You have a completely fantasy idea of how successful communities are established, grown and sustained.

They are not unlike startups and other businesses.

There's first group of settlers who found a settlement. There are others who come later and grow a settlement into a town. Still more join later to grow a town into city, so on and so forth. Every step of the way, people come and join the community chasing social and economic reasons to join the community. The economic and social reasons are provided by those already in the community by way of their contributions to that community in the form of establishing economic activity and contributing to sustainable growth.

Like startups and businesses, outside capital and support can help, but alone will not lead to their sustainability and growth. Until we solve some fundamental limiters like limitless free energy, there will always be more demand for support and aid than there will be support and aid available. This means that those providing aid and support, just like venture capital and private equity, need to pick and choose where to provide support to maximize the utility from that support.

Some communities just don't have the core nugget of what is necessary to make it worth rendering aid and support beyond the minimum. For those communities, it's best to allow those within the unsustainable community to move to other communities with sustainable opportunities.

Every successful community from town to city, is successful because its members inherently provides for its own sustainability. Those communities that are not sustainable are doomed to peter out. Any support beyond helping the members of unsustainable communities to sustainable ones is just throwing good money after bad.

Outside support alone will never magically turn any community into a prosperous community. That kind of thinking is what produces businesses like WeWork.

> I am prepared to take care of myself and my family in the event of the disasters that we expect in California, including earthquakes and the fires that are currently surrounding my city.

I'm curious how? Just evacuating yourself to other areas that can provide resources? What about people near you that may need help being evacuated well before FEMA can render aid such as with wildfires?

> I have resources that I can provide to my family

Are we only discussing money and a vehicle? Is the tank always full?

> But who do you consider to be part of my community?

In a major disaster, all communities are local. These are very real people that you're going to personally see that will need urgent assistance to avoid injury or death.

If something happens to your "preparations", you could find yourself in the position where you or your family needs urgent assistance to avoid injury or death.

> The levels of philanthropy that you expect the poor to rely on are completely delusional, and that's why we need FEMA.

They really aren't. You've just never experienced a local community that does more to provide for one another. It's not uncommon for city dwellers to have this attitude.

FEMA is a federal organization whose effectiveness is bounded by local response. They are not a wholesale replacement for local response.

Every FEMA failure that's happened in my life began as a failure of local response.

> we're all monsters, and will leave our neighbors to drown without a second thought.

Speak for yourself. This attitude is exactly why local responses fail.

> Governments and larger scale philanthropies with the capacity and resources for meta-thinking and longer-term investment are the only organizations that are capable of responding in a sustainable way.

The Cajun Navy is exactly the opposite of that and was far more effective during Hurricane Katrina.

In many disasters, it's amateur HAM radio operators that provide critical communications infrastructure to aid federal responses.

It's local SAR volunteers that provide help such as swiftwater rescue.

In a disaster, most urgent first aid is rendered by amateurs until someone can be brought to a medical facility because EMTs and other first responders are overwhelmed.