Is the world becoming uninsurable?

American, living in area prone to natural disasters: "Is the WHOLE WORLD becoming uninsurable?"

The answer is obviously "no" since there are other parts of the world that don't live on a hurricane highway nor build houses made from firewood in an area prone to wildfires.

To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building materials.

Perhaps what should be more commonly accepted is that the US is a land of great natural beauty! And large tracts of it should be left to nature.

What's the average monthly leccy bill in Phoenix during the summer? $400?

Where does LA get most of its water? Local sources? I don't think that's the case.

New Orleans is a future Atlantis.

San Francisco is a city built by Monty Python. Don't build it there it'll fall down, but I built it anyway, and it fell down, so I built it again...

> To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building materials.

Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake/tsunami/firestorm combo in 1755 that killed tens of thousands.

When the city was rebuilt, they came up with the idea of using a wooden frame structure for earthquake resistance and masonry walls for fire resistance.

Nowadays, most new buildings seem to use reinforced concrete.

I wonder if American children are taught the story of the three little pigs.

Comments like the last here irritate me. No, we all learn that wood is the only appropriate building material and the Salesforce tower in San Francisco required a whole forest of trees to construct.

The root comment is based on a very dated concept. Of course we can built earthquake resistant megastructures from steel and concrete. A lot of that building technology was created in California. It's either naive or willfully ignorant to think we can't solve this problem.

The issue with those materials is cost. Spread out, suburban design without density is expensive and wood frame construction is a great way to affordably build housing. Wood frame single family houses are not the problem - it's how we design our cities that's the problem.

Hy from Brazil... You know, a poor country.

We make single-level houses with a reinforced concrete structure, because it's cheap.

You know what isn't cheap? Wood. Wood is incredibly expensive to put into a shape, even if you are willing to cut forests down to get it.

Wood is incredibly cheap in North America. We're not cutting down forests for it, either. Much of the wood used for residential construction is milled from trees grown specifically for that purpose.