A closer look
The irony of building a multi-million dollar sea-wall is that you still need someone making fifteen dollars an hour to actually pour the concrete. Climate migration is creating invisible but devastating labor shocks in elite coastal cities. As sunny-day flooding and skyrocketing hurricane insurance premiums make living in the service-worker suburbs financially impossible, the blue-collar workforce is simply packing up and moving inland. Billionaires are continuing to buy oceanfront properties, only to realize that the local economy collapses when the people who physically maintain it can no longer afford to exist there.
