Where Americans Have Been Moving Into Disaster-Prone Areas - eviltoast
  • Codex@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Poor people move where it’s cheaper to live. It’s cheaper to live where risk is higher. This is how risk is systematically offloaded onto the lower class. We build and live in these dangerous places, and we suffer all the loss and damage from those risks. The owner class takes all the profits and value from those places while investing little to nothing in them (too risky!)

  • justhach@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Newsflash: with the increasing extreme weather events, everywhere is becoming a “disaster-prone area”.

    Asheville, NC is 300 miles from the nearest coast and still got its shit rocked by a hurricane.

    • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      300 miles really isn’t very far for hurricanes to penetrate. And Asheville is a bowl in the mountains. So water runs to it, and drains out. It just can’t handle that much rain at once. It’s probably happened before, just long ago.
      That said, I sat on my deck most of yesterday. It was the kind of weather we used to get all summer long 30 years ago. Now it only happens briefly in the spring and fall. Summers are becoming unbearable. Wildfires are the result.

      • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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        1 month ago

        For rain and flooding specifically, new development can make it drastically worse without a huge amount of changes. It’s totally possible that a similar amount of rain 20-30 years ago wouldn’t have caused the same scale of damage, because the water wouldn’t have concentrated as fast.

    • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Lexington, KY felt that hurricane. I’m not sure how far from the coast they are, but that bad boy was still going strong well over the mountains.

  • andrewta@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    How is Minneapolis/St. Paul Minnesota a high risk area? I’m seeing blue dots in that area.

  • OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    Flood Insurance Risk Rating 2.0 is kind of sneakily the second best environmental policy Biden got done (after IRA). Actually charging places in flood plains the amount it costs to rebuild, rather than subsidizing it so people repeatedly rebuild in places that flood all the time, will incentivize people slowly to move away from those areas, or at least pay what it costs to live there and know what they’re getting into.

  • lieuwestra @lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    So half the country, or a quarter of the continent judging by the map. I would guess 90% of people living there were already deeply embedded in local culture before the term climate change was invented.