Making Florida More Flood Resistant Is Forcing Hard Choices for Homeowners

What’s the justification for the government subsidizing homes in areas that repeatedly flood? Admittedly I don’t know very much about this, but it just seems like simultaneously wasting money and increasing human suffering.

reminds me of the recently enacted FAIR plan in California for last-resort wildfire insurance. It got state dispensation to carry otherwise-disallowed, lopsided balance sheets to cover more people -- but if a small fraction of those people do experience wildfire it'll go bust!

--

edit: see below, I was wrong about FAIR being newly enacted

> And also, dont count on the government, like FEMA, to help. Now with phrases like "climate change", and "green" now banned from federal discourse, we're not permitted to say the obvious.

It's a cold calculus, but a government that is ideologically opposed to the science of climate change is more rather than less likely to help bail out flooded properties. With such a… fixed opinion, the hidebound government agencies can't allow themselves to think that the overall risk profile has increased, so they'll be surprised by a hundred-year flood every 10 years.

The confounding factor is that the current US political mix combines ideological opposition to climate change science with opposition to well-functioning assistance programs, so on balance there may be nobody left to write the bailout cheque.

Just for clarity, you're claiming that there's data to support that 10-year flood plain areas should be marked as having a 100% chance of having a flood every year and you have enough data to say a 100-year flood plain should be reclassified as a 10-year flood plain? I ask this because those numbers are shorthand for event probabilities given (flawed) observation data over large time-frames. Argue all you want about climate change moving these number due to rising sea levels. I agree it's happening. That being said, hyperbolic assertions such as this don't help.

The reality is that our flood plain designations are very flawed, but they are the only current metric we have to assess some of these risks. Every location that receives precipitation or is near water has some risk of flooding and that risk of flooding may be hidden. The whole state of Florida is low elevation. Something like 1/3 of it is very low elevation and subject to sea-level rise causing catastrophic changes in coastline. But the other 2/3 of Florida is something like 100ft (30m) above sea level. The other issue with Florida is that it's the flattest state in the US. That flatness contributes to flooding being difficult to properly predict.

> Dont buy houses in flood planes.

I'd just like to call out this hard-line assertion as well. Have you looked at a flood plain map? They have hard borders of zones. Those zones are calling out that event probability. If I buy a house 10 ft outside that zone, do you think my event probability went to 0% in those 10ft? Maybe, if the terrain was drastic, but maybe not even then. Every place we humans build has some probability of catastrophic events. Evaluating those risks is difficult. Hedging against those events is why people buy insurance.

Edit:

Grady, from Practical Engineering, did a good video about this subject - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EACkiMRT0pc

If moving millions of people—functionally including entire metro areas like…oh I don’t know…Miami and New Orleans and large swathes of NYC—by forcing them to abandon their homes (with no insurance they are now unsalable) and then buy/rent (using what money?) new homes far away from their communities and jobs (if they bought close, they’d still be in the flood plain!)—if that’s “simple”, I don’t want to know what policy implementations you’d call “hard”!

>destroyed her vintage Schwinn bicycle

How is this possible? Unless it was in water for so long that it rusted apart, it would be impossible for flooding to destroy a steel bicycle.

"Don't look up" wasn't on the nose enough.

They are doing it now.

Summed up in a recent headline "Florida Gov. DeSantis signs bill that deletes climate change from state law"

Much of Florida real-estate purchases and voting blocs are people with a life/time horizon of 1-3 decades. What you're describing is someone else's problem. Article is a bit less crass about this and wraps it in some good ol folksy humor:

> Ms. Poucher said she knew her old home was in a flood zone when she bought it. “I joked that we would probably be dead by the time the sea level would rise up to where our house was,” she said. Despite her sadness at losing it, she said she’s relieved to know she’s safer from floods.

Same reason schools are chronically underfunded in the state... the voters' retirement funds are better spent on golf courses than schools.

Or at least stop paying them to stay. Let the insurance rates soar to their proper place.

This is a somewhat hasty generalization. Plenty of us who live and have our entire extended family in Florida manage to do so without living in areas of high flood risk. I live less than a mile from the St John’s river, but practically the entire city of Jacksonville would have to be underwater for it to reach my house.

What about the vast swaths of people not in flood zones with hurricane proof homes.

Been through 11 storms with only power loss and 3 pieces of siding coming off my home here in central Florida. Helps that many communities are 10-40ft above the water table.

> We need to start paying people to leave Florida.

I won’t repeat what others have said about risk profile isn’t uniform across FL.

I think tax dollars would be better spent:

- educating and making more transparent the realities that business and private citizens face due to global warming and what actions are being done at the individual and societal level (eg special taxes to fund projects that fight against global warming and its effects)

- make it very very expensive to build in flood zones, with limited, if any, bailouts

You don't even need to leave Florida, just don't live right on the beach on in flood prone areas. My parents live south of Tampa along the coast but not right on the coast, the beach is maybe a 5 minute drive. I remember when Helene and Milton hit I was incredibly worried but afterwards the worst "damage" to the property was their outdoor garden didn't survive. Contrast this with some homes we saw along the beach that were completely destroyed by the storms.

But I get why people keep coming back. There's something so magical about those little villages along the beach. Besides the storms they are incredible places to live and I get why people keep rolling the dice on those places. It's much the same reason that people keep rolling the dice on places like Hollywood Hills even though there is a massive risk o fires and landslides up there.

While true, this is the devil's bargain we have struck in 2008. Big banks betting on RMBSs got a bailout and removed the moral hazard there. People with mortgages rightfully revolted and this FEMA scheme is one of the ways in which money is being filed out.

It all needs to be unwound. How, is unclear.

Agreed, eventually the time will come to pay the piper and home values in coastal Florida will collapse. Probably better if that happens gradually instead of all at once, but the one-shot scenario seems more likely, another Hurricane Andrew level storm would do it.

Well, i don't have any smoke because well, it's not my country, but i assume people have the same smoke for developers building in wildfire zone than for developers building in flood zones.

Especially when those developers are in fact the city mayor, and 13 people died because of him. And he still got re-elected.

Your country is not the only one where powerful people face no consequences.

People who blame homeowners though are all wrong. calculating risk/reward individually is extremely difficult to impossible, and if some people did not and trusted authorities, you shouldn't blame them.

People don't move to the coast of Florida (where they are most at risk from flooding and hurricanes) because housing is cheaper there, as you imply.

You only need to carry homeowner’s insurance if your mortgage lender requires it, as far as I know.

According to the article, the improvements they're balking at amount to raising houses with 6 feet of cribbing, and cost about $100k. So, yeah...

> I get people are sad if they get forced out of their homes for this

Wow, what a way to dismiss the humanity and worth of millions of people.

First of all, in some cases it actually IS a surprise: historical flood data was often quite limited and cities and communities formed before there were accurate estimates of flooding probability, let alone enough understanding of climate change to predict 21st century flooding probability.

If you’re thinking “this side of the street floods, but not the other side, just move across the street”, in many places that is not at all the situation. Miami (avg elevation: 5.9 ft) and New Orleans (elevation from -6.6 to 19.7 ft) are large, dense (by American standards) cities that have existed for over a hundred years. Giant swathes of them are in flood plains. You cannot move a third or more of a city’s residents in any reasonable time—there aren’t enough housing units, never mind the schools and utility capacity and businesses and everything else needed to support a community of people. Plus, most Americans, if they own a home, the vast majority of their net worth is in their house. You pull the insurance, that value vaporizes. Sure, from the perspective of the overall economy, that may seem more efficient. But individuals can use economic efficiency for a down payment. Congratulations, you just vanished billions of dollars of assets! Hope that doesn’t affect the banking system or the local economy!

And they can’t move across the street—to get out of the flood plain they may have to move a significant distance, and people already live in the higher areas of the city: effectively (especially for low and moderate income families) they have to move > 50 miles away. That means they lose their social network, support system, and likely their job. Moving a long distance is expensive, extremely stressful, and can break the few remaining social bonds that we now know are a huge factor in everything from recovering from bankruptcy to whether someone is too disabled to work, to how long people live.

> I feel zero outrage here.

I’m not sure anyone is trying to get you to feel outrage? Like it’s a hard policy problem that greatly affects millions of people. Maybe you could just…care?