From the Los Angeles Times, June 18:
Back in January, on a dark night of pelting rain, Erica Lopez Bedolla had only minutes to evacuate her family from the impoverished Central Valley town of Planada after a levee broke.
“It was so quick,” she told our Times colleague Jessica Garrison, recalling the speed with which the water rushed into her town and then her home, destroying almost everything and displacing hundreds. But after a few months, Bedolla already felt as if the rest of California had “forgotten this happened.”
In a community of mostly undocumented farmworkers, no one is sure whether Planada will recover. But if it does, and if families like the Bedollas do rebuild, we can be certain that the town and its beleaguered residents will remain vulnerable to future floods.
From Planada to Paradise, the urgent fallout of climate change on California’s already terrible housing crisis is undeniable — except perhaps to our state politicians who pay it lip service but have dodged the big questions about where we should build and rebuild in the future.
Our most vulnerable communities often lie in our most vulnerable regions: mountains marred by years of unprecedented wildfires, or Central Valley farm fields drowned in record rains and now epic snowmelt. It’s a big part of the reason several insurance companies are refusing to issue new policies and otherwise limiting their financial exposure in the Golden State.
State Farm, California’s largest home insurer, announced in May that it would no longer take on new residential and commercial properties, a devastating blow that will be felt most keenly in fire-prone areas where coverage is costly and hard to find. Flood insurance typically has to be purchased separately.
Allstate, another major insurer, also has pulled back in California and, last week, declined to reverse course even as state insurance officials agreed to let the company raise premiums by 4%.
Such business decisions should prompt California’s leaders to rethink land-use policies. After all, losing access to insurance creates another barrier to homeownership by making it impossible for most people to get a mortgage, compounding our housing crisis.
But once again, like Florida — a red state our political leaders love to denigrate — California is ignoring the obvious, knowing the consequences of doing so will be catastrophic.
“The reality is most people across the West live in zones that are on some risk map,” said Lisa Dale, a lecturer at Columbia University’s Climate School.
Indeed, there are few places left to live in California that are safe from climate disasters. And yet, in an attempt to help the tens of thousands of people sleeping on our streets and the millions more at risk of getting priced out of their apartments and ending up in a tent, Gov. Gavin Newsom has started cracking down on cities and counties that refuse to build more affordable housing.
His administration has famously made an example of intransigent Huntington Beach, suing the Orange County city for violating state housing laws.
The urgency is refreshing after years of state officials letting cities and counties promise to build but then failing to deliver housing at the rate needed to address a crucial shortage that is driving sky-high rents, homelessness and an exodus of residents to more affordable states....
....MUCH MORE, they go deep.
