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Feb 17 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
How big is the Brittleness Bubble in the U.S., evaluated solely on flood risk?

Between US$121–US$237 billion.

That is a hundred-billion-dollar-plus housing bubble, and flooding is just one of many threats we face.

ht @NatBullard

#brittlenessbubble
axios.com/newsletters/ax… Image
The original study:

"Our results underscore the severity of the financial risks to current homeowners and municipalities posed by potentially widespread property price deflation."

nature.com/articles/s4155…
"Counties in black and outlined in red indicate municipalities that are both heavily reliant on property tax revenue and have high overvaluation."

This map is should ring like a thunderclap, esp considering how many of these communties are also highly vulnerable to other risks. Image
More in my latest newsletter:

"The Brittleness Bubble — the large discrepancy between how we currently value vulnerable places, systems and assets and how we are likely to price them as the risks they face become impossible to ignore — will pop"

alexsteffen.substack.com/p/you-too-can-…
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More from @AlexSteffen

Alex Steffen Profile picture
Feb 10
Nowhere does fractal inequality in America better display itself at the moment than in the availability of enjoyable and stress-relieving free time.

Having paid vacation, during which you are not expected to be available for work emergencies, is the new year-long sabbatical.
The HNW "sabbatical" that actually means "I'm rich enough to not work for a whole year and find the outcome emotionally rejuvenating — while winding up wealthier still, if I've invested sensibly" is a whole new beast.
Many millions of Americans receive no paid time off from their employers.

More than half of fully-employed workers who do get paid days, don't use all their days.
Read 4 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
Feb 1
In a growing planetary crisis, the idea that not launching into an extraction project that is short-sighted, destructive and against most people's interest is a "win for environmental groups" seems pretty outdated.
We still need new minerals, so we need mines.

But we don't need every mine, much less every mining job.
The inability to describe sustainability wins as simply public interest wins is a sign of the broken and outdated thinking we're surrounded with.
Read 4 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
Jan 24
It's a topic I find pretty thankless to discuss, but our assumption that disaster response will always be forthcoming, and that recovery and rebuilding are guaranteed, may not last out the decade.

If you want to see the trendline emerge, look at what's happening in PR.
More and more places will suffer unofficial abandonment, which is often manifest as incredibly slow (and in the end incomplete) progress towards recovery.

Read 4 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
Jan 19
The next massive upheaval in real estate investing will stem from the institutional investors' recognition of climate risk (and the follow-on realizations of brittle-asset precarity and supply limitations on climate-strong locations).

axios.com/2022/12/05/cli…
Brittleness bubble and ruggedization bottleneck.
Related:

alexsteffen.substack.com/p/the-brittlen…
Read 4 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
Jan 18
Personal ruggedization folks may recall discussion of SLR pressures on groundwater levels as invisible flood risk.

Here's @RosannaXia explaining the point much better than I did.

latimes.com/environment/st…
Groundwater "gets pushed upward as denser water from the ocean moves inland from rising tides. [E]ven before the water breaks the surface, it can seep into the cracks of basements, infiltrate plumbing, or, even more insidiously, re-mobilize toxic chemicals buried underground."
"We really need to focus on where contaminants may be mobilized by rising groundwater, because that could have an immediate impact on a 6-year-old, or a pregnant woman, or someone who has extra vulnerability in their immune system..." —@kzhill
Read 5 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
Jan 17
Earlier...

"We have to reforge the global economy. We have think in terms not of reforming the fossil-fuel dominated economy we have, but replacing it. That’s a gargantuan task. That said, the timing for an economic revolution has never been better..."

thenearlynow.com/the-smokestack…
Now...

"The world is moving into 'a new age of clean technology manufacturing' that could be worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year by the end of the decade, generating millions of jobs in the process, according to a new report from the IEA."

cnbc.com/2023/01/12/the…
Things are moving fast.
Read 4 tweets

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