On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 12:53 PM, MarkI-ZeroPoint <zeropo...@charter.net>wrote:
If you’re smart, sell the place now while beachfront property is valuable… > when your house is underwater it won’t be worth much! > I live in the East Bay, across a bridge from San Francisco. A group of us were discussing over lunch onetime what would happen as the water rises in New York. It seems to me that the water will before long make much of the coastal area of Manhattan uninhabitable. There are various contingencies that are being discussed, including putting up barriers and dams at various places along the lines of what has been done in the Netherlands (and hiring Dutch experts to help out). But eventually I think Manhattan and the surrounding areas might lose some of their luster as a center of culture and commerce, especially if there are regular floods coming through and leveling older neighborhoods. Over a period of decades, I don't think there is much that can be done except to move to higher ground or leave the area. So we were thinking that there might be a gradual exodus from New York once it sinks in that things are not the way they used to be. Where would all of the people go? A natural destination would be the Bay area -- it's quite sleepy compared to New York, but it's got its own allure as a chic place to live. The problem with that idea is that the Bay area itself will start to lose land to the encroaching waters. The New York Times had a what-if scenario, and much of the Bay area costal land ended up disappearing, if I remember correctly. So maybe not the Bay. Perhaps people might come through the Bay and then gradually move up to Sacramento; the problem there is that Sacramento is surrounded by flood planes and does not seem to be far above sea level. When you set aside Sacramento, you start losing some options. Eventually you begin to wonder whether Stockton, an industrial city quite a drive out into California's Central Valley, and similar cities, might be a destination for the all of the New Yorkers. Eric
