NYC restricts building height to restrict population by land area. There isn't really a need for small apartments since population density is the limiting factor not space. You could build a not much more expensive apartment building instead of a dorm for the same population.
I don't think there's any reliable way around that. They can do that with real-time power meter monitoring even if you don't have an internet connection.
With a VPN, your ISP may not know where packets are going, but they can still see packets moving. So, unless your VPN is injecting dummy data to mask all patterns (possible, but not common), your ISP is going to have a good idea if someone is home or not.
In both job listings and most analyses, equity and / or bonuses are often omitted. It is hard to tell if the same is true here, but in software they can make up such a large portion of the pay that anything omitting it is close to meaningless.
The problem with a national climate disaster relief fund is that there is no incentive structure to push people to protect their property or migrate to less risky areas. We have areas that are destroyed every other year but people keep on rebuilding.
Perhaps as an alternative there could be a national fund with risk adjusted fees that is mandatory in cities that receive services.