedly massive crisis. Take that current skewing of residential dividends and torque it up tenfold.
Decades of peace and stability have left us under-appreciating how critical functioning systems and services are to outcomes. If you’ve ever spent time in a genuinely poor country, you understand the losses people suffer when forced to rely on unreliable electricity and water, unreliable emergency services and health care, unreliable local business operations, unreliable trains, unreliable banks. Brittle systems tend to grow more and more unreliable as their tolerances are exceeded.
As reliable function becomes an un-ignorable concern, smart people will want to see their housing dollars buy continued access to the infrastructures of prosperity. What was once taken for granted will now become an investment people are willing to pay a hefty premium to secure.
Ruggedization preserves function. Being able to live in a relatively safe place with rugged systems and capable local institutions means not just having a house that’s less likely to be damaged or destroyed — it means having a life where the work you and your family put in is less likely to be lost.
Homes in places that face fewer dangers is one thing. But those homes, connected to systems less exposed to risk, where action to ruggedize is progressing, where institutions are functioning at a high level, where public goods and infrastructure are supported and well-managed, and where large numbers of desperate people are not overwhelming support systems — those homes will appreciate in value. Appreciate, I expect, a lot.
What doesn’t erode away will be worth comparatively more. When reliable function grows scarcer, durability grows disproportionately valuable.
FORCE FIVE: DISPROPORTIONATE DRAW
A lot of places have dimming prospects. That means a lot of energetic people — young people, talented people, ambitious people — looking for other places where they can better pursue their dreams. Many will find themselves headed towards the kinds of places we’re talking about, because that’s where the energy is flowing. Even when the rent money doesn’t buy you as much housing as it would elsewhere, being where things are happening is itself a huge return. A comparatively thriving economy and a sense of new possibility are themselves draws, even to those less concerned with safer futures.
I’d guess we’re talking about a spiky effect. The relocation of remote workers hasn’t spread people evenly across the landscape. It has instead concentrated, and helped drive up home prices in some formerly-affordable but thriving “remoting” hotspots (Nashville, Austin, Boise, Denver) to record highs. The climate squeeze, I believe, is also going see an archipelago of town and cities benefit most. This will add even more to the housing pressures on safer locations, but it will also create potential for some safer-but-currently-struggling cities. Ruggedizable places.
(Calling a place ruggedizable is saying it has potential: that it is less endangered, and could make itself less exposed, but is still stuck in inertia. Think, for example, of an old industrial city that scores well on climate risks, whose housing is affordable but whose local government is broke. I suspect thousands of people will soon be bargain-hunting for a more secure but also more vibrant future, and at least a few safer towns that are far off the national radar today will wind up becoming cultural epicenters.)
FORCE SIX: A RUN ON DURABILITY
These five forces all jack up the torque on safer places, as people seek better prospects in a worsening planetary crisis. But individuals and businesses aren’t the only players here (or even the most significant). Large institutional investors also have a stake in future safety.
The shrinking of the number of viable places also means a potential contraction in investment opportunities. While some predatory sociopaths will jump at the chance to rip off distressed people in unofficially abandoned places, that’s not where the real money is. The real money is in capturing (or engineering) future value by investing early.
The financial waters are going to get rougher. Many investors will seek safe harbors for their money. Some of those harbors may be hedges in metals or art or crypto, but (though I’m not an investment advisor), it seems like that we’re going to see place come to matter more, and various ways emerge of aggregating opportunities in safer places at the scales large investors need. A geographical redistribution of durability means a geographical redistribution of high-return opportunities.
If we do see big money moving towards safety and ruggedization, it will fuel a boom in these places. If I’m also right that rugged places will disproportionately draw fast-growing climate-focused industries as well — climate-savvy people being risk-aware, in my experience — then we’ll see capital, innovators and entrepreneurs finding advantage in mutal proximity there.
Booms grow themselves. Much capital, talent and human passion is portable — it flows where the prospects look good. Where a lot of people see advantage, we face not just housing crunches, but capital battles. Institutional investors with billions to allocate may run the numbers and realize that overpaying for durable investments in the short term can still mean massive profits in the near term. We could well see a run on durability, with asset acquisitions at prices that would never make sense to individuals.
If that happens, the squeeze will grow anaconda-like. Getting into the housing market, or even just finding a place to rent, will get even harder as the sheer number of people competing for places inevitably means that some will be able to pay a lot more than is realistic for others.
A run on durability combined with a slow growth of housing supply will inevitably push those with less wealth out — leading to the bitter irony that young and/or poor people may find themselves among the climate-displaced, even when they’re living in some of the safest places on Earth.
The only real answer to this problem is a politics of urgent abundance. We must build at genuinely inclusive scales. If you live in a relatively safe place, and you don’t want it to be trapped in the amber of wealth, your town has to build enough housing (and workplaces and infrastructure and schools and so on) to meet a massive uptick in demand. It will need to go on building for decades. (I wrote a book about why building compact communities at scale is also a critical climate/sustainability solution.)
Not many prosperous towns are ready to do this. The ones that aren’t could quickly turn into enclaves of wealth. A lot of people will be left outside those gates when they close. Still, if you’re lucky or smart enough to get in, you and your family might find yourselves with some of the brightest futures around.
WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?
You should start figuring out a plan.
In a situation where waiting for large scale collective action places each of us and our families at dire risk, it is immoral to tell us not to look out for ourselves, to hold out for some promised revolution.
This is particularly true because I don’t think it is now within the power of the government — even under the most radically committed leadership — to steer us to a place where everything turns out okay for everyone. Even if we made it our central national priority tomorrow, we’d be too late to save everything and rescue everyone. We missed that turn at least a decade ago.
Barring a good outcome for all, I’d like to believe that we as a nation will at least do what still can to ruggedize more potential climate havens and build them out to be inclusive for millions more people. It pains me to say it but I don’t see much sign of that, yet, either.
Ruggedization is now inescapably a personal responsibility. That’s a staggering condemnation of past leadership, but it’s also the reality we face. The clock is ticking and you have important choices to make.
I can’t tell you what the right choices are for you. Neither can anyone else.
There is no formula. We lack sufficient data about too many important questions. We lack adequately granular predictive models. We lack enough conceptual clarity on the ways discontinuities — literally unprecedented patterns of events — could play out in the various interconnected systems whose stability and continuity we’re used to taking for granted. Weirdness abounds. Heck, even what “best” means when weighing choices is different depending on who you are, and where you’re coming from.
But we can get clear about what we want, and we can learn to narrow the odds — to anticipate what we can’t predict. That’s not a light lift, because it demands updating how we see the world:
“Events being unprecedented does not make them beyond comprehension. The loss of continuity does not mean a descent into blind chaos. We can learn to thrive amidst discontinuity, disruption, upheaval. There are thousands of people teaching themselves how, right now.”
Don’t wait too long to start.
EDIT: I will indeed be teaching my Crash Course in Personal Ruggedization again, beginning at the end of the month. I’ll send an email with sign-up info to the whole list next week, but if you’re interested and would like to save the dates, it’s every Thursday for six weeks, 10:00 a.m. to noon, Pacific time, from February 29th through April 4th. (The next course after that will likely begin in May.)
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That is, the overall prospects for humanity are being determined by how long we let dangerous and unsustainable practices go on. The faster we cut emissions, protect ecosystems, reduce toxics and so on, the better. In general, the greatest good for the overwhelming majority will always be found in a headlong charge towards a sustainable society.
As I like to say, we’re not yet ready for what’s already happened.
Obviously, I’m not an investment advisor, and this is not investment advice. This is simply an analysis of larger trends. Do your own research and think seriously about the risks of any action you choose to take.
It can sound strange, even rude, to say a place is relatively safe when society as a whole faces such chaos. But not admitting that different places face different degrees of danger does no one any good.
Many people who are technically free to pick up and go have lives that effectively prevent them from considering such a move. Their home is where their family, friends and community are, where their roots run deep, where the meaning of their life is defined. Not being willing (or feeling able) to give that up for a safer location makes sense. Then it’s time to look at strategies to reposition and ruggedize in place (as I’ve discussed elsewhere), and hope for the best.
It’s worth remembering that most of the damage places suffer will not come from rare catastrophes, but from increasingly constant small damages and discontinuities that drain money, erode function and sap value. They add up, and worsen each other, and launch a vicious spiral of damage, disinvestment, displacement, debt… and further exposure to worsening damage. This is why I think a loss of capacity to ruggedize will occur before the arrival of the most disastrous impacts we’re told to anticipate. Indeed, a reduced capacity to respond to worsening threats is one of the signs of a brittle system tipping over into a broken one.
This piece unpacking the idea of ruggedization is a good snapshot of the early discussion. This very long interview Dave Roberts did with me in 2005 captures a lot of the optimism the bright green crowd felt back then — optimism about bold actions to preserve essential continuities, an optimism that’s faded as bold actions never happened, and we slid inexorably into discontinuity. (I discuss all that here.)
Especially because those impacts are manifold and mutually intensifying, in systems that exhibit complex, nonlinear changes. As I wrote before, “The ecological and climate problems we face are numerous, complex and chaotic. They interconnect and accelerate one another, in an avalanche of impacts. They are largely irreversible. The dangers are extreme, and we face ‘systemic and cascading risks.’”