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JD Goulet's avatar

I have some personal experience to add to this excellent assessment. People need to know the human horror stories of what's already happening right now.

In 2020, I left the conservative desert in Eastern Washington due to the intensifying Christian Nationalism, fascism, rogue militias, and an ever extending wildfire season that kept me trapped indoors for weeks on end fighting for my asthmatic life to get my family to what I thought would be a safer place—Savannah, Georgia. I mistakenly thought a blue city in a red state might be safer than a red city in a blue state. But boy was I wrong.

Decades of Republican-crafted deregulation of industry and defunding of vital public services made living in Georgia a deadly money pit for a multitude of reasons, but I will focus on the housing situation here.

Even far inland, homes were becoming uninsurable. The mortgage payments kept creeping up $300 to $500 a month each year, mainly because of the rising cost of insurance. Calling around to compare policies taught me that most companies wouldn't insure homes in our zip code at all.

The cheaply constructed homes, which I came to learn included ours, started falling apart within 5 to 8 years of being built, just long enough for the builders to escape any accountability. I learned that no level of homeowner’s insurance or home warranties could protect us financially in such a broken and dysfunctional system.

We spent the majority of the summer of 2021, in a home I'd just bought months before, suffering from a non-working air conditioner. The home was beautiful on the surface, and only 10 years old, but underneath it was an expensive death trap.

It's too long a story to detail, but the lack of any accountability for businesses in a state ruled by corporate con artists meant our home warranty was useless and the problems of hastily built, low-quality homes with HVACs way too small for the square footage meant mass regional failures and an HVAC industry ill equipped to handle the load.

Our house was consistently over 85 degrees inside, even at night, which coupled with the heavy humidity of the area meant we could barely bring ourselves to do anything but lay around trying to not succumb to heat stroke in our own home, quite a problem when your home is also where you work for a living!

I could write a book about what I witnessed and lived through in my 2.5 years of living in Georgia, which I saw as clear evidence of the massive-scale failure of neoliberalism and capitalism as a whole.

I also want to mention the retirement communities popping up in these dangerously hot areas. My parents fell for the marketing gimmicks of an adult living city outside of Tucson, AZ (not just a community, but a whole city that's over age 55). I worry about these vulnerable elderly folks being lured into these hot zones with water scarcity problems being left to die. When you have developers convincing a population of over twenty thousand aging and elderly folks it's a good idea to live a 30-minute drive across the desert to the next nearest population center that contains people under the age of 55 that they rely on for health care and basic assistance from community, how is this not sending off more people's alarm bells? I am just in awe that this is happening and no one seems to realize how insane and inhumane it is.

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Kevin's avatar

Miami native, left 2010. Climate so much worse than my 1980s childhood, heat went from “sweaty fun” to “oh hell no.” Even winter is worse - rain every day during the dry season, or droughts. Whole family bailed except brother who runs pool cleaning business and loves guns more than being melanoma free. Hard pass

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