Option A is a beautiful home in California near good schools and job opportunities. But it goes for nearly a million dollars – the median California home sells for US$906,500 – and you’d be paying a mortgage that’s risen 82% since January 2020.

Option B is a similar home in Texas, where the median home costs less than half as much: just $353,700. The catch? Option B sits in an area with significant hurricane and flood risk.

As a professor of urban planning, I know this isn’t just a hypothetical scenario. It’s the impossible choice millions of Americans face every day as the U.S. housing crisis collides with climate change. And we’re not handling it well.

The numbers tell the story

The migration patterns are stark. Take California, which lost 239,575 residents in 2024 – the largest out-migration of any state. High housing costs are a primary driver: The median home price in California is more than double the national median.

Where are these displaced residents going? Many are heading to southern and western states like Florida and Texas. Texas, which is the top destination for former California residents, saw a net gain of 85,267 people in 2024, much of it from domestic migration. These newcomers are drawn primarily by more affordable housing markets.

This isn’t simply people chasing lower taxes. It’s a housing affordability crisis in motion. The annual household income needed to qualify for a mortgage on a mid-tier California home was about $237,000 in June 2025, a recent analysis found – over twice the state’s median household income.

Over 21 million renter households nationwide spent more than 30% of their income on housing costs in 2023, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. For them and others struggling to get by, the financial math is simple, even if the risk calculation isn’t.

I find this troubling. In essence, the U.S. is creating a system where your income determines your exposure to climate disasters. When housing becomes unaffordable in safer areas, the only available and affordable property is often in riskier locations – low-lying areas at flood risk in Houston and coastal Texas, or higher-wildfire-risk areas as California cities expand into fire-prone foothills and canyons.

Climate risk becomes part of the equation

The destinations drawing newcomers aren’t exactly safe havens. Research shows that America’s high-fire-risk counties saw 63,365 more people move in than out in 2023, much of that flowing to Texas. Meanwhile, my own research and other studies of post-disaster recovery have shown how the most vulnerable communities – low-income residents, people of color, renters – face the greatest barriers to rebuilding after disasters strike.

Consider the insurance crisis brewing in these destination states. Dozens of insurers in Florida, Louisiana, Texas and beyond have collapsed in recent years, unable to sustain the mounting claims from increasingly frequent and severe disasters like wildfires and hurricanes. Economists Benjamin Keys and Philip Mulder, who study climate change impacts on real estate, describe the insurance markets in some high-risk areas as “broken”. Between 2018 and 2023, insurers canceled nearly 2 million homeowner policies nationwide – four times the historically typical rate.

Yet people keep moving into risky areas. For example, recent research shows that people have been moving toward areas most at risk of wildfires, even holding wealth and other factors constant. The wild beauty of fire-prone areas may be part of the attraction, but so is housing availability and cost.

The policy failures behind the false choice

In my view, this isn’t really about individual choice – it’s about policy failure. The state of California aims to build 2.5 million new homes by 2030, which would require adding more than 350,000 units annually. Yet in 2024, the state only added about 100,000 – falling dramatically short of what’s needed. When local governments restrict housing development through exclusionary zoning, they’re effectively pricing out working families and pushing them toward risk.

My research on disaster recovery has consistently shown how housing policies intersect with climate vulnerability. Communities with limited housing options before disasters become even more constrained afterward. People can’t “choose” resilience if resilient places won’t let them build affordable housing.

The federal government started recognizing this connection – to an extent. For example, in 2023, the Federal Emergency Management Agency encouraged communities to consider “social vulnerability” in disaster planning, in addition to things like geographic risk. Social vulnerability refers to socioeconomic factors like poverty, lack of transportation or language barriers that make it harder for communities to deal with disasters.

However, the agency more recently stepped back from that move – just as the 2025 hurricane season began.

In my view, when a society forces people to choose between paying for housing and staying safe, that society has failed. Housing should be a right, not a risk calculation.

But until decision-makers address the underlying policies that create housing scarcity in safe areas and fail to protect people in vulnerable ones, climate change will continue to reshape who gets to live where – and who gets left behind when the next disaster strikes.

Ivis García, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, Texas A&M University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

MBW Views is a series of op-eds from eminent music industry people… with something to say. The following MBW op/ed comes from Frederic Schindler, a music supervisor and the founder of the music supervision company Too Young Ltd. and the licensing platform Catalog. He was named the 2025 Music Supervisor of the Year by the Association of Independent Music. 

In the world of visual media and beyond, ‘free’ is the most expensive thing there is. And its close cousin,‘ easy’, is a dangerous accomplice.

In simple terms, sync licensing is the process of finding, getting permission, and paying to pair a piece of music with visual media. It’s the song that swells during the final scene of a film, the track that drives a global advertising campaign, and the beat that powers a viral TikTok video or videogame action. It is the soundtrack to our feeds, screens, and culture.

For years, I’ve been vocal about the broken sync system and the urgent need for this sector to be digitized – the gatekeeping, the endless email chains and archaic manual processes, the perfect pairing opportunities that die even before they are born.

It’s a system so inefficient that it has created its billion-dollar solution: the frictionless, instantly gratifying world of stock music, sound-alikes, and bespoke studios that mimic references closely enough to be effective, but just far enough to avoid legal consequences.

On the surface, it’s a triumph of convenience. For a nominal fee, you get a track. No lawyers, no delays, no fuss. It feels free. It feels easy.

But what is the true cost of this convenience?

The first cost is financial, and it is staggering. The stock music industry is now a $1.3 billion behemoth and is expected to grow to a $2.8 billion beast by 2030. To put that in perspective, the entire global record label business generated just $650 million from sync last year.

Yes, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Lou Reed, Beyoncé, John Coltrane and all the outstanding past and present history of recorded music combined made less revenue than music opportunistically created for visual media.

A market built on generic, anonymous tracks actually doubles the sync revenue of the artists and labels we love. This is not just a market inefficiency; it is a colossal transfer of wealth away from our musical culture and into the hands of platforms that sell sonic wallpaper.

But the damage runs deeper than lost revenue. The proliferation of subscription-based, “royalty-free” platforms has introduced a pernicious model that preys on artists and producers. It’s the “all-you-can-eat” buffet model, applied to sync.

Just as streaming platforms conditioned a generation to perceive individual songs as having near-zero monetary value, these sync platforms do the same for productions. They turn music into a bulk commodity by offering unlimited “syncs” for a flat monthly fee.

These platforms often operate on a work-for-hire basis, demanding artists alienate their rights for a one-time payment. Consent becomes a transaction, and the artist is reduced from a rights-holder to a gig worker on a sound assembly line, churning out content based on briefs and “sync market trends”.

Every time a production defaults to the ‘easy’ option, it is a vote to entrench this exploitative model and defund the artists we claim to admire.

The second cost is cultural. Sync is, or should be, an engine of discovery. It’s the perfect song in a pivotal scene that sends you down a rabbit hole, introducing you to your next favourite artist or musical scene. The track in an ad defines a moment and captures the zeitgeist.

Think of Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill in Stranger Things. This single placement didn’t just define a character’s struggle but resurrected a 37-year-old masterpiece for an entirely new generation, topping charts worldwide.

That is the power we are losing. That’s the opportunity we are missing. But how often does that happen now? Consider the sheer volume of media we consume daily: the background to a 15-second social media ad, the intro to a podcast, the hold music on a customer service line, the teaser of that new series on Netflix.

Each slot could be soundtracked with art, but is overwhelmingly filled with functionality. This cultural real estate is some of the most valuable in the world, yet we are increasingly filling it with the musical equivalent of grey paint.

We are replacing moments of potential discovery with forgettable, algorithmically-optimised soulless sound-alikes. This slow, creeping erosion of quality is creating a blander, less resonant visual media landscape for us all.

Finally, the third and highest cost is the future. As we stand on the precipice of an unregulated generative AI revolution, the path of least resistance becomes even more seductive. Why bother with stock music when AI can generate something passable in seconds?

But this thinking is a trap. It mistakes mimicry for artistry and convenience for value. By accepting ‘ok’ over ‘great’, we are training ourselves, our clients, and our audiences to devalue the very human spark of creativity that makes a piece of music outstanding.

And memorable music touches us, deeply. This becomes personal for me when I think of my two-year-old daughter. I wonder if she will have her anthems of rebellion, love, and belonging – the kind of artist-driven music that defined youth culture for the last century. Or will her generation’s soundtrack be a seamless, functional, but forgettable stream of background audio?

“As we stand on the precipice of an unregulated generative AI revolution, the path of least resistance becomes even more seductive.”

The traditional sync system is broken, but the solution cannot be to abandon the value of artistry altogether.

The solution is to fix the friction. It’s to build systems that make licensing real, culturally vital music as seamless as its generic alternative. It’s about using technology not to replace human talent and curation, but to empower it.

We have a choice. We can continue down the hill of “free and easy” and pay the hidden price in lost revenue, diminished culture, and a devalued creative future.

Or we can build a better system – one that recognises that the right song will never be just a commodity. It’s a story, an identity, and an experience. It’s a talented artist’s creation that resonates intimately with us. And that is something worth paying for and defending.Music Business Worldwide

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The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency—which handles services including citizenship applications, family immigration, adoptions, and work permits for non-citizens—started the contract with Palantir at the end of October, and is paying the data analytics company to implement “Phase 0” of a “vetting of wedding-based schemes,” or “VOWS” platform, according to the federal contract, which was posted to the U.S. government website and reviewed by Fortune.

The contract is small—less than $100,000—and details of what exactly the new platform entails are thin. The contract itself offers few details, apart from the general description of the platform (“vetting of wedding-based schemes”) and an estimate that the completion of the contract would be Dec. 9.Palantir declined to comment on the contract or nature of the work, and USCIS did not respond to requests for comment for this story.