"There Were No Good Options."
"There Were No Good Options."
What a real estate story in the New York Times tells us about how well we're doing at preparing for unprecedented discontinuities.
Yesterday, The New York Times published a piece in their real estate section — The Hunt — that might be one of the most telling pieces of climate journalism I’ve seen recently.
The story — “In Santa Barbara, Their Budget Would Buy a Mobile Home. Which One Would You Choose?” — concerns a Santa Barbara family, the Zeros, and their search for an affordable home to buy.
“Their budget was around $850,000, but even with $450,000 saved, high mortgage rates meant that most single-family homes were out of reach. So they began to seriously consider a manufactured-home park about seven miles west of the city. ‘There were no good options,’ Mr. Zero said. ‘Except for this place.’”
“This place” is Rancho Goleta Lakeside, and the future does not look bright for its 140 mobile homes and “pool, clubhouse and lake.”
Here’s where Rancho Goleta Lakeside is located:
One of the easiest ways to find a reasonable assessment of brittleness for U.S. properties is the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) National Risk Index1.
Let’s go to the map.
According to FEMA’s estimates, the Zeros’ new home is in a census tract that’s in the 98.48th percentile of risk of annual loss, meaning only 1.5% of places in the U.S. are riskier. You don’t need a weatherman to know that this looks like a very brittle place.
Looking at the land itself would give us some idea of the dangers it faces in a rapidly warming world. Based on what I can tell from a distance, it’s on low-lying property, a short distance from the beach (which also means close to rising seas and worsening storms), near a slough and on a lake that themselves look subject to flooding, and it’s in a part of California that could get deluged by a catastrophic atmospheric river… and/or hit by a large earthquake. Finally, it’s between a fossil gas field, a sewage treatment plant, and what looks to be a large wrecking yard, none of which is particularly healthy or good news should there be a major disaster. We know worse and more frequent disasters are coming.
Obviously. I wish no harm to the Zeros, who seem like nice people. The odds are against them, but I sincerely hope they and their neighbors dodge those odds and live long happy lives near some of the most beautiful beaches and bluffs in America.
But I am left with questions.
My first question is: “Do they actually know the odds they face?”
Maybe they do, maybe they don’t (it doesn’t seem kind to call them up and ask). But certainly a great many people being forced into extremely brittle situations by the housing shortage have only vague ideas of the magnitude of dangers now facing their families. People literally don’t know what they’re buying.
They also don’t have many choices. Failure to build extensively in relatively safe places with durable infrastructure is a direct cause of the rising climate exposure we’re seeing. Making people choose between being rent-swamped and moving into a brittleness trap is a dire ethical lapse on the part of existing cities, as damning a judgment of their inaction and exclusion as the homeless residents on their streets. Housing-stressed families are being forced to accept the best of a set of bad options. That’s not their fault.
The crazy thing is that there’s actually a boom in building comparatively cheap housing in extremely brittle places, from desert exurbs to swampy beaches to tinder-dry forests. This is both understandable and scandalous.
As Erika D. Smith and Anita Chabria write, “Allowing our new affordable housing stock to be built or rebuilt in high-risk areas is an abdication of governmental responsibility and a cheat on [people] who mistakenly believe they are buying a home as a generational investment.”
Note the other bad odds that few struggling home-buyers seem informed about: the odds these homes will lose much of their value when the brittleness bubble collapses. Recognition that a home is exposed to risk itself makes the home less valuable, potentially leaving millions of families underwater in more ways than one.
This loss of value comes with other serious risks, including loss of insurability, as insurance companies decline to cover properties with rapidly growing risks and potentially rapidly falling home values, as this would drive them towards bankruptcy.
As properties become effectively impossible to insure, most banks will refuse to issue 30-year mortgages on those properties, instantly making them worth a fraction of their value and popping what I’ve called the Brittleness Bubble.
If the crisis intensifies quickly, which looks likely, entire communities will see their financial fortunes devastated. These losses — of home values, local tax revenues, local businesses, and critical community institutions — make recovery after a disaster much harder. They make investing in measures to protect the community from future harms harder still. They cancel these places’ futures.
This potential collapse of value is particularly acute in housing parks where residents don’t even own the land their homes sit on:
“[M]obile homes lay bare a warming planet’s collision with a shortage of affordable housing. Though perceived as a shelter of last resort, mobile homes house 22 million people, and mobile home parks provide three times the number of affordable housing units than the nation’s public housing. Most mobile home residents are low or very low income. Households are disproportionately non-white, seniors and families with small children. Typically, residents of mobile home parks rent the land they live on, leaving them with no claim to growing property value and no right to return should disaster strike.”
But whatever the kind of home, and whatever the form of property ownership, many face potentially generational losses of family wealth and greatly-diminished life opportunities.
The climate crisis is going to ruin a lot of people, and investing heavily in endangered assets is one of the easiest ways to join them. It’s not going to be hard to end up displaced — a climate refugee of one sort or another — and families should at least be equipped to make an informed choice before they put themselves in the crosshairs2.
Which brings me to my second question: “Why isn’t journalism doing a better job helping people understand the climate risk and brittleness they face?”
I don’t know the reporter here, Livia Albeck-Ripka. I have no problem with her work, which is a skilled delivery on The Hunt’s premise: a family looks at three new homes, then the reader gets to guess which home the buyers chose and pick the home they themselves would like to live in. It’s feel-good fare for the real estate section, and I doubt Ms. Albeck-Ripka was invited by her editors to reinvent real estate reporting as we know it when the story was assigned.
But someone needs to reinvent real estate coverage.
(That, and how we get news about business, politics, technology and science, culture, career, personal finance, health, national security, and heck, even how we raise our kids. It all has to change.)
Let’s see more explicit discussion of risk, of danger and uncertainty and loss of predictability. Let’s see real talk about the odds of losing your most valuable investment in a brittleness crash. Let’s see honest conversations about the terrible trade-offs being forced on people stuck in a housing shortage on a heating planet. Let’s explore the climate crush, and the ways a lack of new housing, climate triangulation about the need to ruggedize, are making a safe, secure and prosperous future a luxury good. Let’s talk about the actual choices facing families seeking homes in a gathering storm. That’s the real story here.
The planetary crisis is not an issue. It is the central context for every important, long-term material decision anyone is making, anywhere in the world. In a very real way, the vast climate and ecological upheavals we’ve set in motion are the world, now. We have to learn how to live in that new world.
That shouldn’t be news to anyone.
PS: I’ll be teaching a quick introduction to personal ruggedization on April 25, 2024. Save the date: details to follow!
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The National Risk Index is not perfect — with some arguing it overemphasizes some relatively mild dangers and puts a heavy emphasis on social vulnerability that may not hold us when assessing the likely future prospects of a place — but it’s evidence-based and easily used.
The personal ruggedization work I do aims to empower people by helping them understand discontinuous dangers and identify the signs that a given place and way of living may help them reduce their risks, and enable them to build a more solid platform for the lives they seek to live.