Phoenix is still one of the fastest growing cities in the US. I can’t imagine that the homes these people are buying are appreciating assets as a result of climate change. A lot of people are going to be completely fucked financially whenever the climate eventually forces move and it turns out they have just been lighting tens of thousands of dollars on fire.
It is absolutely bonkers to me that people still aren’t considering this sort of thing whenever they choose to move to a new city.
The price of housing is scaling rapidly there too. A house that cost about 120k in 1988 now Zillows around 500-600k, and even the new developments in fringe areas start in the 400s.
I almost wonder if there will end up having to be some catastrophic buy-down programme. Maybe people stop coming to Phoenix. Maybe we’d end up just infrastructure abandonment of areas-- “we can no longer guarantee services because we can’t actually have workers fix the electrical wires/sewer/etc when it’s 55C” which likely reduces the property value to near zero. Someone is going to have to eat the loss, and none of the obvious targets (a bunch of elderly landowners who vote in every election? Suing the fossil fuel industry who wrecked the place?) are easy political targets, so the most palatable approach might be to buy people out to get their problem off the table; pretend the house still appreciated like it wasn’t in a hell-dimension, and take this buyout to move to Montana while we demolish the entire city of Mesa for a giant solar farm.
Phoenix is still one of the fastest growing cities in the US. I can’t imagine that the homes these people are buying are appreciating assets as a result of climate change. A lot of people are going to be completely fucked financially whenever the climate eventually forces move and it turns out they have just been lighting tens of thousands of dollars on fire.
It is absolutely bonkers to me that people still aren’t considering this sort of thing whenever they choose to move to a new city.
The price of housing is scaling rapidly there too. A house that cost about 120k in 1988 now Zillows around 500-600k, and even the new developments in fringe areas start in the 400s.
I almost wonder if there will end up having to be some catastrophic buy-down programme. Maybe people stop coming to Phoenix. Maybe we’d end up just infrastructure abandonment of areas-- “we can no longer guarantee services because we can’t actually have workers fix the electrical wires/sewer/etc when it’s 55C” which likely reduces the property value to near zero. Someone is going to have to eat the loss, and none of the obvious targets (a bunch of elderly landowners who vote in every election? Suing the fossil fuel industry who wrecked the place?) are easy political targets, so the most palatable approach might be to buy people out to get their problem off the table; pretend the house still appreciated like it wasn’t in a hell-dimension, and take this buyout to move to Montana while we demolish the entire city of Mesa for a giant solar farm.