> I'm sure stripping 45% of thousands of people's net worth won't have significant economic or cultural impacts.

"Climate migrations" has been an alarm bell for a long time. It's just people didn't want to listen.

The issue with your statement is if it's a person or human-created entity that's doing the stripping, that's a problem we can address. When it's the environment we live on doing the stripping, well, that's simply a predicament.

If you want to get mad at someone, get mad at the groups that have been propagandizing for the last few decades that carbon is a myth and we're completely decoupled from the ecosystem we live on.

What's the solution? Having every one else pay so people can live in areas guaranteed to be hit by increasingly strong hurricanes? I pay less for car insurance now that I live in a rural area than when I did in a city. That makes sense. If you want to live in a nice climate by the beach, go for it. However, be prepared to pay for it.

At some point the rest of us have to stop paying for people's stupid behavior.

US taxpayers have funneled untold billions of dollars into these states to prop up their real estate industry by providing FEMA flood insurance at hugely subsidized rates, while the private insurance that's becoming unaffordable only covers wind damage. When you see those photos of towns wiped away by a hurricane, that's flood damage, and your tax dollars are paying to rebuild those houses in the same place. Over and over.

In a just world there would be legal liability for some of the real estate industry folks who persuaded people to put all of their net worth into an asset that's going to be blown away in the next hurricane, and other consequences for the politicians who enabled and encouraged them. The odds of this happening in real life seem to be about zero.

If only someone warned us about the impacts of climate change

Not much sympathy here. When you buy a house you buy into these risks. You jumped on the FOMO wave out of greed, you take the consequence yourself.

If you don't want that speficikt risk, then rent and invest the difference in broad etfs - it will typically put you equivalently.

Do you have a good alternative as storm damage looks to get worse in the future?

I'd be interested in relocation programs or something but I can't see how the value of the houses can be preserved.

My preferred solution would be to declare unlivable areas national parks and buy out the homeowners via eminent domain (at a quantity that lets them maintain a significant percentage of their home equity, since the home is no longer sellable).

Regardless of climate change: punishing people for where they live is, historically, a great way to kick off a revolt or a civil war. People need to move out of storm zones, but the move needs to be executed mercifully or those who are forced to move will have little incentive to consider themselves members of society (to everyone's detriment).

My real point commenting initially though was that this situation is an excellent example of the failures of raw capitalism. Raw capitalism is a system perfectly willing to allow, admit, and increase inequality of outcome based on deviation from initial conditions. In contrast, societies only work long-term if there are some guardrails on inequality of outcome (otherwise, what is the point of cooperation?).

If ten or a hundred thousand people are at risk of losing half their net worth, that's the kind of thing a functioning society should probably step in on to lower the burden.

This is one of those annoying thorny issues. Looking at the farmers recently asking for government handouts. The writing has been on the wall for at least a decade in Florida. You build a home at ground level near a flooding zone and bad things happen.

Because that's how free markets work, everyone gets more wealthy all the time. (/s but seems many fervently believe it)

That's the thing though, right? If everything is getting continually more abundant (it is), and most people aren't getting more wealthy most of the time, shouldn't that be considered a problem?

investing has risks involved. Everyone knows that house values can go down after 08. It is well past time to stop subsidizing people who want to live in disaster prone areas. They can live there, but they have to pay to rebuild their own stuff

Yes, market self-regulation is an inherently violent form of regulation. There have to be victims first, before the thing can change.

This is one reason why legislation is a smarter, better form of regulation. But capitalists rely on promoting the evil in people, and do not care about anyone but themselves. So it is preferable to them.