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- [00:00]
Rachel
Hi, it's Rachel here, program director at Strong Towns. I'm popping in to invite you to our upcoming Locomotive Training sessions, a series of live workshops, or you can watch the recordings afterwards. Focused on equipping advocates with the tools they need to make their places stronger, these workshops take place every Thursday at 12pm Central, starting Sept. 12 and ending Oct. 31. Join for one session or pick up a round trip ticket to attend them all. We're covering everything from getting kids to school more safely to investing in housing that strengthens neighborhoods without pushing people out, to building third places through Tactical Urbanism. And we've got a whole range of guest speakers coming at you from organizations like Better Block, Blue Zones, Incremental Development alliance, and more. Plus, every session includes a featured Strongtown staff speaker. You can hear from Carly, Chuck, Norm, Ed. So many cool people. So join me on this tour by grabbing a ticket today@strongtowns.org local motive. Tickets are $25 for a single session or one. 25 for all eight sessions in the round trip, plus a couple extra bonuses. And all of that cost goes to supporting the Strong Towns mission, educating local advocates like you to make your cities and towns more resilient. Also, members get that cool member discount. So head to strongtowns.org locomotive to get your ticket today. Thank you so much.
- [01:32]
Abby
This is Abby, and you are listening to Upzoned. Hey, everyone, thanks for listening to another episode of Upzoned, a show where we take a big story from the news each week that touches the Strong Town's conversation. And we episode it, we talk about it in depth. I'm Abby, a planner in Kansas City, and I am joined today by my friend Chuck Marone, who has been awake since 4am this morning.
- [02:08]
Chuck Marone
I was in Texas this week as part of the fourth week of the fall book tour. And, yeah, traveling home, My wife said, why are you getting on the first plane? Why don't you sleep in a little bit? And I'm like, because I really want to be home. And she said, well, you're not going to see us anyway. We're all working and doing stuff. And I'm like, I just want to be home. But I did it so I could come home and talk to you, Abby. That's what I. That's why I got up at 4am.
- [02:36]
Abby
Yeah, you can't miss up. Zoned.
- [02:39]
Chuck Marone
No, no. Well, what did I tell you a couple weeks ago? I'm like, we were talking calendar and I'm like, oh, I can't do the next seven weeks in a row. We've managed to make a couple of them work. I appreciate that, but.
- [02:53]
Abby
Yeah, well. And I know you've got a busy schedule. How dare you. For doing a book tour.
- [03:00]
Chuck Marone
It's been fantastic. A lot of people showing up. I feel like, you know, the stuff I talk about when I'm out on the road, obviously I'm proud of the book and I like the presentation, but it gets tighter every time I do it and I feel like the story gets better every time I do it. So I feel like it's really starting to connect with people. Not that it wasn't. I don't want to be like, if you saw it last fall, it was crappy. It was good last fall. But I feel like it's, you know, it gets, it's one of those things that when you do it more and more and more, it becomes tighter. It becomes a better narrative.
- [03:37]
Abby
Totally.
- [03:38]
Chuck Marone
Yeah. So I'm having fun doing it. It's not as much work. Last spring, figuring out the threads were, was, was work, right?
- [03:49]
Abby
Yeah. Yeah.
- [03:50]
Chuck Marone
I mean, you're taking 80,000 words that you have like already cut down from 200,000 words. Right? Like, it is like this is this massive topic and you try to cut it down into a book that people can read and then you have to cut it down into a 20 minute, 40 minute or 60 minute presentation. It just feels impossible. But yeah, so it's, it's, it's fun.
- [04:14]
Abby
Well, I saw your presentation. I think it was 60 minute presentation back in the spring, so sounds like we'll need to have you come to Kansas City so I can see the updated version.
- [04:26]
Chuck Marone
I am totally ready to do that.
- [04:28]
Abby
I know.
- [04:29]
Chuck Marone
Why isn't it on the calendar? I don't know why it's not on the calendar.
- [04:32]
Abby
I don't know. I will figure it out. We'll get you to Kansas City. Okay. Well, we've got a really fascinating article today and it's actually really timely given the events that have happened recently with Hurricane Helen that has caused really massive damages on, you know, in the southeast portion of the United States. Shout out to our friend Joe Minicozzi at Urban3 from Asheville, North Carolina. It sounds like he and his team are doing well. So I hope other people in that part of the country are also doing well. I don't know if you've talked to other people, Chuck, in that region.
- [05:16]
Chuck Marone
We have some local conversations in that region and then some others around it and people are helping each other out. You know, it is bad in the sense that people are still without Power. You know, we're almost a week out now. People are still without power, still without water. The topography there is not easy. So it's what. Not here in Minnesota. When the power goes out, if you can get a generator to fill up the water tower, like, everybody has water. But when you've got hills and mountains and, like, all this crazy stuff, I want to say, like, their sewer System had, like, 90 pumps in Asheville, or their water, one of them had, like, a mass. You just. It doesn't work. Like, nothing works. When the power goes out, obviously, is a disaster area, but it feels like people are coming together and working together, but under really difficult circumstances. That is going to take a long time to actually get back to some sense of normalcy.
- [06:18]
Abby
Yeah, it's really sad.
- [06:19]
Chuck Marone
It is really sad. It's really, really sad because Asheville is such a great place and the surrounding countryside there, these are not, for the most part, wealthy people. These are people that eke out a living on the side of the, you know, hillbillies, you might have called them in older days. Right. A lot of these places are very poor, and they're trying. They're struggling to make it work, and now they're struggling even more. And so, yeah, Joe and his team are all alive. They're all okay. They've all got food and water. They're all. I mean, Joe said he feels very fortunate and, like, you know, really lucky that he is faring as well as he has. I know he's going out to do some talks next week, so he will not be in Asheville. But, yeah, there's a lot of people that are going to struggle for a long time. It feels a little. For those of you old enough to have Katrina in your mind, the cleanup after Katrina, the immediate cleanup took months. The, like, rebuilding took years. And I think you could even argue that 20 years later, it's not done and that there's a little bit of that feeling here, you know, hopefully not quite to that extent, but there's a little bit of that vibe here that this was so dramatic, that it's going to be. It's going to take a long time.
- [07:48]
Abby
Yeah, yeah, totally. Well, so let's get into the article because it starts to talk about different ways of approaching these situations. This is published in Shelterforce by Tim Robustelli and Ulaya Panfil, and it is entitled Retreating from the Coast. Makes sense, but our current approach isn't working. So according to the article, 20 million Americans will need to move by 2100. So the next 75 years. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, otherwise known as FEMA, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, otherwise known as HUD, have relocated people over the last 40 years, 50,000 people over what's called managed retreat strategies at the cost of $3.4 billion. So just kind of looking at scale, the government has relocated 50,000 people over the last 40 years. So double the that to 80 years to get 100,000 people, which is the amount of time we're talking to move 20 million people.
- [09:01]
Chuck Marone
So doesn't scale.
- [09:02]
Abby
Yeah, yeah, it doesn't scale. Efforts would need to increase by 100 times. And another way that the article puts it is that it would take 4,000 years to move everyone. So this current approach, it's called manage retreat, it's described as being incremental, reactive. It's implemented very much in a piecemeal manner where individual homeowners are bought out or the homes are reinvested in or built anew. The New Jersey Blue Acres program is an example where they have been implementing managed retreat in response to Hurricane Sandy. In recent years, the program has been buying out homeowners with damaged homes in order to restore parcels as natural flood barriers. So the question is, how does the government move 20 million people in 75, 80 years? So the article is very long. It has a lot of detail on a lot of different strategies, mainly focused on the government being more proactive about these kinds of programs, working with local partners, working with the private sector to steadily over the coming decades, move populations from climate vulnerable areas and incentivize current residents to move to safer ground at a rate of 250,000 people per year. So a lot of strategies are outlined in this article. I don't know if we have time to go into all of them, but I do want to get kind of your high level perspective, Chuck, on this idea that the federal government ought to be stepping in and coming up with a more proactive plan to move 20 million people in the next 80 years. And maybe we can talk about, if you have other ideas that the article has not hit on.
- [10:59]
Chuck Marone
Well, let's maybe start with the baseline of 20 million people because I think there's, I'm sure there's some people are hearing this saying, is this just like climate change scaremongering? You know, like, oh, are we, oh, we're going to flood all of Florida, so we have to move everybody. And then, you know, no, that's not what this is. And let me, let's get away from hurricanes and sea level rise and let's look at something that has literally happened in recent documented history, and that is the subduction zone in the Pacific Northwest. I mean, you have areas where we have gone out and geologically found that, you know, hundreds of years ago, not thousands, not millions hundreds of years ago, land that used to be up above ground and inhabited by people is now under 200ft of water out in the ocean. Because you have massive subduction zone. You have two tectonic plates, one going underneath another. And. And when you have that, you have these violent quakes where the land will literally shift in. I mean, not like an earthquake, like things shift six inches or whatever. You have like entire cities moving. There are huge parts of Seattle that are projected to be underwater the next time one of these big plates slips. And it could be in the next 10 minutes, it could be in the next 10,000 years. There really is no, like, date on which it should happen. There are things being done to try to move people, or let's say, discourage people from building in these zones. And there are other things being done to, like, let's not put elementary schools there. Let's get out of where like the, the tsunami wake would be. Let's do. But you have established neighborhoods, established people, established relationships and economic impacts and all these things. And it is almost impossible to get people to not be there. Now you can go to a place like Florida and you can say, all right, you know, we've got all these people in the. In the path of hurricanes. They shouldn't be there. Their homes shouldn't be there. When their homes get knocked down, like, let's do something about it. And like I say, I understand, but you and I have both taken vacations to Florida and it's really nice to be on the ocean. And it's really, you know, and the reality is, is that there can be places that have been there for 80 years, 100 years, 150 years, and not have a problem. It is like a lottery, right? And it's a bad lottery. Like, we lost that lottery because we were right in the path of that. You know, we were right where the storm surge was going to hit for that hurricane. And had we been five miles away, it wouldn't have impacted us in way. How do you convince people who have, in a sense, one not lost that negative lottery that the next one could be them? Because it really couldn't be. I mean, it could be. So I feel like the idea of moving 20 million people is one of these things where the number is probably exaggerated in the sense that if we just let time run out. There won't be 20 million people impacted. But if we let time run out, the places that are impacted will be impacted severely and potentially, I mean, especially if you're talking the west coast of the US and to some degree, you know, the Northeast with hurricanes and, you know, Florida and the Panhandle with seawater, these could be substantial impacts. But if you had me like, predict out here's where it will be and here's how much it will cost and all that, that is a actually like, impossible thing to do. And so you could spend billions, trillions of dollars really, and not have it really be necessary. If you don't spend it, you're basically just like cherry picking where the problem is. And you will almost for sure get it wrong somewhere.
- [15:28]
Abby
Yeah, that's one of the things that I was thinking about when reading this article is how do you really identify where you, where you implement these kinds of programs? Because beyond the hurricane risk, there's wildfires, there's earthquakes, as you mentioned, there's so many other risks that come with, you know, having a community in, in the world and it, and it's really all over the country. Right. And so how do you assess that risk? Do you focus on hurricanes first? Do you focus on particular areas? And how do you actually get that right at the parcel level, which is what it would take to actually implement a program and identify specific areas to buy out. To me, it seems like there could be a lot of error in that. And I suppose when you're talking about, you know, emergencies like this and trying to be proactive about it, there is room for error. But it's very costly to move people. It really is. And so do you move entire cities? Do you, like, how do you even get to actually identifying these properties?
- [16:42]
Chuck Marone
I feel like there's a way to approach this that mitigates risk but never eliminates it. And I think if we understand that, the logical thing to do would be to say, all right, where is the potential for loss of life greatest? The potential for loss of life is, as I understand, these things would be greatest in the Pacific Northwest. I mean, it's, it is this earthquake, tsunami risk that is the greatest potential for loss of life. Are we going to move people out of the Pacific Northwest? Are we going to move people out of the California coast? Probably not. And so to me, some of the things that they've done to make building there harder or less like we're going to discourage people from building in these places and have them build in different Places where the loss of life would not be that great makes a lot of logical sense until you run into a housing crisis and transportation costs and like, start adding all these other things on. If you identify the places where you'd have the greatest loss of life, then I think the calculation becomes, you know, where. And this, the article gets in this a little bit like, okay, FEMA's going to spend $4 million buying people out, but they'll save $25 million if it burns down a forest fire. I feel like what we're actually saying is that the government is being really dumb about how it's choosing to insure people. And let me, I'm going to say this, and this may, this may sound very heartless in, in the context of where we're at today. And I really don't know how to avoid that. If you look at, like, Florida in general, I believe that State Farm has opted out of Florida. I believe that some of the other insurance companies have opted out of Florida simply because, like, the rates that they are either allowed to charge or that, you know, they can, cannot cover the payouts. And so, you know, if you live in other parts of the country that are not prone to natural disasters in this way, your insurance rates have been going up dramatically to subsidize payouts in Florida. The, the state of Florida has stepped in and essentially provided the insurance gap. And I'm going to say this, I'm not suggesting that the private sector insurance market is run beautifully and perfectly and like, you know, is fully secured and does a great job. But I can tell you the state of Florida insurance program is not run well. I mean, if the idea is we want you to pay a little bit of something to insure your place, but not actually the market rate, because that would be way too high, what you're doing is you're just transferring a ton of risk to the state of Florida, AKA the taxpayers of Florida, to bail themselves out when you're the unlucky place. And I get that to a degree. But there is a kind of reckless governance nature of doing that where you actually then, with the right hand, help people in their time of need and with the left hand, encourage people to be reckless about where they build and how they build and the types of investments they build. And I don't think the government stepping in and actually fixing this problem will resolve it at the scale that it needs to be resolved.
- [20:25]
Abby
Well, and there's a mismatch between different levels of government too. Right. Because the federal government, or at least Aspects of the federal government are looking at this at the national scale. Right. And they're saying these areas need to have some kind of managed or proactive retreat because of the risk the state of Florida is going to step in with when the insurance companies pull out because they can't risk losing their tax base. So the, the interest of the state and cities, municipalities, is to keep and grow their tax base in order to support operations of that government entity. So if, if all the risk was passed to the homeowners of Florida, for example, and they suddenly can't get insurance, they may decide to move somewhere where they can get insurance. They may make different decisions which would be really bad for the tax base of the state of Florida or city xyz. So I can completely understand that there's like these mismatched priorities for different levels of government.
- [21:38]
Chuck Marone
Well, you also, I think, have. I feel like I'm going to say some things that people will get mad at me about and it's going to sound heartless. And let me be clear. I think we need to help people when they need help. I mean, I'm not suggesting we don't. That being the case, a lot of our reaction, and I'm going to use a phrase that has crept into our conversation, but, but I'm going to use it out of context. The reaction that we often have is to build back better, right? Like, ooh, this happened. Let's make sure that next time something bad happens, we are fully prepared. We got a bigger wall, a bigger dike, a bigger pump, a bigger foundation, a bigger building. Let's make sure that everything is all secure. I've been in New Orleans post Katrina and gotten a tour of the whole kind of system, the billions, tens of billions. I want to say it was like 40 or 50 billion that they did building this system to try to prevent a future hurricane from coming in and doing the damage that it did. I do not think that this is the best mindset to have, and I think there's two reasons for that. One, ultimately, when we build big systems to mitigate the damage from natural disasters, what happens is we come to rely and depend on those systems at the same time that we don't maintain them well enough. So during Hurricane Katrina, there were dikes that were protecting the city. And the dikes actually would have worked out fine, but they were not well maintained. And after the storm had passed, the dikes collapsed and that created the flooding. This is a natural human thing. Like, oh, we haven't had something like this happen for 50 years, 80 years. It goes out of living memory and you kind of stop taking care of these systems that are meant to protect you. Because they're just there. They're just part of the background. They're not the urgent thing that you're working on. I think we grow too reliant on these things when we build them. The second, and by too reliant, we become too reliant. And then we build things we shouldn't build in areas that are actually really dangerous. Like these big investments hide the danger from us and make us act in, like, reckless ways. The second thing is that I think we have, because we are super affluent, we have this mentality that the moral thing to do is to build back better and stronger and bigger and more resilient. When in most cases, the reality is that we either shouldn't rebuild at all, or if we rebuild, we should rebuild something that if it blows over, we can just pick it up. If we look at traditional. I think we can think of Japan as a model for this. If we go and look at traditional building methods in Japan, which have in a sense, evolved now to include the way they build today. Traditional building methods were all based on the idea that this stuff is going to fall over in an earthquake and we need to be able to, A, not die from that and B, be able to then pick it up and put it back together and use it again. The idea wasn't that we would harden everything against earthquakes or prevent earthquake from ever happening. It was that we would make it resilient to earthquake. So you see building styles, that buildings will actually be able to move a little bit in a minor earthquake, in a major earthquake, yes, you're going to have to go out and pick things up. But you go out and pick it up, you don't try to make it earthquake proof. I think I've told this story before about the Jay Cook Bridge. Here in Minnesota. We have a state park called Jay Cooke State park. And there's a suspension bridge for just walking over that is kind of famous in the state. And a big storm came in and all this water came rushing down the river and wiped out the bridge. And the state went in and said, okay, we're going to build this bridge and we're going to rebuild it and we're going to build it again really, really strong. And they went and spent a few hundred thousand, five hundred, six hundred thousand rebuilding this bridge. And the next year or two years later, a big storm came in and wiped this bridge out. And then they said, we're going to build this sucker back and it's never coming down again. And they spent like seven, eight million dollars building these massive abutments and all this stuff so that this bridge in the biggest storm would never come down. And I'm like, you could rebuild that thing 50 times for the money that you spent fortifying it against any possible threat in the future. Just build a cheap bridge that is easy to fix.
- [26:48]
Abby
Yeah, yeah.
- [26:49]
Chuck Marone
Like why? Totally. Why the obsession with like having the bridge fall? What is the problem with. If you're going to have a big storm every 10 years or 20 years and it knocks the bridge down, go ahead and build a cheap bridge and put it back up again. Like who cares? It's not a big deal. Why fortify it against the thousand year storm? Like why? What thing in our ego makes us feel like we have to do that?
- [27:13]
Abby
Yeah, well, and that definitely aligns with this article's kind of argument against some of the approaches where FEMA is paying people to rebuild their houses when they're burned down or, or flooded, rather than paying for them to move to a different, different area where there isn't as much risk. I do wonder though if the insurance companies actually might be a more, I would say more of a stick rather than a carrot as compared to like having government buyout strategies. Because if you can't get insurance, then people are going to have to make decisions about where they live unless the states step in. Otherwise I don't really know like what kinds of strategies would be really useful for, for actually getting people to move. Because people, I mean, Chuck, if suddenly your town became, you know, a climate risk area and you were told that you should move, would you. I mean people's, people are really emotionally tied to an area, very economically tied to an area. It's really hard to get people to move. I mean people are still in the same place that Hurricane Katrina hit and people live, people continue to live in these places. People will go back to Asheville and they will live there and it's. Yeah. Despite the risk, it's really hard to get people to move. And I know you wouldn't move.
- [28:48]
Chuck Marone
People live on the San Andreas fault. And I remember the first time I went to California as a young kid thinking I'm taking my life into my hands coming here because it's crazy because the whole thing's just going to go off into the ocean at any point in time. And you know, that's in some ways an irrational fear, but also not because at some point it will. Right, Chuck?
- [29:10]
Abby
I Had the same thought when I was visiting Yellowstone as a kid.
- [29:15]
Chuck Marone
At some point this is just going to blow up.
- [29:18]
Abby
Yeah. I was like, this is crazy. We're visiting.
- [29:22]
Chuck Marone
We're standing on like hundreds of feet of magma below us ready to blow at any moment. Yeah, I know.
- [29:28]
Abby
I hope the insurance companies can cover a quarter of the world when that happens.
- [29:33]
Chuck Marone
Well, obviously at that point, I mean, here's the thing about insurance companies that I don't think people grapple with.
- [29:43]
Abby
Yeah, I'm kidding by the way.
- [29:44]
Chuck Marone
No, no, but it's true. And I think we need to understand this. Back in the 2008 financial crisis, there was an insurer called AIG, American Insurance Group. I can't remember what it stood for. AIG and AIG insured all of these mortgage backed securities, all these credit default swaps against default. And the thing is that they provided this insurance, everybody felt that they were insured, they were taking more risks than they otherwise would have in the mortgage market because they had this insurance company backing. And then when everything went bad, the first thing that went bad was the insurance company. Insurance companies are, let me say this in as delicate as way possible. Insurance companies are designed to make money and to insure people against risk. They are not designed to withstand systematic collapse. And so if all of New Orleans is flooded from a hurricane, whatever insurance company is insuring New Orleans is not like that doesn't work. That kind of systematic collapse. If Florida is insured by an insurance company and seawater rise is going to put the first, you know, 400ft or 800ft or 2 miles of the entire state underwater and wipe out 90% of the value of the development. There's no insurance company that can insure that. I mean that's just not an insurable thing. And that insurance company will go away and they won't claw back the CEO's stock dividends from the last, you know, 50 years and they won't claw back all the other things. I mean that's gone. You just don't have insurance at that point. And so, you know, I think we can pretend that insurance does something here. And I think it does on an individual basis. But when you're talking, when you're talking about 20 million people needing to be moved because we have all these like massive systematic problems. There's no private insurance company that can, can deal with that. That is not a now shared collective risk. That is like a systematic failure and nothing's going to work.
- [32:01]
Abby
Yeah, totally. And I, I mean be beyond the insurance companies, beyond these Federal programs, which I think, I think in terms of all the different skills of government, there's a lot of mismatched priorities that are happening here. I mean, I think you can even look at like some of the federal, the federal programs that are, I think rightly promoting, you know, local governments to increase density and change their zoning standards and promote development. There's no distinction between areas where you know that are considered to be really risky and areas that are not considered to be risky. At least that's my understanding. I mean California, Phoenix, places that are, I would say incredibly risky are, are they're implementing programs to scale up the population, support growth, where you would be thinking that we actually want people to move to different parts of the country. So there's a lot of mismatched priorities. I think with even within the federal government and different scales of government that make this very difficult to actually implement.
- [33:16]
Chuck Marone
A decade of drought wipes out Phoenix. I mean I don't, I might be, that might be a little hyperbolic but like two decades of drought wipes out Phoenix. Going back and studying cultures that lived prior to our current affluence and I often think about how, you know, people even, I mean heck, Abby, even 50 years ago, but for sure, 100 years ago, did not know the weather that was coming three hours from now, right? Did not know like, I'm going to walk to town, it's four miles away. I might get caught in a blizzard on the way home and not make it home like that. That was, that was a thought that was in the back of your mind. These civilizations, because the cost of failure was so high, became very risk averse. We don't build in that low area because it floods. We don't build here because of the forest catches on fire. We don't build here because every now and then a big rain comes in and wipes all this stuff out. We don't build here because a huge wave comes in and wiped out the last civilization that lived here. And so we all look, learn to live way back from this edge. All of those decisions have consequences, often consequences where when more affluent people came in touch with these civilizations, said, why do you do these goofy odd things? Why do you do these weird, strange things? Why don't you live over here? Why don't you. It's more convenient if you live near the water. It's more convenient if you lived over here. And like, well, we don't do that because we inherited this story that the people who did that all died. And so we don't do that anymore. We have lost in the same way that we build in a desert, expecting water, and we build in hot areas, expecting air conditioning, and we build in super cold areas like I live in, expecting central heat. We are immune to, like, the risks that are around us. And some of those risks are not. Okay. I have. I'm a little obsessive in this regard, but, like, I have wood heat and gas heat in my house. If the gas went out, I can heat my house with wood for probably, you know, with the wood that I start the winter with, probably for a month. Right. So, like, I've got enough to bridge the gap. Like, I will be fine if I had to switch to wood heat. But a lot of people would not. A lot of people, their pipes would freeze, their house would become uninhabitable, and they would suffer tens of thousands, maybe more in damage. You can mitigate some of these risks, and some of them you can avoid. I feel like we have become. There's a scientific word for this, and it's not coming to my head, but you. You basically become ignorant of the risks around you to the point where you, you know, I'll go a foot further, a foot further, a foot further, a foot further, and then you wind up having to retreat 10ft because you. You realize that you, like, went out too far. And our affluence has just allowed us to be, you know, kind of numb to these risks.
- [36:47]
Abby
Yeah. And I think it's. I think it's becoming more and more clear that not every. We can't continue to operate that way.
- [36:56]
Chuck Marone
As a country and the government won't fix it. Right. Like, there is no government program that can fix this.
- [37:01]
Abby
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. When there is an idea that the government is just going to fix it and it's out there and people just kind of assume that things will get bailed out and everything will be okay. I think that that also creates very little incentive for people to make better decisions that can help themselves.
- [37:26]
Chuck Marone
If we look at. So there have been some catastrophic forest fires that have burned down cities, burned down towns, burned down people's homes. I know I've known some people who have lived in some of these places. And the thought is always, we lost so many things that were irreplaceable. Photos, pictures, memories. And this is horrible, right? This is horrible. But for the most part, and there's some exceptions to this, for the most part, people have been able to get out of those and not lose their lives. The thing that I ask afterward is, like, why would we Ever rebuild this place in this way. Why would we do this again? Now, you could argue the forest burned down, it's not going to burn down again. And that's probably true. You know, it's not going to burn down in the next 20 years because it's all going to be growing back in green. It might take 50 to 100 years for this place to get to the point where it's going to burn down again. But in those instances, like, what do you do? And I think more importantly, what do you do in the places that have the same. Because we can go around and point to, like, this city's going down, this city's going down, this place is going down. When this fire goes off, like, this is a really high likelihood of going down. Is that going to happen next summer? Is that going to happen 100 summers from now? Like, at some point it will happen.
- [38:47]
Abby
Right, right.
- [38:49]
Chuck Marone
What do we do? And to me, the only thing you can do really today for people is to say, hey, we will insure your house up to like, this amount. But that amount is going to be for you to move somewhere else, definitely. So if your house is worth a million dollars because it's on a beautiful mountain, we're actually going to give you $250,000 as an insurance payout. And then you're going to have to go buy a house somewhere else. Like, that's. That's all the insurance you get here. The rest of it is like your risk. Sorry. And then here are. Here's a kit to help you. And if the. If the thing starts, we're going to try to evacuate you as early as possible, and we're going to try to get you out of here. And if you don't go, we're going to actually, like, forcibly remove you, because we're just trying to save lives at that point. And that's what you agree to by living here, is that when we tell you to evacuate, you will evacuate. Should the federal government spend millions of dollars buying out those houses and moving people?
- [39:50]
Abby
I don't know.
- [39:51]
Chuck Marone
In light of everything else, I find that really hard to justify.
- [39:58]
Abby
Yeah, agree. Especially because it's really hard to get that right and actually identify the right properties and when to prioritize them. So, yeah, very challenging kind of issue.
- [40:10]
Chuck Marone
If we move 100 people in different places and then we look back 50 years from now at the money we spent and the people we moved, it's probably one or two out of those hundred actually needed to be moved. But you just don't know which two of the hundred are the ones that will experience the natural disaster?
- [40:29]
Abby
Yeah, exactly. And I'd like to know what the difference, and even in that, analyzing different areas would be with the insurance companies versus the federal government. Like what that method, like how their methodology, methodologies would differ, how they would be thinking about this, if they're thinking the same way about this. Because I bet you they wouldn't be thinking the same way about how you actually identify the properties and areas. Partly because there's different incentives that these entities have.
- [41:00]
Chuck Marone
Right, Absolutely. Let me give you this last thought. I remember and I can't remember the name of the hurricane Ike, Eugene. Like, I'm throwing out names now. I can't remember the one. There was one that was, I want to say, in the 90s or early 2000s that was. Went through Florida and it was. It was really, really bad. And the big thing at that point was this conversation about trailer houses and how they allowed so many people to live in trailer houses. The trailer houses, when the hurricane comes through, just gets blown away. This is horrible. How can we do this? There should be some, like, higher standard. I remember at the time, you know, as an engineer thinking, yeah, we should fortify that and not allow that. And I actually have come full circle on it. And I think that the fact that we can predict a bad hurricane a week in advance, and we can predict it in a way where we can evacuate people 24 hours, 48 hours. I mean, we'll say there's a storm brewing. It looks like it could be a bad hurricane. Looks like it's going to hit here five days from now. It's a big range. It could go either way. Get ready. And as the day gets closer, we can say, like, okay, like, now you. You guys all living in these trailer houses. Like, I'm sorry, you got to go. Trailer houses are actually. I mean, I realize that these are people's homes. There are things in those homes that will be irreplaceable to people. I recognize that cost. I'm not trying to minimize that cost. This is tumult in people's lives. This is turmoil in people's lives. And I'm not trying to diminish that. But the idea that we couldn't save everybody's life is just wrong. Like. Like if you lived in a trailer house, we could get you out. We have plenty of morning, plenty of time. We could have a plan. We could get you out. The idea that we should say every home has to be built to, like, a certain minimum, albeit crappy, standard, but one that, like, dramatically increases the price of housing and makes it really, really difficult to do because of hurricanes, insurance. Da da da da da. I really feel like isn't the way to go. I am of the mindset that the really super important things that you can never, as a society afford to lose, you build back so it can. You build so it never falls down. The stuff that you can deal without or put back or fix, you build kind of cheaply, and then you just put it back when you need to. And there's nothing wrong with that. I feel like that's the mentality that our engineers have lost, and they've lost it because we are so quick and easy to throw money at problems. And you can do that when the problem is a hundred thousand people or 200,000 people. You can have that mindset. But when the problem is 20 million, you have to have a more tactical mindset.
- [44:15]
Abby
Yeah, yeah. One that really focuses on adaptability and. Yeah, being. I think tactical is a great word for that.
- [44:23]
Chuck Marone
Yep. Let's save people's lives. Let's put back what we can, but let's not worry about things that get blown over.
- [44:30]
Abby
Yeah, totally.
- [44:32]
Chuck Marone
And our hearts go out to everyone in Florida, everyone in North Carolina. I mean, this is horrible. It is horrible, right? It is horrible. And when you lose everything, what. The conversation that you and I are having is really about, like, federal, like, what is our macro policy on this stuff? You know, if you're a city that undergoes a natural disaster, I mean, people will talk about it 100 years from now. Right. I mean, in Asheville, they actually have a line. Here's how high the flood of 18. Whatever. Whatever was. And then this one is up to this line, right? It's higher. And this will be now the one. Someone 100 years from now will say, well, back. This flood of 2024 was right here.
- [45:20]
Abby
Exactly. You know, and people will be back. They will rebuild. That's the thing.
- [45:25]
Chuck Marone
Will rebuild.
- [45:26]
Abby
They will. Yeah, they will. Well, my heart goes out to everybody I know, Chuck. We are on a time crunch, so we're going to have to skip the today, but. Okay, well, we'll. We'll save it for next time. When is the next time I will see you? I think I'll have guests.
- [45:44]
Chuck Marone
Might be a while. It might be a while. I'm. I'm in Michigan, then I'm in Florida, then I'm in Pennsylvania. So it might be end of October, but you always have better guests than me when you do this.
- [45:56]
Abby
All right, well, I will catch you the next time and we will do a down zone. Take care. Thanks, Chuck. And thanks everyone for listening to another episode of Upzone. Bye, Chuck.
- [46:10]
Chuck Marone
Bye. Let me show you what I'm about to do.