Keenan on rising insurance and housing costs as a de facto relocation plan that needs no central design. He argues price signals are already pushing people away from flood- and wildfire-prone areas.
…that you need to get the hell out of this place. It's just way too expensive to live there. No one should have ever been there. And by the way, the government was subsidizing your way of life for a long time. And we're no longer... Paying your insurance. Yeah, we're no longer going to subsidize it.
…doesn't take any central design at all. You just let costs move people. Jesse says, for better or worse, that is going to be a key reshaper of where people live. It'll push us away from coasts where we can't afford flood insurance. And it'll push us away from brush-filled areas at risk of wildfire.
It's already happening. I think people think, oh, this is going to happen 100 years, 200 years, or whatever. It's like, no. The market economy is adapting much faster.
This, as you might imagine, has some downsides. Using price to drive people out is a pretty blunt instrument. I asked Jesse about how it goes wrong.
Yeah, I mean, it's a good question because the downside of the price signal theory is that there's a bunch of people who are not all that sensitive to price signal.
He says that can be people who own their homes but can't afford to move. That can be people just barely getting by.
