One of the ways I managed to make trading on the IPPI work so well for me was by keeping close track of the real intertidal. Of course I could only really do that in New York, as it took site visits to do it; but whatever was happening in New York was pretty similar to what was going on in the other great coastal cities of the world, in particular Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sydney, London, Miami, and Jakarta. The same forces were at play in all these places, mainly aquatic stress, technological improvements, and legal issues. Whether the buildings were going to stand or collapse was one of the crucial questions, maybe the crucial question. It was a different story for each building, although big data sets could be gathered, and algorithms created to judge the risk pretty well in various categories. It was in individual cases where it got most speculative. As always, it was safest to generalize and play the percentages.
But to research this question in person, I could get in the Jesus bug and zip around New York harbor looking at actual buildings, see how they were doing, rate them against the algorithms that were predicting how they were supposed to do, and look for discrepancies that would allow me to play those spreads better than other traders. Real-world inputs to the models, thus getting a leg up on the competition, especially on the many traders who traded in coastal futures from Denver. Real-world inputs were an advantage; I was sure of this because I’d been doing it for four years, and it had worked.
What I was seeing, to the point of confirming it to my own satisfaction, was that the models for coastal property behavior, my own included, were simply wrong about certain categories of building, something I was hesitant even to think at first, in case I somehow lost the encryption on my own thoughts, for instance by blurting something after hours in a bar.
So, pondering all these things as I zipped around the waterways of the lunatic city, it seemed to me that I might already have a way to do value-added investing, by putting a little venture capital where it would serve a social good, thus encouraging Jojo to reconsider me in some fundamental human sense. I could perhaps identify buildings that were more likely to collapse than the models had them collapsing on average, and figure out ways to upgrade them, putting off their collapse long enough that they could serve as refugee dwellings or maker spaces. Housing of any kind was scarce, because too many people kept coming to New York and trying to live here, out of some kind of addiction, some compulsion to live like water rats when they could have done better elsewhere. Same as it ever was! Which meant there was need for some kind of Jane Jacobs–like housing reform. This was more than I could handle, but some improvements in the intertidal, that I could try. The intertidal was my specialty, so that was where I could start. Try to figure something out.
So I abandoned my screens one morning and went down to my sweet skimmer and hummed out of the building onto Twenty-third, and headed west to the Hudson. Time to go out and put my eyeball to reality.
The intertidal zone of lower midtown sloshed back and forth over an area with a lot of old landfill, and that double whammy had brought a lot of buildings down. Thirtieth to Canal was a wilderness of slumped, tilted, cracked, and collapsed blocks. A house built on sand cannot stand.
Nevertheless I saw the usual signs of squatting in the soggy ruins. Life there possibly resembled earlier centuries of cheap squalid tenement reality, moldier than ever, the occupants risking their lives by the hour. Same as ever, but wetter. But even in the worst neighborhoods there stood some islands of success, waterproofed and pumped out and made habitable again, in many cases better than ever, or so people claimed. The mutual aid societies were making something interesting, the so-called SuperVenice, fashionably hip, artistic, sexy, a new urban legend. Some people were happy to live on the water if it was conceptualized as Venetian, enduring the mold and hassle to live in a work of art. I liked it myself.
As always, each neighborhood was a little world, with a particular character. Some of them looked fine, others were bedraggled, still others abandoned. It wasn’t always clear why any given neighborhood should look the way it did. Things happened, a building held or fell down, its surroundings followed. Very contingent, very volatile, very high risk.
So on this day I hummed in very slowly to have a look at Mr. Hexter’s old neighborhood, south of the fallen tower. It was south of the Hudson Yards, I noticed, a small bay that had lost the railroad tracks that used to floor it, leaving the shallows there open to tidal tear so severe that it was said to be as deep there as in the middle of the river. Whether seepage from that hole in the side of the island had caused this tower to fall was unknown, but there it was, its broken upper half taking waves right in its broken windows. It looked like a crippled cruise ship on its last slide to the bottom.
A lot of other buildings were following it down. I was reminded of those photos of drunken forests in the Arctic, where melting permafrost had caused trees to tilt this way and that. Chelsea Houses, Penn South Houses, London Terrace Houses, they all canted drunkenly. Not the slightest bit inspiring, in terms of investment opportunities. Recovery techniques were improving all the time, but there is no point to waterproofing a house built on sand. The graphenated composites and diamond sheeting are strong but they can’t hold slumping concrete, they’re more like very strong plastic wrap; they need support to work, they’re mostly waterproofing.
As I purred along the narrow canals between Tenth and Eleventh I caught sight of the Great Intilt Quad, up near the shore of the Hudson. Here in the first rush of skybridge building a group of investors had suspended a mall about forty stories above the ground, in the middle of four skyscrapers that anchored the skybridges holding the mall in air. This had thrilled people until the weight of the mall had pulled the four towers abruptly inward, dropping the mall five stories at once and breaking everything in it before somehow the towers held. After that people had gotten a lot more careful, and now the Great Intilt Quad stood there like a bad Stonehenge, reminding people never to hang too much weight outside the plumb line of a skyscraper. They were only built to hold up their own weight, as many engineers pointed out.
All these drunken buildings: how long could they last? In the eternal battle of men against the sea, which antagonist was winning? The sea was always the same, while improvements were being made in humanity’s ramparts; but the sea was relentless. And it might rise yet again. A Third Pulse was not out of the question, although big masses of ice at risk of sliding were not currently being identified by the Antarctic surveys; this was a finding factored into the IPPI. Anyway, wherever sea level went in years to come, the intertidal was always going to be in trouble. Anyone who tried on a regular professional basis to fight the sea in any capacity whatsoever always admitted that the sea always won in the end, that its victory was merely a matter of time. Some of them could get quite philosophical about this in a depressive nihilist way. Nothing we do matters, we work like dogs and then we die, et cetera.
So a time was going to come when all the weaker buildings in the intertidal were going to need major repair—if that was even possible. If it wasn’t, they would have to be replaced—if that could even be done!
Meanwhile, people were living here. Signs of squatting were everywhere: broken windows replaced, laundry hanging from clotheslines, farms on rooftops. Especially by day it was obvious. At night they would turn off their lights and their buildings would look abandoned, perhaps here or there candlelit for their ghosts’ convenience. But by day it was easy to see. And of course it would always be that way. Manhattan never had enough places to live. And you couldn’t make rents high enough to keep people away, because they dodged the rents and squatted wherever they could. The drowned city had endless nooks and crannies, including of course diamond bubbles holding the tide out of aerated basements. People living like rats.