These days, the real estate news reads like something out of a Stanley Kubrick movie.
A lot of things are happening very fast.
A lot of the world’s major cities are sinking.
New York City is sinking because of the weight of its 1.68 trillion pounds of buildings pushing down on the clay, sand, and silt that makes up the city’s earth. New York experiences a “subsidence rate” (the technical term for sinking) of about one to two millimeters per year on average, and parts of downtown are no more than one to two meters above sea level. Ninety percent of the 67,400 structures in the flood risk areas in New York City have not been built to floodplain standards. I wrote about Michael Bloomberg’s book “Climate of Hope” in this newsletter almost three years ago, when New York had another Mayor. Hopefully, this current Mayor will read the book and take some action.
And while our Mayor focuses on other “more important things,” on the other side of our world, the President of Indonesia is taking significant action against his country’s pending catastrophe. Jakarta is sinking. Forty percent of the city lies beneath sea level, and President Joko Widodo, is proposing moving the capital and its ten million residents to another part of the country with higher land. The Java Sea is rising due to global warming, and to get clean drinking water, Jakartans have dug thousands of illegal wells that deflate the marshes underneath the city.
Not far from Indonesia, Japan has more than 10 million abandoned and empty houses that they’d love to sell to you for $25,000 (and they’re negotiable). Not only is the Japanese population declining, but the few buyers that are looking for homes only want new construction.
And in Europe and South America, refugees seek a new place to call home. Fleeing from war-torn countries or dangerous environments, most refugees are treated like criminals or political pawns. In my personal experience, immigrants make the hardest workers and, if given the opportunity, make considerable contributions to creating a country a better place.
Perhaps the world has a transportation problem. On our surface, we have empty houses in places that honest people cannot get to or are unwelcome because they look different and speak another language.
I know there lies a solution somewhere. Perhaps instead of bussing honest hard, working people to prison-like buildings and treating them like criminals, we can offer them homes in other places that are begging people to inhabit.
Let’s do this.
-Shaun