Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
California Town to Ban Rebuilding in Landslide Area
Palos Verdes Peninsula is a place in southern California that is prone to landslides. This is a natural part of the geology and geography of the peninsula, and they have been a problem since the 1950s when houses started popping up in substantial numbers. In 2023, the movement of the land accelerated. The LA Times said that at one stage the land was moving a foot a week. It has since slowed, but in some places it is moving a foot a month. This causes homes to fracture, the streets warp beyond use and utilities are compromised regularly. The city is considering a ban on new construction for the area. It should do so. Some places are not suitable to long-term occupation no matter how lovely the view.
The LAT also said, "As of this month, the city has designated 20 homes too dangerous to enter and another 38 as having significant structural damage -- enough to make parts of homes uninhabitable. At the end of last year, the federal government agreed to finance a buyout program for about 20 homes, to convert the properties into open space and limit future risk in the area."
This local issue has global importance because the planet does not care where humans build homes. Earth is going to do what Earth chooses, and any house in the way is doomed. It is not just landslides but also storms, floods and fires that happen frequently in the same places. Some poor bastard gets flooded out of his home, and the TV interview ends with a vow to rebuild. Five years later, the rebuilt home is wipe out by a flood. The lesson is do not rebuild.
The paper also interviewed Nikki Noushkam, a resident of the area, who said of the proposed ban "To me this just doesn't make sense to basically come and say, 'This is forever and ever'," she said Wednesday night. "Why are you applying a blanket policy on all of this? It just doesn’t make sense to me."
This journal has no knowledge of what sort of person Ms. Noushkam is nor of her past. But one is prepared to suggest she is letting emotion get in the way of reason. The landslides do seem to be forever and ever. They have been for at least 70 years, and for most humans, that is close enough to eternal that it makes no difference. Should that change, the city is quite capable of reversing the forever and ever ban with a single vote of the city council.
Since the Second World War, the US has built homes in places where there were none. Florida was sparsely populated before the arrival of air conditioning. Few lived in the canyons above LA. As the US homebuilding industry expanding into these areas, nature fought back. Hurricanes, landslides, fires and floods that used to hit unoccupied lands started affecting the newly build homes. Insurers first raised premiums, and then in more incident prone places, they withdrew altogether.
It is almost impossible to find a house insurance policy that includes flooding without a punitive premium. Indeed, the people who could not get insurance forced the government to create an insurance program to fill the gap, unimaginatively named the National Flood Insurance Program, administered by FEMA.
The NFIP is a mistake. It simply lowers the cost to the insured without reducing in any meaningful way the risks. That means the risk is socialized while the benefits accrue largely to the homeowner. So, the rebuilding in incident-prone areas continue.
It is unfortunate for people like Ms. Noushkam that their lives have been up-ended so severely. The country owes them some sympathy and support for relocation. It does not owe them anything for putting a new house in a landslide area.
© Copyright 2025 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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