Historically that doesn’t make sense. Usually by not relocating you can extract greater concessions from your fellow citizens. As an example, if you left Rancho Palos Verdes when signs showed up you could have bought an equivalent home. But if you waited for your property there to be condemned, you received money equivalent to the maximum of the price in the last three years. The latter is obviously superior to maximize your own capital with the bonus that you get to live there until it is dangerous.
Likewise, the flood plains of Texas are cheap and nice to live in when there are no floods and when floods are imminent you have sufficient warning that you can evacuate and the federal government will compensate you. You can then go back and live there. This one is harder because it is unpleasant to move and you don’t receive the inflated price but it does incentivize some on the border.
Of course the fires in Malibu are a story of going too far in the wrong time. If they’d had a sympathetic administration in the federal government likely some kind of compensation scheme could have been worked out. So you have to work on the politics and the economics.
Its probably cheaper to start buying out people now (no way this cost isn't going to be socialized) than to risk in the future ultra expensive bleeding heart projects to kick the can down the road.
At the very least a moratorium on new builds and additions should go into effect immediately.
Just regulate it, make every home buyer buy an insurance for when it eventually happens. That way people who think its worth it will live there and all the relocation is already paid for.
But the National Flood Insurance Program will, with plenty of federal bailouts.
Private insurers haven’t been willing to cover large parts of the south for decades. The NFIP was the backstop and already overstretched when Katrina hit New Orleans, which is when it first got bailed out. It’s been a downward spiral ever since.
We're already seeing other states struggling with soaring house insurance rates (California and Florida) and a pattern of spikes in rates leading government mandated caps on rates leading to insurers pulling out of the states.
I've no idea what the going rate for insurance is currently in New Orleans but it has to be crazy right?
My insurance agent told me that insurers in the US generally don't cover floods at all, because its expected that your compensation will come from the government.
They won’t pay out even outside risky areas if your stuff is too old. 35 year old roof blown off in a storm? Insurance will say it was at end of life anyhow and worth $0. Tough.
The majority of New Orleans residents aren't wealthy enough to convince the state to pay them (or even care what happens to them, really). If recent news is any indicator, being non-white means they are screwed.
At some point you’ll have to do it without insurance or mortgages though. There are places on the island of Hawaii where neither are available due to volcano risk.
That's easy to do. It will simply become impossible to convince people to invest in their houses. Even force of law will fail.
Go check out the "Maas-vallei" in the south of the Netherlands to see cities (10+) that really, really shouldn't be located where they are (medieval foundations were built on the shores and never replaced. They've eroded away decades ago and still aren't being replaced, plus they've got more plant roots in them than forest soil). And Belgium has it worse.
It isn't even the result of rising sea levels. It's just too many buildings. Too little places for the river to go in such flat terrain.
People live there, are unwilling to move, are unwilling to upgrade their houses, and every 10 years or so, a flood comes, things collapse, often 5-10 people die, government pays for the houses and bridges that collapse and nothing changes until the next flood comes. Sometimes the houses are "repaired" (never the foundations of course) and it's rented out, usually to young families who can't afford better. I'm over 50, and I remember this happening when I was 5.
Where do you get the idea that under communism the government helps the citizens? Talk to a few Chinese homeless people. It's getting easier to find them every year.
It’s more than rising oceans. New Orleans is sinking rapidly just like Jakarta.
The southern third of LA has ground composed of spongy organic material deposited by rivers since the last ice age as opposed to solid ground largely made up of silicates and minerals covering bedrock.
Relative sea level rise = actual sea level rise + land subsidence
Cities like New Orleans are suffering a double whammy: not only are they subsiding (sinking), but the sea levels are also rising and so between the two they're in grave trouble.
Reminds me of the famous photo showing Anderson Cooper in hip waders, standing in a flooded hole. It appears that flood waters were chest high, but if you saw the surrounding terrain you realized the water was not nearly so deep, it only seemed that way because he was standing in a hole.
You can take your tinfoil hat off. In common parlance, ”rising seas” is about relative sea level (RSL), which is what actually matters regardless of the mix of underlying causes. This is how it’s used by e.g NOAA https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/faq.html#q1
Do you think the average CNN reader has a good grasp on the distinction of relative and eustatic sea levels?
I considered it a pretty nuanced topic, I’m surprised CNN treats it as table stakes.
Yes, but it’s not the topic of the article though. The article is about relocation. It describes the general problem and why New Orleans is particularly vulnerable. It would be nice to mention sinking land explicitly, but the idea that there’s some ”agenda” behind why they aren’t mentioning it is ridiculous.
Common thinking is that one of these things you can influence, and the other you cannot. You don’t often read articles that mention the sunrise or seasons because they just are, and everybody is already aware of their contribution.
Possibly the soil subsidence can be stopped or at least reduced.
In urban areas, there is no true solution for soil subsidence; it is not feasible to “reinflate” soils with water while urban life continues above.
It is beneficial, however, to restore a certain level of water content to the soil in the interest of slowing future sinkage. The key is to absorb or retain as much stormwater runoff as possible through porous surfaces, retention ponds, bioswales, rain gardens and widened and landscaped grade-level outfall canals.
I generally agree with your point about it being simply emergent behavior.
But on the other hand, the timing (having seen over the past week or so several articles about the most disastrous IPCC model now having become implausible) makes me wonder if some individual actors are thinking they need something to shore up their disaster prophesying.
> I wonder why CNN have decided to highlight oceans rising and not mention land sinking anywhere in the entire article? Is it possible they have an agenda?
Because water incursion is a much more difficult thing to deal with, in terms of infrastructure and prevention.
Also, let me know when the rest of coastal land has the same sinking as N.O.
This doesn't make sense. Both land sinking and water rising contribute together to 11mm/y ground level going closer to sea level. And the sinking has >2x effect.
Isn't land sinking something to address locally where it happens, compared to water rising which we're gonna need some sort of global solution for, as it's not just because of one country? If so, one would seem more difficult than the other.
Problem is the sinking isn't really something you can address in this particular case. It's a river delta that is compressing itself. But it's not only this, its land loss due to oil and natural gas practices, oh and its rising sea levels too.
I wish that there were a Corps of Engineers in the Army, whose job it was to build and maintain water retention structures. I think that such an organization might be our best hope for half an inch of rising water every year. Given that much of the state is already below sea level, that they have not suffered the wrath of climate change could only be a miracle. It must be the work of a merciful God who has forgiven their sins of owning Ford F150s.
This approach has already failed miserably for the city. They just need to move to where it isn't so obviously a risk, regardless the reason of the day, rather than have all of us pay to try to keep them there and then continually fail anyways.
Why would this need to be a miltary organization? Are the sinking lands/rising seas a plot from some enemy? This is a civil engineering thing if ever I saw one. Might want to look at how the Dutch deal with this. I don't think it involves any armies.
The way the Dutch deal with this is changing. The predominant view now is depolderization. Environmental concerns indicate that they should return the land to the sea.
In case you missed it, that was a joke. There is infact an Army Corps of Engineers that is responsible for exactly what the comment suggested (amongst a lot of other things).
The Army Corps of Engineers has its prominent civil engineering role because early America did not have a lot of federal resources and was born from war. So when the Federal government decided it wanted to take on large scale civil engineering works, the only ready to go resource at hand were the military engineers. And then afterwards, it's pretty much been inertia.
The Army Corps of Engineers civil works division is basically almost completely staffed by civilians. So there's a convoluted top level organization, but on the ground, it's not like they have soldiers and military engineers building levees.
Because if it were civil and paid for for centrally, it'd be Big C Communism marching in. Let the army do it and it's eagle-riding patriotism.
But also if you do declare some sort of emergency that allows this, otherwise frustrating checks and committees can be bypassed. Probably not a bad thing.
That was my reaction to the headline. New Orleans is already below sea level. Has been for as long as I can remember. They have adapted to it, you can argue the wisdom of trying to fight the ocean but I'm not sure why they will fail now.
Maybe they can get some investors to fund some big pumped hydro energy storage projects.
we can though? NOLA is sinking in large part because human activity has lowered the groundwater level by draining the swamps and wetlands, so the soil starts compressing.
This humors me: people still think CNN has a “liberal bias” especially as it transitions into ownership by David Ellison.
They probably should have mentioned it, yeah. But if you’re on a sinking ship in the ocean that does mean that the water level is rising relative to you and that is most of your problem.
And are we supposed to not be prepared and informed about the ocean rising at over 3mm per year? I wouldn’t exactly jump to being dismissive of sea level rise that is so dramatic. Every 10 years you’re gaining over an inch, every 100 you’re gaining about a foot. And then you’ve got the ice caps melting which is an impending climate disaster.
In reality, the right-wing criticism of the “mainstream media” has been a form of projection and justification for legitimizing its own propaganda network. Meanwhile, the right denies their own mainstream status: the “mainstream media lies” but the #1 cable news network is a right wing network, the Joe Rogan Experience is the #1 podcast that hosts political
guests but isn’t part of the “lying press,” and this is all justification for the FCC to send threatening letters to terrestrial networks for their choice of jokes on late night talk shows or their daytime talk shows not being conservative enough.
CNN misses one detail in a highly scientific story and they get accused of having an agenda, Fox News trots out an employee in a mask pretending to be antifa and nobody bats an eye.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t scrutinize all media, but this particular dynamic is something that has been noticeable.
> CNN misses one detail in a highly scientific story and they get accused of having an agenda
If it's as the earlier poster said that sinking is 8mm per year, versus 3.2mm and they point out the 3.2, don't you think this news organisation has missed the main detail?
The headline is literally "Rising seas will swallow New Orleans", not "New Orleans is sinking below the seas", this would be an issue regardless if sea levels were raised or not, it would still sink down into the sea.
It’s not just the one detail. They also racialized the discussion of the impact and, egads, a cardinal sin, they mentioned the “Gulf of Mexico” and made their mention of the governor’s decision a partisan jab by not including the “one detail.”
The white supremacists, descendants of the defeated confederacy, and their sympathizers would love for everyone to stop “racializing” issues.
I guess they don’t want to talk about how black people didn’t even get protection against housing discrimination until the current president of the United States was already a teenager.
This is why the impact is “racialized:” because non-white races often live in less desirable geographic regions of metropolitan areas.
Look at a lot of American cities and demographics of people that live near flood plains and other hazards like pollution and noise and you’ll often notice racial patterns. These are objectively real, not “racialized.”
The people who want us to stop talking about it like yourself, intentionally or not, want us all to bury our head in the sand and pretend like the discrimination has been resolved despite the fact that non-white races are still feeling these impacts.
If you’d like to expand your mind on a related subject, this is a great story:
Agreed. Also, as every media organization is free to make editorial decisions on both what they cover and how they cover it, left/right is often far too simplistic and vague to actually reverse engineer a media orgs bias.
>In reality, the right-wing criticism of the “mainstream media” has been a form of projection and justification for legitimizing its own propaganda network. Meanwhile, the right denies their own mainstream status: the “mainstream media lies” but the #1 cable news network is a right wing network, the Joe Rogan Experience is the #1 podcast that hosts political guests but isn’t part of the “lying press,”
Joe Rogan isn't "right," he openly supports recreational drug use, gay rights, women's right to abortion, universal healthcare, has endorsed Bernie Sanders and James Talarico, etc.
He's not a leftist, but that doesn't make him "right wing."
I mean hard to say. "Climate change" means that weather patterns will change on a location by location basis, it's not all for the "worse" (climate doesn't care one way or another about what humans in particular value), and so far the 2000s have had more storms hit Louisiana than the 2010s and the 2020s have been milder than the 2010s. It's entirely possible that climate change reduces the number of storms that hit new orleans
This article and the one before it are based on a paper in nature that says if the seas rise 10ft-23ft that New Orleans is screwed. Notably it does not predict this, just says that if sea levels rise the city is screwed. Which it is!
But so is lower Manhattan, Miami, 60% of the land in the Netherlands, almost all of Bangladesh, along with numerous other places.
Now 3m-7m is vastly higher than any current predictions, but hey lets scare monger about a single city!
> But so is lower Manhattan, Miami, 60% of the land in the Netherlands, almost all of Bangladesh, along with numerous other places.
From page 1 of the paper: "Coastal Louisiana has been referred to as 'canary in the coal mine' with respect to climate impacts. As highlighted in the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the central US Gulf Coast is the single most exposed LECZ (low-elevation coastal zone) in the world in terms of projected relative sea-level (RSL) rise throughout this century."
> Notably it does not predict this
Again from page 1 of the paper: "The initial impetus consists of new evidence that RSL in this region is probably committed to 3-7m of future rise, with a shoreline bound to migrate as much as 100km inland. We argue that future RSL rise to this elevation – judging from field evidence rather than climate model output – is, in fact, a best-case scenario."
But most of that relative sea changes comes from the land locally sinking, not from the sea globally rising. The title making it sound as if its climate change causing this issue is sensationalist, this would have happened even if the seas didn't rise.
I remember watching it on CNN from Ireland and it was a bizarre. For about two days before they were saying it's probably going to flood, about every 30 minutes on repeat, so I assumed people would evacuate if necessary. Then it did flood with people still there and something of a mess. Then George Bush was shown on repeat saying it's sad but no one could have foreseen this.
I'm not sure it was a sign to leave the place so much as the levees should have been raised about 2 ft higher to deal with the pretty predictable water levels.
This current thing is also kind of bizarre saing there'll be a sea level rise about 10x reality. Why can't people do maths and realistic estimates and planning? I assume it's some kind of politics that requires the untruths? I'm not American and don't really get the politics and why they can't do sensible calculation on flood defences like the Dutch say.
Someone who was 7 during Katrina at that time is roughly 28 today.
Using the Census ACS age brackets, about 20-ish% of louisiana's population is under 15, and another 20 is between 15 and 29. Everyone 30 and older adds up to the other 60.
So a hair over 60% are were at least 7.
But that's who lives there now not who lived there then. Between 2005 and 2006 the state population dropped by 6% and most of that displaced population never returned - people coming in from elsewhere weren't there for Katrina. So the fraction who were both living there AND old enough to remember it is considerably smaller than 60%.
Claiming 9 year olds don't remember Katrina is quite an abuse of the word "roughly". The percentage of Louisiana's population under 25 is 33%, we can agree they don't "remember". Anything else requires considerable stretching with a hand-waving accompaniment. I can do that part just as well as any other internet person. Let's see, how about the fact that what followed Katrina was years of rebuilding? Someone from New Orleans probably saw its aftermath around them for 4-5 years.
Why are you assuming the rapid increase in LA’s population from 2006 to 2010 did not have a significant portion of temporarily displaced people moving back?
Oh, then you’re of course aware that many many people did in fact return, and that your earlier estimate of the number of people coming to LA after 2005 that hadn’t lived there before was over-estimated.
Oh hey, something I used to work on. The story here is coastal erosion / land subsidence much more than it is sea level rise, although that is a contributing factor. The land subsidence has been caused by Engineering works of the past, including the construction of levees and floodwalls around the city. When I worked on this a decade ago, we were already telling people outside of the city to move and spending a fortune to protect people inside the city. The most cost-effective option is often getting people to move, but good luck convincing everyone. Also this is such a shame because New Orleans is one of the most unique, charming places in the US.
New Orleans is on a river delta, and without human effects on land, and without sea level rise, wouldn't one expect this delta to expand due to silt deposition?
And would this silt deposition actually occur at a rate that would fully counteract sea level rise, just as the huge rise in sea levels at the end of the last ice age did not mean that the delta disappeared?
If so, the danger to New Orleans would be entirely avoidable by changes in local land use.
Perhaps the fundamental issue is that river deltas tend to be dynamic, with the watercourse continually changing, which isn't really compatible with a city in a fixed location. (Hence the damaging attempts at stopping this.)
Hmmm... On the one hand, yes, silt deposition would tend to expand the delta and that's what you saw over the last 5,000 years up until the 1930's. And yes, it was work done by the Corps of Engineers to fix the course of the Mississippi River that broke this system. That plus logging, oil and gas extraction, and tons of other "local land use" things then led to sinking ground levels. As the article mentions, the governor cancelled a(n expensive) effort that would have resulted in more silt deposition ... in the general area that most experts think would have helped.
On the other hand, the silt wasn't ever being deposited in large quantities in New Orleans itself, but more in other places. The delta is huge. New Orleans is famously below sea level and always has been. There's always been hurricanes. It's always been dangerous to live there and I'm not sure you can blame the dynamic nature of the river.
It isn’t expansion that it would do it is a return to wandering. When a river wanders, typically people die. It is not a good thing to be near a wandering river.
The river water picks up silt as it flows to the sea. The silt has to go somewhere. That's why the delta exists, and grows, absent other effects.
The river wandering is part of this. Since the silt can only be deposited where the water goes, for the delta to grow (or just maintain itself) the river has to go here and there all over it.
And yes, people die when this happens. But if you stop the river wandering, the silt isn't going to be deposited so as to maintain the delta.
Maybe it's not a good location for permanent human settlement.
I hope there is some plan to thwart this, as New Orleans is my favorite city on Earth. Truly unique culture and history against the homogenization and suburbanization of America. If you’ve never visited, please go.
The tourist portions of the city are created and supported by the surrounding population; they generate the parade, music, and celebratory culture year round. We can't just abandon or move the residential areas and keep the rest intact without it becoming a Disney main street facsimile version mocking what it once was, which would destroy the tourist appeal outright.
I agree with you except for the last part, NOLA is gonna get frog boiled into exactly that Disney facsimile, people have shown they aren't discriminating about authenticity to the degree that you are.
I was thinking the same thing. It truly is a magical place and unlike any other city in America I've been to. I think relocation is best for the safety of the residents (obviously), but I can't help but think "New Orleans 2.0" would end up being just another city. Unless someone comes up with a way to pick the whole thing up and move it, I strongly recommended visiting before it's gone.
I wonder if they would even have to be relocated if they had the water management expertise and functional government of Denmark?
I think the article didn’t talk enough about how Louisiana is far too poor to undertake a planned relocation without a vast amount of federal help.
Then, you’ve got the fact that Louisiana’s political leadership is some of the worst in the country. The article touched on it but arguably didn’t discuss it enough. These are not people who will do anything that benefits constituents. Arguably they aren’t even benefiting their donors by burying their head in the sand, although I imagine their donors have accepted that they’ll just leave New Orleans with their profits in hand when the time comes.
Louisiana isn’t poor by almost any objective measure. They’re in the bottom half of US states by GDP per capita (not in the bottom 10), but they’d be in the top 20 countries in the world by GDP per capita if they were a country.
> Income inequality isn’t the same things as government resources available per person.
Correct. You clearly understand that your citing of averages papers over the poverty rate and conflates the gains of the rich with the plight of the poor.
Louisiana is literally ranked the #1 poorest state in the nation today counting the percent of people who don’t have enough to pay rent or eat properly.
“Government resources available per person” is cold comfort to the over one in four children in Louisiana who are living in poverty. How are those government resources actually being used, and if it ranks so well, why isn’t that reflected in LA’s health and education? “Government resources available per person” includes tax credits for oil and gas…
You’re arguing with a different person than you think you are.
I’m arguing about available resources, not willingness to use them.
If you want to define poor purely by percentage of people who are living below the poverty line instead of median income, average income, gdp per capita or tax revenue, go ahead. But in the context of whether the government has the resources to do something, that’s not a good metric.
And beyond this scope if you look at average or median personal income, the average or median person in Louisiana is not poor, which is the metric I would use if I was going to call a group of people poor.
Okay I see your point; the state has money, even if a significant portion of the population doesn’t. That in itself is a problem. I was arguing, and many others here are arguing that the population of LA is poor, and you’re arguing that the state isn’t poor, and has options (whether or not it uses them). Both points are true - the state has resources, and the population has the greatest poverty in the US. Poverty rate is a valid objective metric of whether a state is “poor”, but it refers to the population and not the state budget, which is also a valid objective metric of whether a state is “poor” or not.
> if you look at average or median personal income, the average or median person in Louisiana is not poor
This is one to be more careful with. Neither the average nor the median inherently tell you anything about the state’s poverty rate, and having a poverty rate that’s the highest in the US and almost twice the national average absolutely supports the viewpoint that LA is relatively poor. When it comes to median household income specifically, the LA Budget Project says “These numbers obscure stark racial disparities” and points out that the median Black income is around half that of White non-Hispanic household income. (Page 9 - https://www.labudget.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/LBP-Cens...)
It might seem like the median $60k household income isn’t poor, but 50% of households are below “ALICE” levels and having to compromise on basic necessities. This doesn’t support your claim that the median resident of LA is not poor. https://www.unitedforalice.org/introducing-ALICE/louisiana
That metric makes Louisiana look relatively better because cost of living is low. For example, 48% of households in New York are below ALICE levels.
It highlights one problem with using percent of people below the federal poverty level as your metric. Median income doesn’t tell the whole story, but neither does percent below the poverty level. $33k goes a lot further in Louisiana than it does in New York.
> Median income doesn’t tell the whole story, but neither does percent below the poverty level.
You’re equivocating. Poverty rate is a much better metric for measuring poverty than median income is.
Louisiana has a higher poverty rate, and a higher child poverty rate, than New York State. New York’s ALICE level seems comparable because New York’s cost of living is so much higher, but it’s actually true that around half the people in New York (and Louisiana, and make other states) are struggling to afford all their basic necessities. Poverty rate isn’t ALICE, poverty rate is high probability of compromising on nutrition.
Come on, be honest, are you willing to live on $16k/year in Louisiana? (Or any state??) I wouldn’t want to, and I bet you don’t either. Are you really going to argue that’s not poor?
> ALICE level seems comparable because New York’s cost of living is so much higher
That’s my point. You’re the one who brought up ALICE as a metric to show how someone making the median income is still poor.
If it applies to Louisiana, it applies to New York as well.
> Louisiana has a higher poverty rate, and a higher child poverty rate, than New York State.
If you adjust for cost of living, New York and Louisiana have the same poverty rate.
> Come on, be honest, are you willing to live on $16k/year in Louisiana? (Or any state??) I wouldn’t want to, and I bet you don’t either. Are you really going to argue that’s not poor?
No but I’d rather live on $16k in Louisiana than New York. I’m not making a value judgement on what constitutes poor or not, I’m saying that if $16k is poor in Louisiana, then $22k is poor in NY.
Incidentally for big chunks of my childhood my family was below the poverty level in the Deep South, and so were many of my friends.
Yes I understand your point and yes I brought up ALICE - as an aside - and I see that was my mistake because you’re using it to dodge the core fact that LA has very high poverty relative to most other states. ALICE levels are a completely different tier of wealth metric than the federal poverty line.
Cost of living is less applicable to the federal poverty line than it is to the ALICE threshold or the median income because the cost of food and several other basic necessities don’t vary geographically as much as the price of housing does. The poverty line of $16k/person is set in part because it’s the line where going below likely means you can’t afford enough food no matter where in the U.S. you live.
> The poverty line of $16k/person is set in part because it’s the line where going below likely means you can’t afford enough food no matter where in the U.S. you live.
That’s not correct at all. The poverty level is 3x the amount of money it took to feed one person a nutritional diet in 1963 and then adjusted for inflation. They picked 3 times because food represented about 1/3 of a poor family’s budget.
Note that they use CPI-U for the adjustment, and food prices haven’t risen as fast as most is the rest of the goods in CPI-U so it’s closer to 4x the amount needed to afford the minimum nutritional diet.
If you look here, you’ll see that the “thrifty food plan” for the most expensive person (male 20-50) comes out to $3,800 a year.
If you just think about it for a minute $16k or $43 a day is a crazy amount for the minimum amount of money to afford food. I don’t spend that much on myself on average and I ‘m making many times more than $16k a year.
Now I can try very hard to come up with the most charitable explanation for what you are saying and assume that you mean that $16k is the number that you need to afford other necessities plus food.
However if that’s what you’re saying then the number 1 other necessity is housing. Which means for an accurate comparison you need to factor in housing price differences.
To your point housing cost is the largest difference between states, but it’s also the largest part of nearly everyone’s budget, even people living on $16k a year, and it’s far from the only difference. Groceries a fair amount between states, and other necessities are somewhere in between.
You can’t just look at a flat number across the US, there’s no way around it.
I mean just look at average rent. It’s more than 2x higher in NY than LA. Even looking at another southern state, GA. Rent is 25% higher there. That’s a huge difference and it absolutely needs to be accounted for if you care about comparing poverty between states.
2- $16k / year / person is not enough in the US to live comfortably, regardless of where you live. Going below that does in fact risk compromising nutrition, and the fact that that is what is actually occurring among the poor is pretty well documented.
3- If you want to use cost of living, then as you point out, NY is not a valid comparison to LA. Compare LA to Nebraska or South Dakota or any of a dozen other states where the cost of living is nearly the same, and you will see exactly what is said all over the internet: LA has a much higher population of poor than other comparable states.
4- The fact that LA’s ranked 32nd for tax revenue and #1 for poverty seems like something to be rightly ashamed of.
We’re tilting at windmills and failing to convince each other, but Louisiana is widely considered to be one of the poorest states in nation, and trying to argue otherwise on HN certainly won’t change the mountain of evidence or the summary at all.
The page you linked to doesn’t discuss how the “poverty threshold” is calculated. It discusses how the poverty threshold is used to measure poverty level.
It does however provide a link 3 paragraphs down that does tell you how the “poverty threshold” is calculated. A direct quote:
“The current official poverty measure was developed in the mid 1960s by Mollie Orshansky, a staff economist at the Social Security Administration. Poverty thresholds were derived from the cost of a minimum food diet multiplied by three to account for other family expenses.”
Can you acknowledge that the risk of comprising nutrition on $16k a year is higher in a state where rent is 2x higher and groceries are 10% more expensive?
Literally every anti-poverty group in the country acknowledges that the failure to update the poverty threshold by region is a terrible failure in the way the United States handles poverty.
If you want to come up with a tortured method that only compares Louisiana to states with 85%+ white populations in order to fit your preconceived regionalist prejudices then have at it.
Let’s rank states by number of homeless people while we’re at it and see if that’s at all useful.
Maybe instead we could look at the percentage of people who can’t afford food, shelter, and basic necessities in their state on their income. As far as I can see the only major downside to doing that compared to other methods is that it doesn’t support the way you think the world ought to work.
You’re still wrong. What you quoted is what they did in 1963, not how they’re setting the poverty threshold today. The same page you pulled the quote from contains a paper that discusses the many changes to the poverty threshold calculation since 1963.
I offered up two states that have comparable cost of living. There are actually around 14 or 15 states that have lower cost of living than Louisiana, and all of them have a lower percentage of people below the federal poverty line than LA.
> Let’s rank states by number of homeless
Seems like another straw man to me. There are more people below the poverty line in Louisiana than there are homeless people in the entire US.
> Maybe instead we could look at the percentage of people who can’t afford food, shelter, and basic necessities in their state on their income.
That’s what ALICE is, we already talked about it, and the ALICE threshold is FAR higher than the federal poverty line in all 50 states.
OH, BTW, guess which state ranks highest on the ALICE poverty list…
> it doesn’t support the way you think the world ought to work.
You have a vivid imagination. I’ve been trying to avoid snark here, and appreciating that you also kept it low as well until now. I will mention that your interpretation of what I said about thresholds was not in any way ‘charitable’ let alone realistic. I would love to see your budget that stays under $43/day without compromising on food. Show it to me and I’ll list a few things you forgot you need that blow your budget. I don’t know how to live on $43/day assuming I don’t pay any rent.
I understand it’s confusing because the papers on the site mingle proposed plans with adopted plans.
Here’s a summary of exactly what happened. If you want to research that yourself I’ll include a link to an overview, but I know what I’m talking about.
1. Start with the 1963 base thresholds developed by Orshansky.
2. Apply the 1969 revision:
-Keep the 1963 nonfarm thresholds as the base.
-Change the inflation adjustment
method from food-plan costs to CPI.
-Change the farm adjustment.
3. Every year thereafter:
-Take the prior threshold and adjust it by the relevant CPI. (Originally CPI-W, then CPI-U after about 1980.)
4. Apply a few technical revisions in 1981:
- Remove farm/nonfarm distinction.
- Remove male-headed/female-headed distinction.
- Expand family-size categories.
That’s it. The numbers are still based on the data from 1963 adjusted for inflation each year. There are differences in that we no longer look at the gender of the head of household and farm families no longer have lower multiple applied.
But the number is just the calculations from 1963 based on a multiple of the amount of food needed carried forward.
Most other countries use a relative benchmark for poverty and most other counties use COL adjustments by region. The US does not. It is stupid that we don’t. And using the resulting measurements from this flawed system is horribly misleading.
As to whether you can live on $43 a day minus rent. Louisiana has expanded Medicaid coverage, so someone making $16k a year will get free healthcare. Assuming a single person with no kids, they’ll also get about $180 a month in snap benefits which covers a little more than half of the $333 usda thrifty food plan. So how about you tell me how this hypothetical person can’t survive on $1,333 a month with rent, healthcare, and half of their food covered? If you can’t imagine being able to survive on that you must living in a very high cost of living area.
> using the resulting measurements from this flawed system is horribly misleading
Then don’t. Use the cost-of-living metric you’ve been arguing for to answer the relevant question here. When accounting for cost of living, you will discover exactly what we already know: Louisiana’s population is the poorest in the nation.
I’m not actually sure which state has the highest percentage of people under a poverty threshold adjusted for COL because to do that math you need a specific poverty breakdown by household size and that’s far more effort than I’m willing to put in.
New York, California, Mississippi, Alabama, New Mexico, West Virginia, and Louisiana all have % below ALICE thresholds between 46 and 50%.
Based on that I think it’s very likely any one of those could have the highest percentage of people under a COL adjusted poverty threshold. Either way they’re so close that’s there’s no meaningful difference.
The real question is why would you use the percent of people under some threshold as your primary factor when deciding to label their entire popular “poor”.
I certainly wouldn’t use COL adjusted poverty rates to say that New York or California is poor, or that the populations of those states are poor.
Let’s say hypothetically that we constructed a rich threshold, say it’s $500k a year COL adjusted. And some hypothetical state was both number one for percentage of people over the rich threshold and number one for percentage of people below the poor threshold, would you say that this population was the poorest in the nation or the richest?
ALICE is adjusted by household size, and cost of living adjusted. Louisiana is the state with the highest percentage of people below ALICE threshold, and the only state that crosses the 50% line. It’s right on their map, so now you know. https://www.unitedforalice.org/national-overview
You can continue to equivocate about other states that are close, it doesn’t really make a relevant difference here. Louisiana has the most poor people by “stupid” absolute percent below the federal level, it has the most poor people by cost-of-living household-size adjusted ALICE level, the third lowest median income, and the third lowest number of billionaires per capita. By multiple objective metrics, including the one you asked for, Louisiana is most definitely poor.
It’s looks poor because there are some very poor people living there because they are the descendants of slaves and share croppers who are still suffering as a result of that.
However if you have look at average incomes and state revenue which represents the resources available, which was the what I was responding to.
Whether they chose to use those resources is a different question.
Also even looking at something like average or median personal income, Louisiana ranks in or near the top 20 counties in the world.
What you’re seeing is that America has a terrible safety net so the floor is much lower than most of Europe.
From the panhandle of Florida all the way through Port Arthur in Texas that area is one of the poorest places in the United States. It’s not even close.
And anyone that could get out they left a long time ago very happy my parents decided to leave that part of the world, the best thing that could’ve happened to the south is that everything from Virginia to South Carolina is gentrifying.
The sad part is that a large part of the population don’t realize that the conservative upper end of the population is selling out the conservative lower end.
Feels more than a bit cherrypicked. There is also not much daylight (less than $1000) between them, and, once again, dead last.
They're also, once again, dead last in economic oppurtunity.
Frankly, I call bullshit on your interpretation. Have you ever set foot in Louisiana? I've lived in the deep south my entire life.
The entire south, outside of a few cities is generally pretty poor, but Louisiana/Arkansas/Mississippi is just a different level. That's what happens when you elect a bunch of MAGA morons.
PS: The local governments are doing everything possible to NOT help their citizens.
My wife is from Baton Rouge, her whole family still lives there and in New Orleans, and I’ve been there a couple weeks out of every year we’ve been married. I’m also from the Deep South and I’ve traveled extensively through the US.
Most of the rural south is indistinguishable from rural Pennsylvania or most other rural part of the US. The main difference in the Mississippi Delta region is that the population is mostly Black descendants of former slaves who are still suffering the after effects of slavery and subsequent generations of sharecropping.
But the state still has plenty of resources compared to just about anywhere else in the world.
>less than $1000
$1000 is 20% of the entire per capita amount. Louisiana is only $1000 behind Colorado and Rhode Island.
14 of the 20 poorest counties in the country are in Alabama, Louisiana, or Mississippi, and other than one in South Dakota, none of the 30 poorest are outside the South. Only 4 of the top 50 are from outside the South.
>Most of the rural south is indistinguishable from rural Pennsylvania or most other rural part of the US. The main difference in the Mississippi Delta region is that the population is mostly Black descendants of former slaves who are still suffering the after effects of slavery and subsequent generations of sharecropping.
Obviously not, but the current administrations method for getting out of a hole is to yell at the workers to dig faster while passing another tax cut for the big corps and billionaires.
Louisiana isn’t poor by almost any objective measure.
Uh, by the objective measure of my own two eyes? You can trot out all the fancy numbers you want, I’m not blind. The resource extraction that goes on in Louisiana does not necessarily trickle down to its residents nor even stays in the state.
GDP per capita is meaningless in the US bro. It's literally a cooked number that holds up big capitalists making money "in the state" from extraction of natural resources, but that money isn't staying in LA.
Drive through LA and those places you mentioned and you'll see it.
Louisiana only pumps about 3-4% of the total crude oil that the US produces.
The money in Louisiana is primarily in refining oil pumped elsewhere. There are definitely externalities that big oil unloads on the people of Louisiana, but the refineries inject a lot of money into the community.
Louisiana isn’t poor by almost any objective measure. They’re in the bottom half of US states by GDP per capita (not in the bottom 10), but they’d be in the top 20 countries in the world by GDP per capita if they were a country.
Huh? Your link shows them between Chile and Portugal.
That's on the other side of the river from New Orleans.
To what I think is your larger point, that project is a small part of the efforts at water control around New Orleans. But, so far they have generally been viewed as beneficial and the various governmental entities keep paying for them -- why should we expect anything different in the future ? Roads get repaved all over the country, bridges rebuilt, and the levees rebuilt. There's always an "infrastructure crisis" of the decade, the chatter is how we as a society judge the expense and confirm it's necessary.
Aside from rising seas, there is regional destruction of protective barrier islands from poor resource management and sedimentary processes that should have moved the agriculture transshipment activities of BR/NO to the Atchafalaya River in the recent past. This is easier said than done and there is a strong video about how the Mississippi’s current path has been maintained by the Old River Complex:
Rebuild it like Venice: imagine canals, building water passageways, and pirogues carrying tourists up and down the romantic Bourbon Street, all the former riff-raff washed away and only paying businesses remain. The sewer smell of Venice provides a good model.
Ccp central planner think like nonsense. People will just move on house boats and ponton cellar houses. New-new orleans will be right where it is now, near the river, even when the river changes course.
relocation requires assistance, people living paycheck-to-paycheck cannot just up and move out of city/state
take some of that $1 BILLION PER DAY being used to bomb innocent kids and civilians in Iran, soon Cuba, and help innocent people in your own country relocate
if the current administration is in charge the week New Orleans is about to go undersea they will "solve the problem" by banning FEMA from doing anything or just defunding it to $1/day
> the city must start the relocation process now to avoid chaos.
I've no reason to doubt this is absolutely true.
that's not what they're gonna do though....
> The region has “crossed the point of no return,” the paper’s authors wrote, adding New Orleans “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century.”
Likewise, the flood plains of Texas are cheap and nice to live in when there are no floods and when floods are imminent you have sufficient warning that you can evacuate and the federal government will compensate you. You can then go back and live there. This one is harder because it is unpleasant to move and you don’t receive the inflated price but it does incentivize some on the border.
Of course the fires in Malibu are a story of going too far in the wrong time. If they’d had a sympathetic administration in the federal government likely some kind of compensation scheme could have been worked out. So you have to work on the politics and the economics.