Is a nomadic lifestyle the future?
Hi everyone!
Someone I’ve been interacting with online for quite a while lives in Asheville, North Carolina (USA) near the Swannanoa River and has had an absolutely brutal few months…
If you don’t remember what Hurricane Helene has done to that part of the country… I’m not sure if the video below will work, it was posted directly to Reddit I think… but if not, here’s the link:
My friend hasn’t worked in months, their house is/was filled with mud and mold and insurance nor Federal/State relief funds will pay out. The house isn’t habitable but a mortgage is still owed and the repair costs are more expensive than the house is currently valued at.
It’s been an absolute nightmare of bureaucracy and logistics and while I haven’t spoken to her in a while, she still pops up on social media occasionally with updates, and they’re all extremely frustrating.
Unfortunately the world has moved on from Hurricane Helen’s destruction to the California fires that are still ongoing…
There’s been lots of articles about State Farm insurance dropping household fire insurance a few months ago – and while it sounds like there might be State/Federal relief funds, you can see from the video above, some people might have lost everything and might not get any help.
I’ve written before wondering if home ownership might be dangerous in the future… and the above events and many more have me musing on it again. Of course, the obvious counter argument is that you have to live somewhere and landlords will take advantage of a disaster, ie, rents increasing in California right now.
The counter to the counter is….
… losing a house is more expensive than increased rent.
I’m start to wonder even further if owning more than a couple of bags worth of stuff is the way to go in a world where weather events are both more intense and more regular.
Photo by Veerasak Piyawatanakul
The main problem is insurance.
As extreme weather events become more regular and more intense, for-profit insurance companies are either going to have to pull out of areas altogether (like Florida or California) or limit the types of insurance they can offer (can’t offer fire insurance in California or flood insurance for Florida). They simply won’t be able to afford to stay in business otherwise.
It’s not just problem spots either, any area could have a freak hailstorm that destroys thousands of roofs and vehicles or something of that nature (ie, Iowa).
When insurance companies pull out of an region, those houses instantly lose their value.
They can’t sell their property because banks won’t lend out a mortgage without available insurance. So people can’t sell… but they also can’t afford to keep a property that’s been damaged either.
I can’t think of much worse than having to pay back a mortgage for a house no one can actually live in.
There is a genuine economic crisis looming… where people’s biggest financial assets are worth significantly less and entire regions overnight lose a huge percentage of an already housing.
As far as I can tell, 12,000+ homes have been destroyed by the California wildfires, in areas that were already suffering a housing crisis. Builders and tradespeople don’t appear from nowhere, all the effort that will go into rebuilding California means that somewhere else isn’t getting the housing it also needed.
So my thinking is that at some point, in some regions, owning a home will just be too risky. Even though you’ll likely have to pay more in rent than a mortgage, at least with rent you won’t lose a massive portion of your wealth if things go badly.
To double down on that… if you manage to actually only care about a bag or two worth of stuff, then you could theoretically move whenever disaster strikes. You could move to another region that won’t have to rebuild.
This might be a silly concept, obviously it’s not possible for people with kids in school or local businesses or a thousand different reasons… but it does feel like only a matter of time before we all go through a huge disaster, and so out of pure survival we just end up with minimal possessions and an enforced nomadic lifestyle.
There is, of course, a pretty likely scenario that after huge disasters, houses and infrastructure are only built in less-prone areas and built to withstand the likely extreme events of the area. A huge part of the devastation of Asheville is that no one ever expected flooding there. The hurricanes were extraordinary… and so maybe we’ll end up building houses and infrastructure that can handle floods and fires and hail and snow and heatwaves and earthquakes, etc etc. I just, ah, don’t know if that’s possible or feasible.
Where for-profit insurance companies abandon people because they cannot profit in high-risk regions, then either homes just don’t have insurance and can’t be sold… or the government has to step in and provide insurance.
Which sounds reasonable… maybe for-profit insurance doesn’t make sense when it comes to people’s homes… but that also means that everyone is paying to rebuild after a disaster. That’s our tax dollars that are spent on rebuilding homes and infrastructure… which is no doubt a worthy cause… but it also means those tax dollars can’t be spent on improving infrastructure or services.
With enough extreme weather events, infrastructure gets steadily worse over time as damages outweigh taxes.
The only sticking point in my theory about people adopting a more nomadic, less material existence is that the best way to survive extreme weather events is through building up your local community to look after everyone and harden and adapt everything for extreme weather. No one can survive for every long alone, and so staying in one spot and building with the community might be way smarter than moving around a lot.
Governments have mostly be captured by corporations, but communities are incredible because we’re better united.
I don’t know what the solutions are for ourselves and the generations that follow us… is this something you’ve put any thought into? No? Just me? Dang…
Thanks for reading!
Also shared to my personal blog : https://lifebe.com.au/opinion/is-a-nomadic-lifestyle-the-future/
Many from overseas and will be deported.
Well, with teachers unable to handle classes now, it is only a matter of time until all the institutions move to AI teaching anyway, so then, home school for all!
Not sure about earth quakes, but Cairns generally does pretty well after a cyclone. I remember my first one where I was walking waist deep in water, and then a couple hours after the rain stopped, the same area was dry again. But, the city has largely been built for it for years.
While cold here in Finland (getting warmer), it is pretty safe environmentally for now. No major earthquakes, no tornadoes, very few forest fires and none of note, and the animals are all cute and fluffy, with nothing poisonous. There is nothing to do here though. Welcome!
Honestly, I think you and your family are in a very good spot for the future decades. I definitely don't expect trees to crop up in the artic anytime soon... but land that might have been too cold for most of the year for crops might actually be viable in the coming decades... whereas I expect farming lands near the equator will have to constantly deal with droughts and floods.
The big thing about climate change is that cities will have to deal with weather events that they're not used to... so Cairns is used to dealing with cyclones, but maybe Sydney or Melbourne might need the same infrastructure in the coming decades.
I wonder if kids will eventually never develop a sense of humour if their teachers and all their entertainment is made by AI?
Ha! we have been travelling with carry on luggage only for a while wondering what it might be like to down size dramatically. The nomadic life style sounds pretty cool especially coupled with freeing up some capital from a house but I still like the idea of having a good base if things turn to shit like back in covid times.
Very interesting. You've put a lot of thought into this.
I think... that if majority of Homo Sapien history remains unrecorded and/or the records possibly destroyed that we sit with another concept to frame your thoughts in the post.
It seems that when we look at the restrictive and complex laws and money-grabbing from the government and the elite that this system is ultimately unsustainable.
Could also be a signal to reform existing systems that do not work. We are allowed to stop supporting business models that do not work and we SHOULD be able to stop supporting governance models that do not work.
I do legitimately think about that a lot... if humans have been around for 200,000 years... what have we learnt but forgotten? Entire civilizations and societies grew and fell without much being passed on.
I do think there have been cycles of massive wealth disparity -> huge conflict (war, plague, revolution) -> wealth redistribution... and then repeat all over again...
Of those 200,000 years, I think only 10,000 or so have had relatively stable climate for agriculture, and with climate change I think we're exiting that stable climate era... which is why I think we could end up in a nomadic lifestyle again. To me, the big question is when.
That we cannot say. Will it all break-in one go or will there still be 100s of years of decline?
You're going to need to explain your maths to me (very slowly and carefully because I'm stupid and dyscalculiac) because I can't make this one make sense ^_^;
As per your last point there's a lot to be said for communities. Sometimes it feels like there's reasons governments and corporations are so desperate to keep everyone fragmented and divided.
OMG... I am also terrible at maths... this might be a disaster.
Okay, here goes...
Say you're renting a house, it's leased for a year and it costs $2000 a month. That's $24,000 a year. You have all your stuff and you have renters insurance.
Your next door neighbour bought their house for $240,000 and have $180,000 left on the mortgage, they also have all the insurances.
A flood hits and both houses are now rotting, moldy and unlivable... and the insurance companies won't/can't pay for whatever reason (which has happened in both California and Asheville North Carolina).
You can't live in your rented house, but you're still obligated to pay out your lease. It's rough, but you basically lose $24,000 for the year.
Your neighbour is still obligated to pay off their mortgage even though they can't live in their house... so they're out $180,000. We've seen in Asheville that absolute jackals descend on the area offering to buy people's properties for dirt cheap, so maybe your neighbours sell their property for $40,000.... so now they're only down $140,000 (I'm ignoring mortgage interest here, so it would probably be a lot more).
So $24,000 is less than $140,000.
Obviously there are all sorts of legalities and rights and all sorts of stuff I'm not really taking into account here.. the variables are huge... but for-profit insurance companies will do whatever they can, even if its illegal, to get out of giving money to their customers.
P.S) I had no idea dyscalculiac was a thing... but I hope this helps.