Affordability is the story of this political moment, and the policy response is almost always to bring upfront costs down, whatever it takes. But what does a home really cost once you add insurance, energy bills, and disaster losses over its lifetime?

Hosts Nuin-Tara Key and Carolyn Kousky talk with Andy Rumbach and Alexis Pelosi about long-term affordability as climate risks keep getting worse, and why resilience is a prerequisite for affordability rather than a perk that goes on top of it.

The group covers why we should call it a housing shortage rather than a crisis, the difference between subsidizing risk and subsidizing risk reduction, and why California’s build/no-build debate misses the point. They also take a close look at rebuilding after disasters—from Katrina to Paradise to Los Angeles.

Guests

• Andy Rumbach is a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, where he co-leads the Climate and Communities program. He’s an urban planner who has worked on disaster recovery since Katrina, much of it directly with local governments.
• Alexis Pelosi is a land use and environmental attorney, a former Senior Advisor for Climate at HUD, and a Fiscal Resilience Fellow at California Forward. She co-founded the Housing Multiplier Project and works with The Resiliency Company on wildfire-resilient rebuilding in LA.

Links

• Housing Multiplier Project: Solving the Housing Shortage Is a Force Multiplier
• Alexis Pelosi: To Solve America’s Housing Crisis, We Need to Center Resilience (Epicenter)
• Andy Rumbach: Place + Resilience (Substack)
• Urban Institute: Building a Climate-Resilient Manufactured Housing Stock
• Insurance for Good and California Forward: The Role of Insurance in Funding and Financing Resilience

California Dreamshot is a production of California Forward, produced in partnership with Pretty Good Productions. Executive Producer: Thomas Clayton Miller. Associate Producer: Sarah Walsh.

Data centers are where the industrial policy rubber meets the road. Where should they be sited? Who makes the decisions? What happens when the equipment ages out and the site goes quiet—what should a community expect in return?

Kate Gordon and Priyanka Mohanty get into all these questions and more with two people watching the data center boom from the ground up: Dana Kuhnline, Programs Director at ReImagine Appalachia, and John Kostyack, founder of Kostyack Strategies.

Dana brings the view from coal country, a region that created enormous wealth and kept little of it. John has tracked the buildout, and the fast-growing, cross-partisan movement pushing back on it.

Topic discussed: why the siting predictions of a year or two ago no longer hold; what Appalachia’s coal history says about where an industry’s wealth ends up; the “but what about China” argument that surfaces in nearly every local fight; whether a moratorium buys anything without a plan for the time it buys; what each guest would tell California’s next governor; and lots more.

Links & resources

From our guests

• Data Centers: Steps Communities Can Take to Avoid Stranded Assets — ReImagine Appalachia (Aug 2026)
• Local Government Resources Regarding Data Centers — ReImagine Appalachia webinar series
• The New Environmental Movement Could Change AI’s Trajectory — John Kostyack, Forbes (July 2026)
• Data Center Moratoriums and the Rise of Private Grids — John Kostyack, Forbes (Aug 2026)
• Kostyack Strategies
• ReImagine Appalachia

Support Nepal flood relief

• Direct Relief (Santa Barbara-based; 100% of Nepal gifts go to the response)
• GlobalGiving Nepal Flood Relief Fund (funds local organizations)
• CARE Nepal flash floods response

#CaliforniaDreamshot #DataCenters #IndustrialPolicy #AI #EnergyPolicy #RegionalPlanning #CommunityBenefits #CleanEnergy #CaliforniaForward #CAFWD #CAPolicy #UAW

“Insurable” has become a loaded term in California. But what does “being insurable” really mean? This conversation slows down and takes the word apart: what a risk actually needs in order to be pooled, where the real limits sit versus where we only think they do, and why getting back to insurability turns out to involve a great deal more than insurance.

Today’s guests have spent years looking at climate risk from opposite ends of the financial system: Spencer Glendon, who spent nearly two decades at Wellington Management before founding the climate literacy nonprofit Probable Futures, and Barney Schauble, who helped build the catastrophe bond market from its earliest days.

They discuss:

• Why human settlement itself is an artifact of roughly 12,000 years of unusually stable climate, and what that means for orchards, sewer systems, mortgages, and municipal budgets built on the assumption it would hold
• Why property insurance is a stranger instrument than most people realize, covering one property, for one year, against a narrowly specified list of perils
• How society reshaped itself around insurance — fire departments, building codes, etc. — rather than the other way around
• Why home hardening runs into a wall when your neighbor does nothing
• What happens to a market when the price signal is quietly removed
• The three axes the group argues every policymaker is choosing whether they name them or not: transparency versus opacity, public versus private, and time
  

The closing argument is that “solution” may be the wrong word for a problem of this shape. What is available instead: no-regrets policy, frameworks built to be revised, room to experiment, and communities committed enough to do the work together.

• Is the Future Insurable? — Carolyn Kousky, Spencer Glendon & Barney Schauble
• Built on Assumptions: Two Tales of One Building — Glendon & Schauble, Probable Futures (May 2026)
• Probable Futures — climate maps and literacy tools referenced in the episode
• Insurance for Good resource library — primers on parametric insurance and catastrophe bonds
• Housing insurance is melting down — Glendon & Schauble, Fortune (2024)
• The Daily on this year’s El Niño
• Insurance for Good / CA FWD report on the role of insurance in funding and financing resilience

Hashtags

#CaliforniaDreamshot #Insurance #ClimateRisk #Resilience #Wildfire #InsuranceForGood #ProbableFutures #ClimateAdaptation #CaliforniaForward #CAFWD #CAPolicy #CapitalMarkets