Tuesday, March 13, 2018

Burn, baby burn. Flood, baby, flood. Just don’t ask us to pay for it.

Today, we’re having a major-league Nor’easter. As of this writing (Monday evening), we’re looking at over a foot of snow in Boston proper – and 2 feet-plus in some areas. Fortunately, while we’re looking at blizzard conditions (high winds, included), we’re not in some bad juju, high astronomical moondance sitch. So our coastal areas are not supposed to get flooded out. Or not flooded at out as badly as they were in the storm a couple of weeks back, when waves were roguing over two-story shorefront houses on the South Shore and Boston’s Aquarium T-station entrance was surrounded by sandbags.

Every winter we have at least one storm where we watch homes and clam shacks on Boston’s North and South Shores get taken out by Mother Nature. Front yards that used to stretch putting-greenly down to the water’s edge, conjuring up images of Kennedy family touch football games at Hyannisport (or my family’s more sedate – ahem – croquet tournaments in West Dennis), are now kaput. Instead of front yards, there are boulders and chunks of concrete flush up against the front steps, hoping to keep the bays at bay.

And Plum Island, which is attached to Newburyport by a causeway, is more and more in danger of moving from a semi-detached island to a fully-detached island.

We get the storm scenes every year – always during the winter, and often during the summer after a hurricane or even a really bad rain storm – but they’re getting more frequent and more severe – in part because the storms are more frequent and more severe, and in part because there are more permanent homes along the coastline. What used to be a clam shack and a few flimsy, non-winterized summer houses are now a bistro and a lot of year-round structures.

And, of course, every time there’s a storm, we hear that the folks who got flooded out will retrench, and rebuild.

And they can do so because, even if it’s god-awful expensive, folks have insurance. Plus the cities, towns, and the state all pitch in to add infrastructure improvements like seawalls and reduning the dunes by trucking in sand.

Meanwhile, out on the West Coast, although they do have mudslides aplenty, they’re not so much worried about flooding as they are about fire.

Which means that when we’re not watching local television to see clam shacks floating out to sea, we can switch to national television to see neighborhoods where one side of a street burnt to the slab, while across the way, the houses are all intact.

But those burnt to a crisp buildings are going to be rebuilt just as surely as those Massachusetts houses that turned into boathouses on their way to being smashed to smithereens are going to get rebuilt, too.

Way out west, like it is here, the problem is worsening weather and development and redevelopment in places that shouldn’t have been developed to begin with. And sure shouldn’t be redeveloped after they’re leveled. Because it’s going to happen again.

As climate change creates warmer, drier conditions, which increase the risk of fire, California has a chance to rethink how it deals with the problem. Instead, after the state’s worst fire season on record, policymakers appear set to make the same decisions that put homeowners at risk in the first place. Driven by the demands of displaced residents, a housing shortage, and a thriving economy, local officials are issuing permits to rebuild without updating building codes. They’re even exempting residents from zoning rules so they can build bigger homes.

State officials have proposed shielding people in fire-prone areas from increased insurance premiums—potentially at the expense of homeowners elsewhere in California—in an effort to encourage them to remain in areas certain to burn again. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) spent a record $700 million on fire suppression from July to January, yet last year Governor Jerry Brown suspended the fee that people in fire-prone areas once paid to help offset those costs.

Critics warn that those decisions, however well-intentioned, create perverse incentives that favor the short-term interests of homeowners at the edge of the wilderness—leaving them vulnerable to the next fire while pushing the full cost of risky building decisions onto state and federal taxpayers, firefighters, and insurance companies. “The moral hazard being created is absolutely enormous,” says Ian Adams, a policy analyst at the R Street Institute, which advocates using market signals to address climate risk. “If you want to rebuild in an area where there’s a good chance your home is going to burn down again, go for it. But I don’t want to be subsidizing you.” (Source: Bloomberg)

Well, I never thought I’d be agreeing with the R Street Institute – and I’ll no doubt be eating my sodden words when the Charles River backs up into my bedroom and the value of my condo plummets – but I’m all for “go for it.”

Let insurance compensate for the first destruction for those who’ve owned a place for a while, but after that, one strike and you’re out. Or at least on your own. As for new construction in places that are statistically likely to burn or flood, how about non-subsidized insurance? If you want to build on the flood plain, have at it – and have at that $$$ insurance policy.

I feel terrible for those who lose their homes to natural disasters, especially those who’ve lived in their homes from way back in time, before they realized that they were living in peril. But we gotta start facing some facts here. It’s going to get worse. We may have to abandon some areas so that they can go back to nature and serve as the fire brakes and flood prevention zones that they were intended to be.

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