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(((Matthew Lewis))) cults & consequences Profile picture
@mateosfo
Mar 2, 2023 • 10 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
This is a really massive story, and I've worked on this for years, and so a thread, but -- TL;DR: The collapse of California's home insurance markets due to climate risk is underway, and it is bad.

🧵

In 2013-14, I worked on a national climate risk assessment for the U.S. Image
It was nerdy as hell, deep and substantive, and everyone else on the project was 100 times smarter than me.

The take-away, though, was stark: Americans were being misled by sprawl developers about their degree of climate risk exposure. riskybusiness.org/report/nationa…
It's kind of just been assumed that California sprawl developers can build single-unit homes as far as the eye can see, including into high fire- and flood-risk zones, and nothing bad will ever happen.

Well, the bad shit. It's happening. abc10.com/video/news/loc…
For the last ~ two decades, insurance industry -- and really, re-insurance industry -- has been developing increasingly sophisticated models of where climate change will cause most economic damage.

The first Risky Business report showed those locations.
We predicted insurance industry would start by raising premiums, and then gradually just cancel policies in those locales, and leave taxpayers holding the bag.

When it comes to sprawl in fire hazard areas, the bag is large: Over $3 trillion in California. realtor.com/research/wildf…
You'll notice a pattern -- risk is highest for single-unit homes, because sprawl, fire/flood zones, and single-unit homes -- well, they're all the same thing.

This week, the California agency in charge of providing a backstop for cancelled insurance?

She said, "We're broke."
But while California taxpayers will be hit to bail out these high-risk properties, the sprawl developers who reaped massive profits saddling us with unfunded liabilities will be fine.

Their profits are safe, thanks to urban NIMBYs, who are basically sprawl developer shills.
The bills are coming due, and in fact, we don't have anywhere near the money to cover them.

The sprawl is going to have to die. Sure, folks can harden properties, make them "fire safe" to an extent.

But many ecosystems literally evolved to catch fire.
And we make people live in them.

That's going to have to end. If you can't connect dots between non-viability of sprawl due to climate risk, and what's *really* going to happen to car culture, well ...

Bless your heart. I hope you never get caught on the wrong side of this.
Point number two is deeply under-appreciated & especially hated by the anti-housing left, but unequivocally true:

The scale of financial risk is an order of magnitude larger than the entire government. We have to let markets work. There's no other way.

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More from @mateosfo

(((Matthew Lewis))) cults & consequences Profile picture
Mar 28
Trump's call for price controls on cars -- which came right after he effectively put the US Government in charge of car production quotas -- is interesting if you unpack the politics of it.

Yes, it is a transparently communist policy. But so is everything about cars in the US.
American drivers now have multiple generations of acculturation to price controls, quotas, and mandates when it comes to cars; they are fully adapted to communism, even though they still laugh when you point it out.

And this is not a Republican thing. It's bipartisan.
Multiple US Presidents have made taxpayers bail out domestic carmakers after poor management drove them to bankruptcy. That's not something capitalists do -- if you run an unprofitable enterprise that fails, you close.

We've never let capitalism anywhere near the car industry.
Read 9 tweets
(((Matthew Lewis))) cults & consequences Profile picture
Mar 23
For folks new to Abundance discourse you may notice that its critics are, almost to a person, the same people who, about 10 years ago, started opposing YIMBYism because YIMBYs want more homes.

A thread about what's happening 🧵
For the last ~ 40 years, housing policy in US cities has been largely determined by a coalition of NIMBY homeowners and left-leaning non-profits that lean pretty socialist. NIMBYs got what they wanted -- little to no housing -- and leftie non-profits got what they wanted: grift.
So when YIMBYs showed up it was natural for that coalition to not just hang together, but go to war:

YIMBYs are a threat to their ideology. YIMBYs properly diagnosed the problem -- a housing shortage -- that they mutually caused, and maintain for their profit and enjoyment.
Read 13 tweets
(((Matthew Lewis))) cults & consequences Profile picture
Jan 14
The current meltdown in California insurance market — which is one of the major factors behind the number of homes built in extreme high fire hazard zones — dates to 1988.

That’s the year California voters passed Prop 103.

A political 🧵
Initially proposed by California drivers angry over having to pay cost of crashing their cars, Prop 103 was written broadly enough to cover all insurance:

It made it illegal for insurance premiums to adjust based on risk, banned the use of forecast models…
… and instituted price controls on premiums, requiring insurers to petition state every time they wanted to raise rates.

It essentially killed the primary purpose of insurance, which is to signal to market the degree of financial risk someone was taking with a house or car.
Read 12 tweets
(((Matthew Lewis))) cults & consequences Profile picture
Dec 4, 2024
A short personal anecdote: In 1996, I was working in public radio, and attended a public radio conference with a bunch of other radio nerds.

Everyone was freaking out about the telecommunications act. I didn’t understand it at first, but over lunch with a couple engineers …
… they explained that most of the local bandwidth that provided communities with local news and programming was about to be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

It wiped local radio off the map.

In those days, same as today, the highest bidders were right-wing nut jobs.
For reasons I still do not understand, the major progressive/left/Democratic donor class simply do not care about owned media.

And so, rather than robust ecosystem of media supporting a broad, progressive, Democratic agenda, we have small outposts of lefty shitposters, whose …
Read 4 tweets
(((Matthew Lewis))) cults & consequences Profile picture
Nov 23, 2024
The thing that most autonomous vehicle advocates get simply wrong, and seem to have created an ideological barrier against understanding, is the intractable relationship between mobility mode (car, bus, walk, bicycle) and land use (where homes are located, at what density).
Autonomous vehicles, at root, are still just cars. There is talk about expanding to vans/jitneys — and this is, from a mobility perspective, by far the most interesting possible application.

But they still only work in cities.

US land use is designed to maximize sales of cars.
IOW, the *current* spatial pattern of suburbs is such that you can’t live in most of them unless every adult in that home has their own car. Otherwise it’s just about physically impossible for them to go anywhere.

There are huge exceptions: “Inner ring” suburbs built …
Read 15 tweets
(((Matthew Lewis))) cults & consequences Profile picture
Nov 17, 2024
Lots of discourse about “the groups” so let me offer my perspective as a resident of Berkeley, California.

These protestors have been trying for the last several years to shut down a construction site for homeless and student housing.

The site is on university-owned land.
In January of 2023, these protestors destroyed $1 million worth of construction equipment.

Their argument was that the student housing and supportive housing for the homeless would cause gentrification and displacement (I am not making this up.) . berkeleyside.org/2023/01/09/uc-…Image
That didn’t work. While vandalism delayed progress, entire city of Berkeley wants housing built.

So what did protesters do? Well, after October 7, 2023 they changed to make it about Palestine.

Now they oppose student/homeless housing “in solidarity with colonized peoples.” Image
Read 7 tweets

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