The rich more exposed to disasters? They just have more walls to lose

According to Reporterre, which draws on an Insee study published on 3 November, the wealthiest households would be more exposed, in material terms, to climate risks. The explanation put forward: they more often live in houses and are more often multiple property owners, so their real estate suffers more damage during natural disasters. The main risk to housing would be shrink-swell clay soil movement (retrait-gonflement des argiles). We do not, at this stage, have the detail of the study: the figures, the territories and the way losses are measured are missing. What follows is therefore our reading, not an established finding.

Let us start with the headline, which is something of a sleight of hand, and not Reporterre's: it has to be read tongue in cheek. To say the rich are more exposed because they have more houses is to measure exposure in euros of bricks and mortar. Naturally, whoever owns three properties may see three of them crack. That says nothing about what the crack costs each of them.

Take two households. One has a main residence and two rentals, the other rents a two-room flat. When the clay swells, the first sees the value of its assets dented, often covered, at least in part, by insurance, and it has the means to front the money. The second has no stone to lose, but it loses something else: a damp home, a rent that does not fall, a landlord who drags his feet, a move it cannot afford. Here the home is not an asset, it is a shelter. And the multiple owner holds his properties as a source of income: the loss is financial, the other is vital.

This is the crux of what the Marxist tradition says about housing: under capitalism, it is at once a roof for those who live in it and an investment for those who own it. Those two interests do not coincide. A catastrophe separates them brutally. The tenant of a damaged flat has no wealth to defend, but bears alone the burden of keeping a household standing: drying, cleaning, finding childcare, chasing paperwork. This reproductive labour, unpaid or nearly so, falls on households, and often on women, when public services and insurers do not follow.

The Insee study therefore has the merit of reminding us that climate does not strike "everyone the same way", but it also risks being misread. One might conclude that the rich are the big losers of climate disruption. Yet losing more in value is not suffering more. The same shock costs one a few points of yield, and costs the other the stability of their everyday life.

The question we would put to Insee and to the public authorities is simple: who pays for the repair, and how quickly? So long as we only measure the value of the walls, we leave in the shadow those who have nothing but a roof.