I know COVID stimulus has numbed people to large numbers, but $100B is a huge amount of money. It's two million people working for a year at $50k salary
"Impacted" has a very wide spread. My sister lost 3 boards from her fence, but they only went about 10' so she really just needs a few nails. Parts and fuel (to get to the hardware store, fuel will probably be the most expensive part of it) will be a couple bucks. Closer to the coast from where she lives, people lost their homes.
So $2500/person isn't a terribly useful number when some people will be done after 5 minutes and $5 of repairs, and others need to rebuild or move.
Creating some more numbers costs us nothing — that number would be better measured against the accruing negative value of Florida’s (and other coastal states’) economic downtime instead of as a thing with any worth of its own: https://web.archive.org/web/20220104144948/https://www.treas...
“Federal Reserve notes are not redeemable in gold, silver or any other commodity, and receive no backing by anything. This has been the case since 1933. The notes have no value for themselves, but for what they will buy. In another sense, because they are legal tender, Federal Reserve notes are "backed" by all the goods and services in the economy.”
Thanks for the lecture on fiat currency, but it’s valuable because will do work for it, and because international oil purchases are denominated in it. Read up on the petrodollar system if you’re interested. And devaluing it is not without cost, inflation causes all sorts of turmoil.
I can only assume it will go higher. We need to push FEMA to have a 2 and done rule. After that the property must be returned back to dunes/parks/public spaces.
Hurricanes are a fact of life in the gulf and southeastern atlantic coasts. There is no area that has not have been hit twice already in the past century. So all this coastline should be dunes and park spaces?
Calgary did this after the 2013 Bow river flood. They bailed out the homeowners. But if they choose to rebuild on those lots, next time they get zero. They are on their own.
If catastrophic hurricanes are really going to happen every 10 years, should the federal government be subsidizing the coastal lifestyle and building you a new house each time?
Consider: 100B/100M taxpayers = $1000 per person. Can you really say that the average citizen of Wyoming should pony up $100 a year so Floridians can build up against the unsheltered sea instead a few miles inland?
Is the federal government paying out $100B for Ian damages from taxes? Or is most of that being paid by private insurance (or even if paid by federal flood insurance, you have to credit back the flood insurance premiums paid rather than assume it’s all coming from taxes).
Literally no one wants to insure those homeowners. They get insurance through the National Flood Insurance Program - it’s subsidized by the Federal government and it’s still incredibly expensive because the NFIP can’t refuse to insure a property thats going to be destroyed once a decade, so they end up being subsidized by all the properties in the NFIP that weren’t built in insane locations.
> If catastrophic hurricanes are really going to happen every 10 years, should the federal government be subsidizing the coastal lifestyle and building you a new house each time?
No.
Unlike other subsidies there is no greater economic/societal good created from people having their costal homes. And, unlike other disaster situations, hurricanes in that region are an outright guarantee.
Also, this is just going to keep getting worse with climate change.
I agree with Calgary. People are free to live there, but not on my dime.
> Calgary did this after the 2013 Bow river flood. They bailed out the homeowners. But if they choose to rebuild on those lots, next time they get zero. They are on their own.
If you're talking about the town of High River/the Highwood River/the Beachwood estates and Wallaceville, it was about 102 houses out of 250 eligible and a couple hundred more affected. All but 14 lots were explicitly not up for development, at any risk; Beachwood and Wallaceville are being renaturalized as a floodplain and High River's removing infrastructure. The houses that weren't destroyed, demolished, or auctioned off to be moved are still there and uninhabited.[1]
Other damaged neighborhoods that were bought out got tossed around between provincial governments for eight years until High River bought them back for redevelopment.[2] There are regulations - the Floodway Development Regulation in particular - against developing floodways, but haven't been promulgated to prevent, or even disincentivize, development.[3][4] (If they had been, parts of Fort McMurray rebuilt after the 2016 wildfires that then flooded in 2020 wouldn't have been rebuilt in the first place.)[5]
The province also wouldn't fund buyouts of other flood-risk properties downstream of High River.[6] (Indeed, the High River bailout was OVERfunded, and High River sent money back to the county in January.)[7]
I don’t think the money goes to the homeowners does it? They have home insurance (which I’ve heard is double what I pay for an inland city in an area unaffected by hurricanes). FEMA helps the area (utilities, essentials, shelter) but doesn’t rebuild their homes from what I’ve heard
Or privately funded to keep rebuilding, yeah. Why should the rest of us have to keep paying for you to rebuild your house because you picked a stupid location and/or didn’t build strong enough in the first place?
When a person engages in some risky activity but offloads some of the risk onto others, they'll continue doing that activity more than they otherwise would.
If the irresponsible people who insist on living in hurricane prone areas pay for their own repairs, then I have no problem with them living there. If they ask for me to pay for it, then that gives me moral buy in into whether they should be allowed to live there.
As someone who believes climate change is fact, if I had the economic mobility to move my life away from such an area I would. Sorry if this seems harsh, but people much smarter than me agree that these areas are going to be prone to worse and worse conditions in the coming decades.
Having people educated, healthy, and protected from the damages of homelessness all have positive externalities. Paying people to return to areas that are regularly ravaged by massive storms only benefits them until the next storm and doesn't represent a long term good, especially in the face of climate change.
I'd love to see the HN crowd that is championing the premise stand up and proclaim all the areas of the globe that people should no longer be allowed to live, huge swaths of which will be in hyper impoverished areas of India, China, Pakistan. They won't dare.
The Pakistan floods were due to massive rainfall exacerbating glacial melt, both of which were triggered by climate change. Pakistan is responsible for fewer than 1% of global emissions and experienced catastrophic flooding anyways. It's an incredibly poor nation that got the short end of the climate change stick. The level of sorrow that Florida pales in comparison to that of Pakistan; I'd argue that Pakistan warrants $100B as much as Florida does (if not more).
Admittedly there's also grinding poverty in parts of Florida so I appreciate the comparison; that's a good hole in my argument.
Should we provide compensation for Floridians to move to safer areas? Yes.
Should we provide compensation for Pakistan for improved flood management? Yes.
Should Pakistanis or Floridians rebuild in the exact same places and the same ways where they've been building? No, unfortunately nobody gets that luxury. That's the horrible thing about climate change - we have very few options and they all have major downsides but we don't get to opt out. Florida's going to experience massive flooding regularly and Pakistan will face the same, and either populations in both areas adapt in some fashion (build for floods or move) or continue to experience mass devastation when the inevitable occurs.
I don't get to dictate where people live any more than I get to dictate where the flood waters go. It's heartbreaking but that's the world we're stuck in.
I lived on a US military base that regularly received typhoons. Damage never exceeded $5 million, and was typically much lower.
Much of the housing was built in the 50s. It was definitely low quality, including such issues as bad electrical grounding and about as many cockroaches there are stars above. At least, that's how I felt as a kid, anyways.
But, it was made of concrete and had steel storm doors. The biggest issue for us was flooding (we were at the bottom of a hill) but newer structures tended to be on stilts or have a sacrificial first floor. This was true both on and off base.
Rents off base apparently are pretty cheap by US standards. And this is with a climate akin to that of Hawaii with beaches nearby.
> No doubt with N carefully calibrated to depopulate the parts of the country you don't like, but not the part you live in.
N is carefully calibrated by actuaries with hard data. Insurance companies stopped offering flood insurance to much of Florida decades ago - they're now covered by a federally subsidized program called the NFIP that has about five million policies. It has been a money pit since 2004 for obvious reasons.
California got plenty of federal funds to rebuild after the Northridge quake and what did the state do? It spent the next four years improving building codes - benefiting the entire country - and plowed the money into seismic retrofits. When >90% of home insurers pulled out, instead of depending on a federal program, the state created the California Earthquake Authority which is almost entirely privately funded within the state. I have no doubt the next big earthquake will require federal assistance but there hasn't been a major incident in nearly thirty years and the state, insurers, and homeowners have done a lot to mitigate future catastrophe.
The same thing is happening now in California with wildfires: many people in rural areas can only get insurance through the California FAIR Plan. The big difference is that the FAIR Plan is funded entirely through premiums and state funds. Very little if any federal funding goes to it because Trump turned it into a hot button issue just a few years ago. That's the one to watch out for, not earthquakes.
There have been only 2 earthquakes in US history with >$10B in damages, and the last one happened 30 years ago. The 2017 hurricane season alone caused $300 billion in damages. That was just 1 year's worth of hurricanes. You don't have to calibrate it that carefully.
> So all this coastline should be dunes and park spaces?
If they cannot be safely built upon, sure. Same reason no one builds houses on the edge of Kilauea's active craters. Hurricane-resistant construction is possible, it's just more expensive. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/14/us/hurricane-michael-flor...
Human brains are funny. Obviously the absurd part of all of this is people (literally) building their houses on the edge of the ocean and expecting this to not happen.
However because it's all we know, it seems that the real absurdity would be the government designating these sites as 'no-build' zones-- or at least FEMA washing their hands of any damage that should happen to these sites.
This should be a wakeup call that many aspects of our current way of life are unsustainable, not that it's just standard operating procedure to rebuild from the ground up every 20 years only for everything to be washed away again.
I would wager a majority of the final costs are from damages to houses not "on the edge of the ocean". Hurricane damages stretch for miles inland. Heck pick any east coast state and check out the areas covered by flood warnings and watches. They're hours from the coast in places. If it was only the houses on the edge of the ocean, this would be relatively cheap.
That's a good point, I decided to do some napkin math:
Sanibel Island has 7,821 housing units at an average density of 454.6 per square mile.
Median sales price of the homes in 2021 was $1.64M, average price was similar.
So a rough approximation of the value of the homes on the island alone is $12Bn. I am not sure how you would translate that into damage costs, but in a scenario of total destruction then $12B would be lost.
I have no real evidence other than visiting Ft Myers and Naples a few times, but I can tell you there is (was) a lot of very valuable property right next to the ocean. I don't doubt that if you look at the total distribution of damages that there is a long tail of less severe damage as you go inland, but the conservative estimates from my napkin math shows that it's likely a significant number (over ten billion) occurred just from properties on the small stretch of coastline.
Insurance isn't going to pay out on value though, it's going to pay out on replacement costs. A home that's $5M because it sits on the waterfront would be $750K 5 miles inland, but they will cost roughly the same to replace.
I sincerely doubt the cost to replace the first home is 6x the second. And then there's this one (https://www.trulia.com/p/fl/sebring/2124-gardenview-rd-sebri...), which is about as far from the coast as you can reasonably be in that part of florida, going for a mere $240k, and I doubt it's significantly more or less to replace than either of the previous two.
People who live on Cape Coral are going to have to internalize the fact that they fell for a real estate swindle, they are partly or mostly at fault, and their own personal financial situation will be impacted.
People in the Pacific states and the northeast are going to need to internalize that it isn't OK to use the Sun Belt as a relieve valve for their NIMBY policies, and the federal government might even need to take measures to disincentivize those states from exporting their populations to Gulf Coast swamps.
If you want to live in a deindustrialized society, there is no downside. If you like things like international shipping, gasoline, diesel, and having food on your table, there are a few downsides.
How many of the critical workers who maintain port facilities live in beachfront houses? Approximately none. We can quit subsidizing wealthy beachfront home owners and limit new housing to places that are more defensible.
Returning all of the current privately owned beachfront to natural habitat would be absolutely glorious. We can make exceptions for public facilities serving the greater good, like ports.
There is a huge difference between "don't use the space at all" and "don't build buildings that are unsuited for the location".
There is also a difference between "my roof was damaged by high wind" repairs and "my house and everything I own floated away due to storm surge" repairs. I'm not trying to speak for OP, but typically the style of "2 and then done" plans are for the latter style of damage (where the damage is into the low-mid 6 figures), not the former (where damage is low-mid 5 figures).
If an area is regularly rendered uninhabitable by major weather events then rebuilding in that area is a liability for all involved. When buildings and property are destroyed their contents are dispersed or leak, representing an environmental hazard; people and animals returning are exposed to evacuation risks in following weather events; and then there's the obvious tax and insurance liability discussed elsewhere.
We've been treating these areas as fit for habitation and we're watching in realtime as they become uninhabitable. While it may have been more tolerable to live in these regions in the last century when global temperatures were lower we're at an inflection point; we're going be forced to concede spaces as too dangerous for regular habitation because storms are only going to increase in severity and frequency.
As a society we have a few options: 1, we continue to rebuild and pay the costs until it becomes completely cost prohibitive; 2, dramatically rethink how we build in the area and construct buildings that can cope with several feet of storm surges; or 3, accept reality and begin the process of resettling people in areas that won't be submerged in 100 years. It's likely that we're going to pursue option 1 for the next 10-30 years because collective change is hard but we ought to start having these conversations well in advance of insurance companies writing off all of Florida as uninsurable.
This doesn't even begin to touch on the benefits of allowing areas to revert to wetlands, but considering that they act as excellent buffers from the storms we're observing as well as carbon sinks, but it's worth stating that retreating from these areas makes more sense on ecological and financial grounds.
Having those coasts be parks with hundreds of miles of low-impact infrastructure like hiking/biking/walking paths, maybe simple low-key restaurants that aren't a big deal to rebuild every decade, etc.
Put all the heavier infrastructure like housing developments a few miles inland. Then everyone can enjoy these idyllic beach lands a little farther from all the buzz of cities. Everyone in the city can still easily go to the coastline-spanning megapark, but now the beach isn't lined with gaudy condos.
The coasts wouldn’t be returned to nature. They’d become enclaves of families rich enough to build and rebuild their beach houses without the help of insurance payouts.
Storm surges come miles inland. It’s not just people on the beach. Most of the gulf coast is fairly flat and filled with other waterways.
What you’re looking at is anybody potentially within 30ft of sea level where any contiguous <30ft elevation is connected to water. I’ve known people 20 miles inland to be flooded by storm surges because they lived near a river, and the hurricane pushed all the water up the river.
The wind is not as big a concern, but also still does a lot of damage. During one major hurricane I evacuated 150 miles inland and still didn’t have power for a week. One person in the town I evacuated to was killed by a falling tree.
It doesn't have to be all or nothing. There's also probably room for stronger building codes in riskier areas. This hurricane (and others in the past) literally changed where the coastline is in some places.
But from some of the pictures I've seen, you do have some neighborhoods where one side is slightly higher than the other side and thus survived much better. Maybe some of those houses shouldn't have been built, and berms strategically placed and other things. One house not being built may under some circumstances prevent multiple other houses from being destroyed down the road. This seems like a low hanging fruit kind of thing if the priorities are there, before getting into beefing up infrastructure and more expensive options.
The amount of damage from hurricanes is trending higher and higher as time goes on, so something has to give and currently it seems federal flood insurance is doing all the giving.
In the small Atlantic coastal town where I am temporarily living, all recently-built houses sit on stilts - they have an open area underneath, often used as a garage, or for storage, but all the finished living space starts eight feet off the ground. Many people are also lifting their older houses this way; the owners of the house next door just moved back in after completing their upgrade.
Some of this adaptation is FEMA-subsidized: anyone whose house has been flooded twice in ten years can apply for a $50k grant toward the lift. Federal flood insurance may be doing much of the giving, but around here at least it's happening in a way that improves long term resilience.
Or build it better/stronger. Or make it uninsurable (for storm damage) and ineligible for relief funds (after x number of claims in x number of years).
It is frustrating to be sending piles of money to these states every year, which they then waste on political stunts like flying legal immigrants to other states, instead of taking care of their citizens, or maybe investing in climate hardening.
And then they're completely unprepared for cold weather, hot weather, wet weather, dry weather, ... and say things like "Nobody knew ___ could be so complicated."
I really don't mind my tax dollars going to these states, but I don't want my tax dollars to be wasted, or worse yet, spent to hurt people on purpose.
Yes and despite that they have below average per capita federal aid. Not only that, they had a record surplus in their state budget the last year. If someone were to try and attempt to portray Florida as some fiscally irresponsible welfare state, I would assert they would be quite misguided.
Interestingly, it does not rank them per capita. California receives the highest at $12/person. Florida receives the third highest at $2700/person. Something does not jive
The source under the page you cite shows Florida as #32 [Edit: the graphical tool shows it as #35] in per-capita balance payments (in direction towards state) over time. Next time you lie, try not using a source that contradicts yourself.
I doubt FEMA money is actually used for the immigrant stunt and Florida is not unprepared for hurricanes. Florida actually has pretty good stormwater management infrastructure, mostly because it has to. Homes in South Florida are also required to be built out of concrete block and have hurricane windows. Point being: Florida is decently prepared for storms. Could it be better? Of course. But I would not say Florida is complete unprepared. I do think there needs to be changes to insurance and government aid though. We're distributing (read: subsidizing) a lot of the cost of living in an expensive area. We're seeing ripples of this with insurance companies not wanting to insure houses in Florida. That or making it more expensive to get insurance directly (premiums) and indirectly (you can't have a roof over 10 years old in some cases because, by law, they have to pay to replace a roof if a few shingles come off).
I say Florida a lot because I lived there up until recently, I can't speak for other states.
> I doubt FEMA money is actually used for the immigrant stunt
An assertion is that money is fungible, so $12mln spent on a stunt in Texas could have been spent on breakwaters, infill, or to move less stable homes from the immediate coast. (Or to have more building inspection before Surfside's incident)
Legal immigrants? The feds flew or bused illegal border crossers who were processed and released to many states, including Florida. Yes it was a political stunt to move them again, but how is it worse than what the feds are doing?
God the fact this comment keeps going gray really bothers me. You're 100% correct and these people are acting lawfully.
I get that HN often swings conservative, but I gotta believe if we were in these folk's shoes some of us would be seeking a better life for ourselves through asylum in America.
I am for 100% open borders, I acknowledge asylum seekers are allowed in the country, and I agree your statement they are doing what many of us would do. I see nothing ethically wrong with what they're doing.
That said, anyone who doesn't understand the undertone here, that the great majority will be denied asylum, that a great number are claiming asylum in a way that is coached/contrived/embellished, or that they couldn't have stopped and claimed asylum in another nation along the way (such as Mexico) is just completely naive. A great number of poeple here are game the system. That's fine, whatever, fuck borders, I'm on board. But I'm gonna call a spade a spade. A great number are here to play the system, often with lies, and the idea that all these people are 'acting lawfully' is not only factually incorrect I assert you KNOW it is factually incorrect and use it here as propaganda. In fact it is not lawful to lie to federal authorities in your asylum claim, but many are doing it.
These are the things many of us know, but aren't supposed to say out loud in some polite circles.
> These are the things many of us know, but aren't supposed to say out loud in some polite circles.
You're spending the majority of your comment saying "great numbers" of these folks are claiming asylum in bad-faith. You imply "great numbers" of them are here to game/play the system. You call a "great number" of them liars. You imply that they're criminals (not acting lawfully).
> I applaud their efforts
No you don't. You're painting "great numbers" of these people out to be untrustworthy to the point of preemptively calling them criminals.
---
> and the idea that all these people are 'acting lawfully' is not only factually incorrect I assert you KNOW it is factually incorrect and use it here as propaganda
Instead of asserting what I know, maybe provide sources for your argument. I take it as an outright aggression toward me that you posit I am spreading propaganda.
> We find that undocumented immigrants have substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony offenses. Relative to undocumented immigrants, US-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes.
It's common sense that if you're looking to immigrate somewhere that you're not out there looking to break the law. Every study I have come across in regards to this seems to have similar outcomes. They know if they break the law they will likely be deported; and they typically act accordingly because they want to live, work, and raise their families in America.
I take great issue with you claiming I'm spreading propaganda. In good-faith I assure you, I am not.
I'm fine calling anyone who lies to immigration a trustworthy patriot. Believe me, I've been fucked with endlessly by DHS/CBP. They even got a federal search warrant and cavity searched me, and racked up thousands in medical bills in my name by cuffing and dragging me to hospitals and lying to doctors claiming there were drugs up my ass. They (CBP) has threatened to deny me entry to the country (with a US passport), to revoke my passport (with no legal mechanism), and all sorts of bullshit -- they're the biggest liars in town! I think people who don't cooperate with immigration services are the trustworthy ones. Hell I think the asylum seekers are probably 'trustworthy' as anybody else -- just often not in their claims.
I understand 'bad-faith' is practically a requirement for many people claiming asylum. I get it.
I readily acknowledge they are generally more law abiding. I only contend that a great number of 'asylum seekers' are gaming the system. I find that perfectly moral, but I aint no fool about what's happening.
>Every study I have come across
The (2/2.5/4x) you cite from the study is undocumented immigrants, not people formally documented as asylum seekers and permitted into the country.
I appreciate you taking issue with my claims. Hopefully this feedback correct your behavior.
This kind of feels like doublespeak. Most migrants come for work, not to escape persecution. Economic migrants use asylum as a way to avoid being deported.
I can't speak for these people but I do know why this happens in Sweden (where I live): because the Swedish state provides lavish benefits, a lot more than neighbouring countries. This fact is taken by human smugglers, blown out of all proportions where they promise migrants that they'll get a house and a car and a girlfriend (not a joke) if only they pay them €€€€ to be dumped into a leaky boat across the Mediterranean.
Sorry, I wasn't precise enough with my language. I was saying if it is that easy to determine who has a legitimate asylum claim, then why don't the courts do so?
When they actually show up to court, they're usually not granted asylum. But we have teens of millions of people living here illegally, it's not hard to avoid the authorities.
This is exactly what I’ve been saying. Many migrants don’t even show up to their asylum hearings.. they just use it as a deportation delayer. You’d think 100% of migrants would show up if they were serious but its only like 80%.
For some reason we keep talking past one another. I’m talking about why CBP doesn’t just turn away asylum seekers that transit via Mexico if it is so easy to determine in advance that their asylum claims are not legitimate.
For some reason you keep railing against illegal immigrants instead of actually engaging in productive discussion.
Then change the law, you can't have it both ways.
Also - if they weren't here legally before the stunt then the governor of Florida literally smuggled people into the country, which he cannot do as immigration is the federal government's purview.
The thing is, there is a decent point that border states bare the brunt of illegal immigration issues but to draw attention to it at the expense of poor humans is just despicable.
“The passport as an instrument of state regulation was born of the French revolution of 1789. At first, ordinary people were issued passes to control internal movement, especially to Paris. But after the king tried to escape, and foreign aristocrats attacked the revolution, the authorities started requiring such papers for exit and entry to the country. The revolution created one of the world’s first “nation-states”, defined by the “national” identity of its people rather than its monarchs’ claims.”
“But as the industrial revolution snowballed in the 19th century, there was pressure to allow free movement of all the factors of production – money, trade *and labour*. Passport requirements were widely relaxed across Europe — in 1872, the British foreign secretary, Earl Granville, even wrote: “all foreigners have the unrestricted right of entrance into and residence in this country”. The situation was similar in North America.”
“In 1947, the first problem considered at an expert meeting preparing for the UN World Conference on Passports and Frontier Formalities was “the possibility of a return to the regime which existed before 1914 involving as a general rule the abolition of any requirement that travelers should carry passports.””
I wonder how much public benefits has to do with strict immigration control. Before 1914 public benefits were practically nil, so it's not like you were likely to become a public charge as an immigrant. US seems to have 'solved' this by tolerating illegal immigration but then giving them the boot if the wheel ever squeaks.
The reason people live in coastal regions is because there are outsized economic benefits to the hinterlands that may outweigh the damage these storms inflict. The interface between land and sea is crucially important for the survival of civilization at our scale.
Under "2 and done", do you restore critical port infrastructure to dunes if they get destroyed by a hurricane twice? Port infrastructure can't exist on its own, it needs a community behind it which needs schools, parks, houses, etc.
This is a problem that the insurance industry will need figure out so they can price risk to the area that's wiped out, the way the home is constructed, etc.
In my mind the debate is how FEMA subsidies will distort the insurance markets. Perhaps they could serve as a "2 and done" re-re-insurance provider?
A great counterpoint to this argument is that an insurance oligopoly might "price gouge" after a big event like Ian, which could kill the community that's needed to support the vital port infrastructure. Ultimately if FEMA subsidies were removed from the picture, shipping costs would increase to price in the risk of hurricanes for the area. Either way we're all paying for it somehow.
These regions can do what California did. Insurance companies left the market in response to the Northridge earthquake, so the state provides a very high deductible earthquake insurance.
Yet fire and earthquake damage are not generally covered by FEMA in California in most cases (I would expect the Big One, when it happens, to be, but based on the big stink that Trump raised to the applause of certain states, like Florida, about cutting back wildfire prevention/disaster funds to CA in 2019, who knows) and economically that state is much more important than Florida.
And thus California has very-high deductible insurance coverage in areas that are especially susceptible to such disasters, because it IS an inevitable risk that such an event will happen. Florida should do the same, as their "catastrophic disaster" is annual.
Private insurers will not cover homes in coastal areas that flood frequently. It is simply not financially viable. Many beach properties have subsidized government insurance.
This is what needs to stop.
If government provides cheap insurance. The building on coast is a great idea.
Geraldo Rivera did a special on it many years ago.
He lost his house. Didn’t cost him a dime. Was planning on rebuilding due to cheap insurance. Which he seemed to find ridiculous.
Can we please not do this flamewar thing? Asylum seekers are technically neither legal nor illegal immigrants yet, but everyone knows this will cause an argument that's completely unrelated to the article.
I think it's a valid conversation to have in parallel when the people/politicians in these places are pulling expensive political stunts that do nothing but stoke the ever-increasing polarization of our nation... only to turn around and shamelessly ask for aide in such a situation.
I tried to be very careful about what I said, and how I said it.
As with many others here, I pay a great deal of taxes, by any measure. I do not want my contribution (_our_ contributions) to be used to hurt people for the purpose of hurting people.
This is not a "flamewar thing". DeSantis chose to hurt people to accrue power to himself. Given the gifts and the fortune that we have inherited, if we cannot speak truth to power, then it would be better had we never been born.
"Sorry, not sorry" is exactly a flamewar thing. You're not "speaking truth to power." First, as I pointed out you're factually incorrect. Second, who do you think is reading your HN thread that has power over the governor of Florida? So you're literally speaking lies to the powerless. Sick.
Under that rule, what exactly is your plan for replacing all the life-critical logistics infrastructure across the entire Gulf coast?
Just abandon the whole thing as a sacrifice zone? How exactly are you going to do any international shipping? Get goods down the Mississippi? Refine half the gasoline the country uses?
People don't live in hurricane zones because it's fun. People live there because that's where the jobs are. Many of them aren't bullshit jobs, and are far more critical to life and limb than yet another dogwalking mobile app.
> People don't live in hurricane zones because it's fun.
People absolutely live in Florida for that reason; people flock there for retirement.
> Under that rule, what exactly is your plan for replacing all the life-critical logistics infrastructure across the entire Gulf coast?
Strict building codes, no more building below sea level as with New Orleans. Even a few miles from the ocean can often be enough to change "my house swam away" into "we had some trees downed".
No one is being told where to live. But there is no reason to subsidize property prices in areas by providing federal taxpayer subsidized insurance. Providing taxpayer subsidized insurance allows people to buy properties with a larger mortgage (for which banks require flood insurance), which allows property prices to rise higher than they would have without taxpayer subsidized insurance.
FEMA doesn't decide where you live, but they do provide federally subsidized flood insurance. He's suggesting that we should stop doing that for two total loss events on the same property.
Folks have had their houses rebuilt with other people's money really often - and build it in the exact same spot, because the feds will come build it again. Even though it's going to get destroyed, again.
I understand. However if gov does not provide disaster aid then you are effectively telling people where to live. Few will accept the risk without the prospect of disaster aid and insurance, which would be unobtainable if the area was ruled uninhabitable by the federal government.
Entire communities, and their economic output, will vanish. A good example are communities whose entire existence is owed to revenue generated by commercial fishing. What do you do with all the fishermen who don't know any other line of work?
Teach them to code?
Long Island, NY is prone to flooding and wind-damage from hurricanes and nor'easters. Areas are routinely destroyed or heavily damaged. Notable years are 1950, 1954, 1960, 1986, and 1999.
Asheville, NC is prone to flooding, land & rock slides, and the occasional earthquake. It is probably one of the state's most natural wonders, and the country-side a lovely place to live.
During periods of heavy rain and tropical events, downtown NYC floods the subways and streets and doing expensive salt water damage.
I know of no place on earth that is without some susceptibility to natural disaster. So where do we draw the line?
Effectively, such a rule would define these and other places as uninhabitable and render them ineligible for both commercial insurance and federal disaster aid. That seems so foolish and counter to our tradition as a nation. Such a rule would see the splintering and end to many long-standing communities.
If the concern is cost, you may want to turn your attention to discretionary federal expenditures.
Surely we can find places to cut bloat, pork, and wasteful spending, particularly in areas that range from nothing to very-little to do with the United States, her citizens, or their needs and emergencies that are a part of living on planet earth.
It is almost like that 75 billion we printed for Zelenskyy could have been used to help Americans.
Lastly, where does it end? How do we define the formula for making these rules, and who gets the define and apply that formula? Best case scenario, if this rule was a thing, you'd be looking at consolidating large parts of American society into more 'manageable' locations and mega cities, which were decreed as somehow having the least amount of risk, and lowest possible expense...
...in a vain attempt at avoiding the risk and expenditures of natural disasters?
...that happen everywhere?
...routinely.
It just seems foolish when you work through it to a practical end.
Stop paying for them to keep rebuilding the house, give them the money to move.
>I know of no place on earth that is without some susceptibility to natural disaster. So where do we draw the line?
OP proposed twice, you objected. I think twice with no time horizon isn't useful. Twice in 50 years seems reasonable for someone who lives in a 100 year flood plain.
But these flood plains are growing with climate change. Storms are getting worse and more frequent. Just continuing to pay to rebuild is not the answer.
>My response was to this comment at the top, where it was, explicitly and objectively, supporting a policy that dictates where people should live.
It's clearly not explicit or objective. "If you choose to live here you will not receive aid when your house is knocked down in a hurricane" is so clearly not the same as "You can not legally live here".
The language of the parent is strong, but the context is if those rebuilds were not subsidized, they probably would not happen anymore. If you get rid of the economic incentive to build there... no one would. Of course, to become public space, which is a logical use of damage-prone areas, the land would have to become so cheap from lack of interest that the state could buy it back. It would be a long process to get there, for sure.
That sounds great, unless you own the property and are forced to sell it to the government for pennies on the dollar because some beaurocracy unilaterally decreed your land as uninhabitable and uninsurable.
I think you're misunderstanding what they're saying. They're saying that federal funds should not be used to repair/replace infrastructure in places that are highly prone to natural disasters. If you have two total-loss natural disasters in less than 50 years either the infrastructure is unsuitable to the risks, or there is no infrastructure suitable for the risks.
Are you saying that unmitigated flood prone areas _should_ be habitable? And the cost of that underwritten with public funds?
There are people who have their house rebuilt every ~15 years from hurricanes with public funds.
>The NFIP is managed and administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) through the Federal Insurance and Mitigation Administration (FIMA).[1] The program is designed to provide an insurance alternative to disaster assistance to meet the escalating costs of repairing damage to buildings and their contents caused by floods.[2] As of August 2017, the program insured about 5 million homes (down from about 5.5 million homes in April 2010), the majority of which are in Texas and Florida.[3][4] The cost of the insurance program was fully covered by its premiums until the end of 2004, but it has had to steadily borrow funds since, primarily due to Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, accumulating $25 billion of debt by August 2017.[3][5] In October 2017, Congress cancelled $16 billion of NFIP debt, making it possible for the program to pay claims. The NFIP owes $20.525 billion to the U.S. as of December 2020.[6]
I think being that you're so ruggedly individualistic, maybe pull yourself up by your bootstraps and pay for your own repairs?
If you're footing the bill for fair market insurance, those places quickly get returned to the environment because it makes no economic sense to build there. Or it does, and the federal government still doesn't have to pay for it.
> Should parts of CA or other earthquake prone areas be labelled uninhabitable?
Major earthquakes happen an order of magnitude less frequently than major storms - but there's merit to reconsidering how much infrastructure we build right next to fault lines. So, possibly?
> What about areas where forest fires are routine?
Without appropriate fire breaks or building construction, possibly - if your house and property isn't constructed to survive a wildfire, then it's _going_ to burn. We can either adapt now or pay much higher costs later.
> Flood prone areas?
Oh jeez, yes, the fact that we build in flood plains is absolutely bonkers.
> Tornado prone areas?
Maybe, but it's a much lower risk than hurricanes. We really need to account for risks during building construction; our current approaches aren't working that well.
> High UV?
High UV is a bummer, not an repeated existential risk to all inhabitants.
> Poor air quality?
Poor air quality is also a bummer but is something we have more control over. Similar to high UV, poor air quality doesn't represent a regular, frequent, unavoidable, catastrophic risk to all of the inhabitants and all property in the vicinity.
> It makes no sense whatsoever to dictate that people cannot live on the coasts due to natural disasters which happen everywhere, all the time.
It makes even less sense to build in areas that are all but guaranteed to be destroyed several times per century. If you can build infrastructure that'll actually last or are willing to accept all liability when the inevitable occurs then by all means, build your house on stilts and cover the cost of reconstruction. But beyond freedom of choice, I don't understand why we think it's okay to assume obvious risk and expect society to provide compensation for a risk that's been known for decades if not centuries.
>Does it matter if a place gets a powerful earthquake every 5 years or 20 years?
Yes, of course.
>The entire premise of the suggestion is simply nonsense.
No, just needs more science and economics math on what makes sense and are reasonable lines to draw.
> More people are killed in high crime areas than in storm prone areas, and they are killed daily.
Do you have stats that back this up on a per capita basis?
> Do we tell people they can't live there, either?
If you can ascertain that the above is true per capita and that the federal government is footing the bill through social security survivorship benefits, maybe. The objection is not that people can't live and where they want - it's that they expect someone else to subsidize it.
Life insurance takes into account where you live. In non-FEMA flood insurance areas, flood insurance is significantly more expensive.
>If you don't take any risk then you are not really living.
The issue is they aren't taking risks - they're socializing their risks onto people who don't live in flood zones.
If they were actually taking the risk of having to rebuild, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
If earthquakes strong enough to destroy many buildings happen in the same location every five or 10 years, then yes, that area should be considered uninhabitable.
It seems that large parts of California are subject to ground shaking that is destructive occurring two or more times per decade with some variability.
Is it really time to take away their insurance and disaster aid?
... then you 're in the neighborhood of what parts of Florida have been getting.
It's not that the whole state keeps getting hit by hurricanes. It's that individual locations have been hit multiple times in a decade. So no, California is not comparable.
California is the most populous and economically significant state in the United States, which alone could stand to be the 5th largest economy in the world. California subsidizes other states, including those much much more prone to flooding, while the reverse isn't true in regards to earthquake damage.
A lot of federal disaster aid is just Californian's own money being used to help them when needed. This is true for other states like NY.
Lastly, California does indeed offer a very high deductible form of earthquake insurance, and it isn't federally subsidized like FEMA is.
One of the reasons SF is so expensive is the building codes. After the 89 earthquake somethings were not rebuilt. When the local Government allow homes to be built with lax standards simply because they want them to be cheap I agree they do not deserve to be rebuilt on the tax payers dime. Might also make the Condo safer.
I apologize for upsetting you. You sounded as if you thought FEMA didn’t contribute financially to storm management in New York. I agree the other user’s comment about snow removal was flippant.
"Public funds" AREN'T used to clear the snow. People in NYC pay to clear the snow. The problem in this instance is that the federal government backstops a "flood insurance" program that is intrinsically not insurance, because the only people who buy into it are the ones that get flooded every year. Everyone in the risk pool is tied together. That's why there is no private flood insurance for the area, because it's literally impossible.
All this money is a straight up handout to allow some specific people to keep getting a high value lifestyle on someone else's dime.
I don't know that it's necessarily used for "clearing the snow", but FEMA funds on the order of millions of dollars have been used in NY for snow storms and blizzards in 2017, 2014, 2007, 2006, 2004, 2003, 2001, 2000, and 1999 per their website[1]. While it doesn't list funding numbers, FEMA disasters were also declared in 1998, 1996, 1993, 1991, 1987, 1985 and 1977.
This is in addition to hurricane funds, the most recent of which was just last year in 2021.
And while FL has received significantly more FEMA funds than NY[2] (6.8B vs 405M), NY likewise receives significantly more than say their neighbor VT (56M) or far away MT (a mere 11M). Is all the money spent in NY likewise a "straight up handout to allow some specific people to keep getting a high value lifestyle on someone else's dime"?
But there is no subsidy for earthquakes insurance like the national flood insurance program. Perhaps we should get rid of the national flood insurance program?
In Europe, rivers are often surrounded by parkland on either side as they flow through cities, such as the Elbe in Dresden. It's gorgeous public space, which benefits everyone, but it also is there for another reason -- the river floods fairly regularly, and so by leaving that as uninhabited park space the floods can happen without causing too much damage.
I was looking to move to Fort Myers or Fort Myers Shores with my girlfriend (she’s originally from there), and we looked at five different houses. Based on damage maps/satellite photos/Facebook posts all five of those houses were flooded. But, the problem is only two of them were in any sort of flood zones. The only reason we didn’t buy is because it looked like the market was tanking. I think there is a lot of blaming going on here against homeowners who really didn’t know better. FEMA really needs to update their maps to account for more catastrophic storms like this. It’s also important to keep in mind this storm could have been a lot worse. It was “only” a Category 4.
There is a lot of political pressure from the owners and sellers of property, among other interests, to minimize the information.
In NYC, after Sandy, a new map with vastly expanded zones was published. Within a day or two, it was replaced with one with significantly reduced zones. I don't know that this was in response to political pressure...
> I think there is a lot of blaming going on here against homeowners who really didn’t know better.
Anyone who is keeping up on climate change research and anyone with any sense knows it's just not wise to invest in property on the Florida coast unless you do so knowing that at anytime your home could be washed away.
You have to be willfully ignorant to think it's a good idea to move to those areas.
I can see why you would want to move closer to family, but did you really not believe that the Fort Myers area could be destroyed at anytime from a major hurricane? Do you really think that sea level rise (which is more about its impact on storm surges) coupled with increasingly more powerful hurricanes is not a problem in the near term? Are you unaware that GHGs in the atmosphere are accelerating, there is no evidence that warming will stop soon, and plenty to suggest that things will increasingly get worse in the near term?
After floods or wildfires or tornadoes or earthquakes, you'll see some buildings are a pile of rubble and others just need brushed off.
These locales should be making these requirements a part of their building codes. But I suspect they are addicted to FEMA money and actually prefer having local stimulus in their economies every few years.
Definitely. Revise the building codes, and after doing so, if it becomes prohibitively expensive or just not worth building in that area, then we'll know that it's no longer a viable place to build.
Yes, for sure. SC coast is getting hammered right now. Not as much wind at this point obviously, but timing could not have been worse… peak storm surge right at high tide.
Whenever I see pictures of the aftermath of such events it seems that the damage is mostly to private houses and boats. Commercial properties, shopping malls, and apartment blocks seem much less affected. If this impression truly reflects what happens then surely what is needed is simply stricter and more appropriate building regulations.
So, does my impression accord at all with reality? Are apartment blocks, corporate and government buildings really more robust and better sited or is this just a misleading impression caused by the images that are easily available?
I don't know if I could get with a blanket 2 and done rule, but I do think there should be some limited liability for the government for certain things. If you google earth into Tampa and look at a lot of the neighborhoods right on the pay, it is ridiculous. Artificial water ways and such. And of course anytime a hurricane comes through, they will easily be destroyed. Dumb planning, yes, it shouldn't be encouraged to rebuild it. But for things like Ports, we need ports.
no. you cant seize land without compensation, see the constitution. literally just don't insure it any more, or require much stronger buildings (like concrete). oh and quit bailing out insurers.
Hopefully insurance costs will not be extracted throughout the entire country. The insurance rates must reflect the true cost of residing in hurricane alley.
Can anyone even get (good) insurance in Florida at this point? I believe many large insurance providers have backed out of Florida over the past few years by making their rates so astronomical that there's only one obvious goal.
Kin Insurance covers my Florida property at ~$400k of replacement coverage with reasonable deductibles for $1800/year. I am not on the water, the property is significantly above sea level with a new roof, and I have done every mitigation recommended by the insurer (wall to roof strapping, water barrier between shingles and decking, shutter supports, etc).
That sounds affordable as long as you have a decent job.
As a point of comparison, however, up here in northern Illinois, you can get 2-3x the replacement coverage from a name-brand national insurance company for that price. And we do have tornado risk.
Which is to say that your insurance is expensive, but I wouldn't call it a barrier to living there. Much like property taxes - if you saw my bill, you'd probably fall out of your chair. Turns out the total cost is high everywhere. ;)
If people focused on functional/survivable structures, then it wouldn't be an issue. Initial construction might be 1.5x-2x the cost, but it'd be better than rebuilding every couple decades. But I guess they wouldn't be as pretty as they'd want.
All new construction in Sanibel, FL (which got hit hard by Ian) is required to have one floor of "sacrificial space" above which finished living structure can be built. In most homes this is a garage or above-ground storage room with no drywall, and all electrical connections at least several feet off the floor. This doesn't make storm surge cost-free and we have yet to see whether it was enough for Ian, but I doubt the storm surge reached more than 6ft.
I run a tugboat company. We are moving a barge and equipment to Sanibel Island right now. We expect months of work removing debris to the mainland and moving construction equipment to the island. The system is working as designed.
If you want to pay rates which allow them to rebuild your home for you every ten years (annual rate = your home's cost / 10), I'm sure they'd be more than happy to do it and collect their small profit.
Being realistic for a second this storm probably killed every remaining private insurer and Citizens (state ran last-resort insurer) will probably have to be bailed out.
>As of August 2017, the program insured about 5 million homes (down from about 5.5 million homes in April 2010), the majority of which are in Texas and Florida.[3][4] The cost of the insurance program was fully covered by its premiums until the end of 2004, but it has had to steadily borrow funds since, primarily due to Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, accumulating $25 billion of debt by August 2017.[3][5] In October 2017, Congress cancelled $16 billion of NFIP debt, making it possible for the program to pay claims. The NFIP owes $20.525 billion to the U.S. as of December 2020.[6]
This. I'm not sure why it works any other way. If the location is somehow critical to the local/regional/national interest than those entities can subsidize the insurance cost. But the free market should handle the situation. If people want to live somewhere that's fine. If it's too risky to insure, than they are on their own.
Sandy was an anomalous storm but could happen again. By the time storms reach the Northeast they’re weak, usually not even hurricanes at landfall. The Jersey Shore was very unprepared but new development is far more robust. Lots more dunes being built and protected too.
A significant portion of Texas and Florida need to realize that these damaging events aren't going to stop happening, and they need to either build stronger, or leave if that's not possible.
If I built a house that could not manage a foot of snow on it's roof in Maine without collapsing, and every year it collapsed got a big check from the feds to rebuild the exact same structure in the exact same place, surely someone would be willing to tell me I'm being stupid?
It's literally Einstein's definition of "insanity"
They're probably government insured. You're never going to change that because you only have to trot out one grandma and one family and you can spend unlimited amounts in indirect costs for them.
> Hopefully insurance costs will not be extracted throughout the entire country.
Not sure about the US but in Australia flood insurance has skyrocketed nationwide after the last few years of extreme flood events, even people living on the top of hills pay more for general policies.
I'll generously assume that you mean 3d printers, to help make housing for the affected people there. Otherwise, I feel like your comment is even less constructive than my interpretation.
As someone who lives in Florida I am wondering when this will all come crashing down.
According to McKinsey non-hurricane/weather events will skyrocket from ~20-40/year to almost 250/year causing constant water damage. Let alone from hurricanes like Ian or Irma.
As someone who has lived in the pacific north my entire life I have no experience with things like this. Does the southeast build their structures differently knowing they are going to get hammered by hurricanes? Japan builds knowing they need to be resistant against earthquakes for example.
It depends on local jurisdiction. In Cape Cod (Massachusetts), for example, any permitted renovations to old structures or construction of new structures requires significant structural updates to comply with a thorough building code meant to help their structures remain inhabitable through and recoverable from storm surge.
Locals complain about it because it's expensive, and because the resulting coastal house on concrete stilts isn't aesthetically pleasing. But it's the only rational thing to do in 2022 if you want sustainable coastal development.
In Florida, where things are more "laissez faire", things may be bit different.
Florida has strict building codes for places that are within the wind zone (so basically the bottom half of the peninsula). Miami Dade has even stricter rules. However, this only applies to newer houses. Ft Meyers (the worst hit area0 had lots of houses that were built pre-Andrew, which was the event that drove the increase in building codes.
I'd also love to hear from an expert, but my understanding is that building codes make some accomodations for a general expectation of flooding (like no basements allowed), but the region has a huge safety net in FEMA and other disaster relief funds, and so for any given house it makes more financial sense to build more cheaply and then use relief funds to rebuild when the disaster actually comes.
This likely is making for a good deal of misaligned incentives, where public disaster relief expenses could be much less if building codes were raised in these areas, but such change is likely to be slow in coming and we should expect the status quo to continue for some time.
This seems like an opportunity for more high rise mixed use buildings that do not have essential functions on the bottom floors. The older SFH's were probably most effected and newer SFH's despite stricter building codes are not resistant to this extreme weather patterns long term. The government needs to incentivize development that benefits economies of scale and disincentivize "disposable"/"perishable" development.
Personally speaking being from a state that they recently tried to attack using migrants as human pawns, I don’t see a reason to have sympathy for the state.
Individuals who didn’t support those attacks and want to work together, sure. The state as an aggregate entity? Absolutely not.
"I sympathize with the victims of Hurricane Sandy and believe that those who purchased flood insurance should have their claims paid. At the same time, allowing the program to increase its debt by another $9.7 billion with no plan to offset the spending with cuts elsewhere is not fiscally responsible," DeSantis said in a statement.
I mean, I live there and the average costal Floridian in my area is completely deaf to the risks and what’s coming with climate change. The whole thing is a raging party on the Timucua native burial grounds. I watched dozens of new million dollar houses built in obvious flood zones over the past few years near me. They are all waist deep in floodwater. It’s not an “I told you so” moment at all. It’s like the inevitability of rain coming right on schedule.
Everyone kept asking me when I was going to buy a house and telling me how much money I was going to make on the appreciation and it was all so preposterous, like a bitcoin moon fantasy. In all likelihood, within my lifetime my part of Florida will return to the sea from whence it came. I have always seen the floodwaters because they have always been there. Now everyone else can see them too.
Florida, as a state, doesn't vote the correct, HN/tech crowd, way. Therefore, they should be ostracized and ridiculed with every chance given. Every Floridian is sub-human.
If you build on the florida coast, surely you should expect a Cat 4 hurricane every couple of years right? Like, why is that an incredible ask? I have empathy for the loss of life, I always do, but I do NOT have empathy for the same people coming hat in hand to the federal treasury asking for more public funds for the same thing that happens every few years and for the same thing they have openly fought.
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[ 8.0 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadWith that sort of model they might as well build permanent cement pads sith disposable houses constructed on top
So $2500/person isn't a terribly useful number when some people will be done after 5 minutes and $5 of repairs, and others need to rebuild or move.
“Federal Reserve notes are not redeemable in gold, silver or any other commodity, and receive no backing by anything. This has been the case since 1933. The notes have no value for themselves, but for what they will buy. In another sense, because they are legal tender, Federal Reserve notes are "backed" by all the goods and services in the economy.”
This would put it as either the third or fourth costliest hurricane in the US (first table is inflation adjusted). Not sure that's cheap.
If catastrophic hurricanes are really going to happen every 10 years, should the federal government be subsidizing the coastal lifestyle and building you a new house each time?
Consider: 100B/100M taxpayers = $1000 per person. Can you really say that the average citizen of Wyoming should pony up $100 a year so Floridians can build up against the unsheltered sea instead a few miles inland?
No.
Unlike other subsidies there is no greater economic/societal good created from people having their costal homes. And, unlike other disaster situations, hurricanes in that region are an outright guarantee.
Also, this is just going to keep getting worse with climate change.
I agree with Calgary. People are free to live there, but not on my dime.
If you're talking about the town of High River/the Highwood River/the Beachwood estates and Wallaceville, it was about 102 houses out of 250 eligible and a couple hundred more affected. All but 14 lots were explicitly not up for development, at any risk; Beachwood and Wallaceville are being renaturalized as a floodplain and High River's removing infrastructure. The houses that weren't destroyed, demolished, or auctioned off to be moved are still there and uninhabited.[1]
Other damaged neighborhoods that were bought out got tossed around between provincial governments for eight years until High River bought them back for redevelopment.[2] There are regulations - the Floodway Development Regulation in particular - against developing floodways, but haven't been promulgated to prevent, or even disincentivize, development.[3][4] (If they had been, parts of Fort McMurray rebuilt after the 2016 wildfires that then flooded in 2020 wouldn't have been rebuilt in the first place.)[5]
The province also wouldn't fund buyouts of other flood-risk properties downstream of High River.[6] (Indeed, the High River bailout was OVERfunded, and High River sent money back to the county in January.)[7]
[1] https://www.highriveronline.com/articles/beachwood-naturaliz...
[2] https://www.highriveronline.com/articles/province-and-high-r...
[3] https://www.evabogdan.ca/uploads/8/1/4/0/81403352/bogdan_ben...
[4] https://era.library.ualberta.ca/items/5da26123-e3df-45b8-a92...
[5] https://theconversation.com/fort-mcmurrays-flood-disaster-wa...
[6] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/foothills-county-floo...
[7] https://www.highriveronline.com/articles/high-river-excess-f...
When a person engages in some risky activity but offloads some of the risk onto others, they'll continue doing that activity more than they otherwise would.
Climate change really doesn't have an opinion on this. Here's a paper from the EPA:
"What Climate Change Means for Puerto Rico"
https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/sites/production/files...
As someone who believes climate change is fact, if I had the economic mobility to move my life away from such an area I would. Sorry if this seems harsh, but people much smarter than me agree that these areas are going to be prone to worse and worse conditions in the coming decades.
That’s your decision, which is distinct from whether other Americans should subsidize the economic consequence of your decision.
a) Build the property to withstand all but 1-2 statistically expected hurricanes within that N year period. This is possible, it's just costly.
b) You don't get public funds
c) You get private insurance
d) You don't build
Say goodbye to Pakistan.
I'd love to see the HN crowd that is championing the premise stand up and proclaim all the areas of the globe that people should no longer be allowed to live, huge swaths of which will be in hyper impoverished areas of India, China, Pakistan. They won't dare.
Who's talking about allowing anything? The debate is about whether these people will be subsidised.
Admittedly there's also grinding poverty in parts of Florida so I appreciate the comparison; that's a good hole in my argument.
Should we provide compensation for Floridians to move to safer areas? Yes.
Should we provide compensation for Pakistan for improved flood management? Yes.
Should Pakistanis or Floridians rebuild in the exact same places and the same ways where they've been building? No, unfortunately nobody gets that luxury. That's the horrible thing about climate change - we have very few options and they all have major downsides but we don't get to opt out. Florida's going to experience massive flooding regularly and Pakistan will face the same, and either populations in both areas adapt in some fashion (build for floods or move) or continue to experience mass devastation when the inevitable occurs.
I don't get to dictate where people live any more than I get to dictate where the flood waters go. It's heartbreaking but that's the world we're stuck in.
Much of the housing was built in the 50s. It was definitely low quality, including such issues as bad electrical grounding and about as many cockroaches there are stars above. At least, that's how I felt as a kid, anyways.
But, it was made of concrete and had steel storm doors. The biggest issue for us was flooding (we were at the bottom of a hill) but newer structures tended to be on stilts or have a sacrificial first floor. This was true both on and off base.
Rents off base apparently are pretty cheap by US standards. And this is with a climate akin to that of Hawaii with beaches nearby.
So it's possible to build well and be cheap.
No doubt with N carefully calibrated to depopulate the parts of the country you don't like, but not the part you live in.
The west coast has too many earthquakes, depopulate it!
N is carefully calibrated by actuaries with hard data. Insurance companies stopped offering flood insurance to much of Florida decades ago - they're now covered by a federally subsidized program called the NFIP that has about five million policies. It has been a money pit since 2004 for obvious reasons.
California got plenty of federal funds to rebuild after the Northridge quake and what did the state do? It spent the next four years improving building codes - benefiting the entire country - and plowed the money into seismic retrofits. When >90% of home insurers pulled out, instead of depending on a federal program, the state created the California Earthquake Authority which is almost entirely privately funded within the state. I have no doubt the next big earthquake will require federal assistance but there hasn't been a major incident in nearly thirty years and the state, insurers, and homeowners have done a lot to mitigate future catastrophe.
The same thing is happening now in California with wildfires: many people in rural areas can only get insurance through the California FAIR Plan. The big difference is that the FAIR Plan is funded entirely through premiums and state funds. Very little if any federal funding goes to it because Trump turned it into a hot button issue just a few years ago. That's the one to watch out for, not earthquakes.
Edit: phrasing
If they cannot be safely built upon, sure. Same reason no one builds houses on the edge of Kilauea's active craters. Hurricane-resistant construction is possible, it's just more expensive. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/14/us/hurricane-michael-flor...
However because it's all we know, it seems that the real absurdity would be the government designating these sites as 'no-build' zones-- or at least FEMA washing their hands of any damage that should happen to these sites.
This should be a wakeup call that many aspects of our current way of life are unsustainable, not that it's just standard operating procedure to rebuild from the ground up every 20 years only for everything to be washed away again.
Sanibel Island has 7,821 housing units at an average density of 454.6 per square mile.
Median sales price of the homes in 2021 was $1.64M, average price was similar.
So a rough approximation of the value of the homes on the island alone is $12Bn. I am not sure how you would translate that into damage costs, but in a scenario of total destruction then $12B would be lost.
I have no real evidence other than visiting Ft Myers and Naples a few times, but I can tell you there is (was) a lot of very valuable property right next to the ocean. I don't doubt that if you look at the total distribution of damages that there is a long tail of less severe damage as you go inland, but the conservative estimates from my napkin math shows that it's likely a significant number (over ten billion) occurred just from properties on the small stretch of coastline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanibel,_Florida https://sanibelrealestateguide.com/average-price-homes/
For example, here is one house for sale on the water in Naples (https://www.trulia.com/p/fl/naples/2331-crayton-rd-naples-fl...). 3 beds, 2 baths, 2k sqft on a little over 0.25 acres. $3.5M
Just 7 miles away is this house (https://www.trulia.com/p/fl/naples/5241-hunter-blvd-naples-f...), 4 beds, 2 baths, 2.25k sqft on 0.25 acres. $625K.
I sincerely doubt the cost to replace the first home is 6x the second. And then there's this one (https://www.trulia.com/p/fl/sebring/2124-gardenview-rd-sebri...), which is about as far from the coast as you can reasonably be in that part of florida, going for a mere $240k, and I doubt it's significantly more or less to replace than either of the previous two.
They should be allowed to live there as long as they want to fund it.
People in the Pacific states and the northeast are going to need to internalize that it isn't OK to use the Sun Belt as a relieve valve for their NIMBY policies, and the federal government might even need to take measures to disincentivize those states from exporting their populations to Gulf Coast swamps.
Yes. That makes sense to me.
What's the downside?
Returning all of the current privately owned beachfront to natural habitat would be absolutely glorious. We can make exceptions for public facilities serving the greater good, like ports.
There is also a difference between "my roof was damaged by high wind" repairs and "my house and everything I own floated away due to storm surge" repairs. I'm not trying to speak for OP, but typically the style of "2 and then done" plans are for the latter style of damage (where the damage is into the low-mid 6 figures), not the former (where damage is low-mid 5 figures).
We've been treating these areas as fit for habitation and we're watching in realtime as they become uninhabitable. While it may have been more tolerable to live in these regions in the last century when global temperatures were lower we're at an inflection point; we're going be forced to concede spaces as too dangerous for regular habitation because storms are only going to increase in severity and frequency.
As a society we have a few options: 1, we continue to rebuild and pay the costs until it becomes completely cost prohibitive; 2, dramatically rethink how we build in the area and construct buildings that can cope with several feet of storm surges; or 3, accept reality and begin the process of resettling people in areas that won't be submerged in 100 years. It's likely that we're going to pursue option 1 for the next 10-30 years because collective change is hard but we ought to start having these conversations well in advance of insurance companies writing off all of Florida as uninsurable.
This doesn't even begin to touch on the benefits of allowing areas to revert to wetlands, but considering that they act as excellent buffers from the storms we're observing as well as carbon sinks, but it's worth stating that retreating from these areas makes more sense on ecological and financial grounds.
Having those coasts be parks with hundreds of miles of low-impact infrastructure like hiking/biking/walking paths, maybe simple low-key restaurants that aren't a big deal to rebuild every decade, etc.
Put all the heavier infrastructure like housing developments a few miles inland. Then everyone can enjoy these idyllic beach lands a little farther from all the buzz of cities. Everyone in the city can still easily go to the coastline-spanning megapark, but now the beach isn't lined with gaudy condos.
Sign me up!
What you’re looking at is anybody potentially within 30ft of sea level where any contiguous <30ft elevation is connected to water. I’ve known people 20 miles inland to be flooded by storm surges because they lived near a river, and the hurricane pushed all the water up the river.
The wind is not as big a concern, but also still does a lot of damage. During one major hurricane I evacuated 150 miles inland and still didn’t have power for a week. One person in the town I evacuated to was killed by a falling tree.
But from some of the pictures I've seen, you do have some neighborhoods where one side is slightly higher than the other side and thus survived much better. Maybe some of those houses shouldn't have been built, and berms strategically placed and other things. One house not being built may under some circumstances prevent multiple other houses from being destroyed down the road. This seems like a low hanging fruit kind of thing if the priorities are there, before getting into beefing up infrastructure and more expensive options.
The amount of damage from hurricanes is trending higher and higher as time goes on, so something has to give and currently it seems federal flood insurance is doing all the giving.
Some of this adaptation is FEMA-subsidized: anyone whose house has been flooded twice in ten years can apply for a $50k grant toward the lift. Federal flood insurance may be doing much of the giving, but around here at least it's happening in a way that improves long term resilience.
It is frustrating to be sending piles of money to these states every year, which they then waste on political stunts like flying legal immigrants to other states, instead of taking care of their citizens, or maybe investing in climate hardening.
And then they're completely unprepared for cold weather, hot weather, wet weather, dry weather, ... and say things like "Nobody knew ___ could be so complicated."
I really don't mind my tax dollars going to these states, but I don't want my tax dollars to be wasted, or worse yet, spent to hurt people on purpose.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/federal-spe...
California received the lowest compared to how much California paid the federal government. Florida is ranked in the middle.
Although, I clicked on the source and data is from 2013 so I wish I had found a more recent source.
https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-...
https://rockinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Balance-of-P... Table 12B
I say Florida a lot because I lived there up until recently, I can't speak for other states.
An assertion is that money is fungible, so $12mln spent on a stunt in Texas could have been spent on breakwaters, infill, or to move less stable homes from the immediate coast. (Or to have more building inspection before Surfside's incident)
I get that HN often swings conservative, but I gotta believe if we were in these folk's shoes some of us would be seeking a better life for ourselves through asylum in America.
That said, anyone who doesn't understand the undertone here, that the great majority will be denied asylum, that a great number are claiming asylum in a way that is coached/contrived/embellished, or that they couldn't have stopped and claimed asylum in another nation along the way (such as Mexico) is just completely naive. A great number of poeple here are game the system. That's fine, whatever, fuck borders, I'm on board. But I'm gonna call a spade a spade. A great number are here to play the system, often with lies, and the idea that all these people are 'acting lawfully' is not only factually incorrect I assert you KNOW it is factually incorrect and use it here as propaganda. In fact it is not lawful to lie to federal authorities in your asylum claim, but many are doing it.
These are the things many of us know, but aren't supposed to say out loud in some polite circles.
I applaud their efforts, but I aint no fool.
You're spending the majority of your comment saying "great numbers" of these folks are claiming asylum in bad-faith. You imply "great numbers" of them are here to game/play the system. You call a "great number" of them liars. You imply that they're criminals (not acting lawfully).
> I applaud their efforts
No you don't. You're painting "great numbers" of these people out to be untrustworthy to the point of preemptively calling them criminals.
---
> and the idea that all these people are 'acting lawfully' is not only factually incorrect I assert you KNOW it is factually incorrect and use it here as propaganda
Instead of asserting what I know, maybe provide sources for your argument. I take it as an outright aggression toward me that you posit I am spreading propaganda.
Regardless. I rebut:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014704117
> We find that undocumented immigrants have substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony offenses. Relative to undocumented immigrants, US-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes.
It's common sense that if you're looking to immigrate somewhere that you're not out there looking to break the law. Every study I have come across in regards to this seems to have similar outcomes. They know if they break the law they will likely be deported; and they typically act accordingly because they want to live, work, and raise their families in America.
I take great issue with you claiming I'm spreading propaganda. In good-faith I assure you, I am not.
I understand 'bad-faith' is practically a requirement for many people claiming asylum. I get it.
I readily acknowledge they are generally more law abiding. I only contend that a great number of 'asylum seekers' are gaming the system. I find that perfectly moral, but I aint no fool about what's happening.
>Every study I have come across
The (2/2.5/4x) you cite from the study is undocumented immigrants, not people formally documented as asylum seekers and permitted into the country.
I appreciate you taking issue with my claims. Hopefully this feedback correct your behavior.
What behavior?
They want jobs.
For some reason you keep railing against illegal immigrants instead of actually engaging in productive discussion.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23030681-000-the-trut...
“The passport as an instrument of state regulation was born of the French revolution of 1789. At first, ordinary people were issued passes to control internal movement, especially to Paris. But after the king tried to escape, and foreign aristocrats attacked the revolution, the authorities started requiring such papers for exit and entry to the country. The revolution created one of the world’s first “nation-states”, defined by the “national” identity of its people rather than its monarchs’ claims.”
“But as the industrial revolution snowballed in the 19th century, there was pressure to allow free movement of all the factors of production – money, trade *and labour*. Passport requirements were widely relaxed across Europe — in 1872, the British foreign secretary, Earl Granville, even wrote: “all foreigners have the unrestricted right of entrance into and residence in this country”. The situation was similar in North America.”
https://fee.org/articles/passports-were-a-temporary-war-meas...
“In 1947, the first problem considered at an expert meeting preparing for the UN World Conference on Passports and Frontier Formalities was “the possibility of a return to the regime which existed before 1914 involving as a general rule the abolition of any requirement that travelers should carry passports.””
Under "2 and done", do you restore critical port infrastructure to dunes if they get destroyed by a hurricane twice? Port infrastructure can't exist on its own, it needs a community behind it which needs schools, parks, houses, etc.
This is a problem that the insurance industry will need figure out so they can price risk to the area that's wiped out, the way the home is constructed, etc.
In my mind the debate is how FEMA subsidies will distort the insurance markets. Perhaps they could serve as a "2 and done" re-re-insurance provider?
A great counterpoint to this argument is that an insurance oligopoly might "price gouge" after a big event like Ian, which could kill the community that's needed to support the vital port infrastructure. Ultimately if FEMA subsidies were removed from the picture, shipping costs would increase to price in the risk of hurricanes for the area. Either way we're all paying for it somehow.
And thus California has very-high deductible insurance coverage in areas that are especially susceptible to such disasters, because it IS an inevitable risk that such an event will happen. Florida should do the same, as their "catastrophic disaster" is annual.
Geraldo Rivera did a special on it many years ago. He lost his house. Didn’t cost him a dime. Was planning on rebuilding due to cheap insurance. Which he seemed to find ridiculous.
Can we please not do this flamewar thing? Asylum seekers are technically neither legal nor illegal immigrants yet, but everyone knows this will cause an argument that's completely unrelated to the article.
Sorry, but it's a bad look.
Yeah wouldn't mind losing this $120B if they had saved that $600k, amirite?
FEMA subsidizes all kinds of wealthy people, Florida MAGAs and NYC Davosers alike.
As with many others here, I pay a great deal of taxes, by any measure. I do not want my contribution (_our_ contributions) to be used to hurt people for the purpose of hurting people.
This is not a "flamewar thing". DeSantis chose to hurt people to accrue power to himself. Given the gifts and the fortune that we have inherited, if we cannot speak truth to power, then it would be better had we never been born.
Sorry, not sorry?
Just abandon the whole thing as a sacrifice zone? How exactly are you going to do any international shipping? Get goods down the Mississippi? Refine half the gasoline the country uses?
People don't live in hurricane zones because it's fun. People live there because that's where the jobs are. Many of them aren't bullshit jobs, and are far more critical to life and limb than yet another dogwalking mobile app.
People absolutely live in Florida for that reason; people flock there for retirement.
> Under that rule, what exactly is your plan for replacing all the life-critical logistics infrastructure across the entire Gulf coast?
Strict building codes, no more building below sea level as with New Orleans. Even a few miles from the ocean can often be enough to change "my house swam away" into "we had some trees downed".
Should parts of CA or other earthquake prone areas be labelled uninhabitable?
What about areas where forest fires are routine?
Flood prone areas? Tornado prone areas? High UV? Poor air quality?
It makes no sense whatsoever to dictate that people cannot live on the coasts due to natural disasters which happen everywhere, all the time.
Frankly, being told where to live is more garish than being told what to think and what to say.
My response was to this comment at the top, where it was, explicitly and objectively, supporting a policy that dictates where people should live.
Folks have had their houses rebuilt with other people's money really often - and build it in the exact same spot, because the feds will come build it again. Even though it's going to get destroyed, again.
Entire communities, and their economic output, will vanish. A good example are communities whose entire existence is owed to revenue generated by commercial fishing. What do you do with all the fishermen who don't know any other line of work?
Teach them to code?
Long Island, NY is prone to flooding and wind-damage from hurricanes and nor'easters. Areas are routinely destroyed or heavily damaged. Notable years are 1950, 1954, 1960, 1986, and 1999.
Asheville, NC is prone to flooding, land & rock slides, and the occasional earthquake. It is probably one of the state's most natural wonders, and the country-side a lovely place to live.
During periods of heavy rain and tropical events, downtown NYC floods the subways and streets and doing expensive salt water damage.
I know of no place on earth that is without some susceptibility to natural disaster. So where do we draw the line?
Effectively, such a rule would define these and other places as uninhabitable and render them ineligible for both commercial insurance and federal disaster aid. That seems so foolish and counter to our tradition as a nation. Such a rule would see the splintering and end to many long-standing communities.
If the concern is cost, you may want to turn your attention to discretionary federal expenditures.
Surely we can find places to cut bloat, pork, and wasteful spending, particularly in areas that range from nothing to very-little to do with the United States, her citizens, or their needs and emergencies that are a part of living on planet earth.
It is almost like that 75 billion we printed for Zelenskyy could have been used to help Americans.
Lastly, where does it end? How do we define the formula for making these rules, and who gets the define and apply that formula? Best case scenario, if this rule was a thing, you'd be looking at consolidating large parts of American society into more 'manageable' locations and mega cities, which were decreed as somehow having the least amount of risk, and lowest possible expense...
...in a vain attempt at avoiding the risk and expenditures of natural disasters?
...that happen everywhere?
...routinely.
It just seems foolish when you work through it to a practical end.
Stop paying for them to keep rebuilding the house, give them the money to move.
>I know of no place on earth that is without some susceptibility to natural disaster. So where do we draw the line?
OP proposed twice, you objected. I think twice with no time horizon isn't useful. Twice in 50 years seems reasonable for someone who lives in a 100 year flood plain.
But these flood plains are growing with climate change. Storms are getting worse and more frequent. Just continuing to pay to rebuild is not the answer.
It's clearly not explicit or objective. "If you choose to live here you will not receive aid when your house is knocked down in a hurricane" is so clearly not the same as "You can not legally live here".
Are you saying that unmitigated flood prone areas _should_ be habitable? And the cost of that underwritten with public funds?
There are people who have their house rebuilt every ~15 years from hurricanes with public funds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Flood_Insurance_Progr...
>The NFIP is managed and administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) through the Federal Insurance and Mitigation Administration (FIMA).[1] The program is designed to provide an insurance alternative to disaster assistance to meet the escalating costs of repairing damage to buildings and their contents caused by floods.[2] As of August 2017, the program insured about 5 million homes (down from about 5.5 million homes in April 2010), the majority of which are in Texas and Florida.[3][4] The cost of the insurance program was fully covered by its premiums until the end of 2004, but it has had to steadily borrow funds since, primarily due to Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, accumulating $25 billion of debt by August 2017.[3][5] In October 2017, Congress cancelled $16 billion of NFIP debt, making it possible for the program to pay claims. The NFIP owes $20.525 billion to the U.S. as of December 2020.[6]
I think being that you're so ruggedly individualistic, maybe pull yourself up by your bootstraps and pay for your own repairs?
If you're footing the bill for fair market insurance, those places quickly get returned to the environment because it makes no economic sense to build there. Or it does, and the federal government still doesn't have to pay for it.
Major earthquakes happen an order of magnitude less frequently than major storms - but there's merit to reconsidering how much infrastructure we build right next to fault lines. So, possibly?
> What about areas where forest fires are routine?
Without appropriate fire breaks or building construction, possibly - if your house and property isn't constructed to survive a wildfire, then it's _going_ to burn. We can either adapt now or pay much higher costs later.
> Flood prone areas?
Oh jeez, yes, the fact that we build in flood plains is absolutely bonkers.
> Tornado prone areas?
Maybe, but it's a much lower risk than hurricanes. We really need to account for risks during building construction; our current approaches aren't working that well.
> High UV?
High UV is a bummer, not an repeated existential risk to all inhabitants.
> Poor air quality?
Poor air quality is also a bummer but is something we have more control over. Similar to high UV, poor air quality doesn't represent a regular, frequent, unavoidable, catastrophic risk to all of the inhabitants and all property in the vicinity.
> It makes no sense whatsoever to dictate that people cannot live on the coasts due to natural disasters which happen everywhere, all the time.
It makes even less sense to build in areas that are all but guaranteed to be destroyed several times per century. If you can build infrastructure that'll actually last or are willing to accept all liability when the inevitable occurs then by all means, build your house on stilts and cover the cost of reconstruction. But beyond freedom of choice, I don't understand why we think it's okay to assume obvious risk and expect society to provide compensation for a risk that's been known for decades if not centuries.
Does it matter if a place gets a powerful earthquake every 5 years or 20 years?
The entire premise of the suggestion is simply nonsense.
>It makes even less sense to build in areas that are all but guaranteed to be destroyed several times per century.
More people are killed in high crime areas than in storm prone areas, and they are killed daily.
Do we tell people they can't live there, either?
If you don't take any risk then you are not really living.
Free market insurance actuaries.
>Does it matter if a place gets a powerful earthquake every 5 years or 20 years?
Yes, of course.
>The entire premise of the suggestion is simply nonsense.
No, just needs more science and economics math on what makes sense and are reasonable lines to draw.
> More people are killed in high crime areas than in storm prone areas, and they are killed daily.
Do you have stats that back this up on a per capita basis?
> Do we tell people they can't live there, either?
If you can ascertain that the above is true per capita and that the federal government is footing the bill through social security survivorship benefits, maybe. The objection is not that people can't live and where they want - it's that they expect someone else to subsidize it.
Life insurance takes into account where you live. In non-FEMA flood insurance areas, flood insurance is significantly more expensive.
>If you don't take any risk then you are not really living.
The issue is they aren't taking risks - they're socializing their risks onto people who don't live in flood zones.
If they were actually taking the risk of having to rebuild, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
March 26, 1872. Lone Pine
April 18, 1906. San Francisco
June 29, 1925. Santa Barbara
March 10, 1933. Long Beach
July 21, 1952. Kern County/Tehachapi
March 22, 1957. San Francisco and Daly City
March 27, 1964. Crescent City
Feb. 9, 1971 San Fernando
Oct. 1, 1987 Whittier
Oct. 18, 1989 Loma Prieta
April 25, 1992 Petrolia
June 28, 1992 Landers
Jan. 17, 1994 Northridge
Dec. 22, 2003 San Simeon
Aug. 24, 2014 Napa
It seems that large parts of California are subject to ground shaking that is destructive occurring two or more times per decade with some variability.
Is it really time to take away their insurance and disaster aid?
1906 San Francisco
1911 San Francisco
1913 San Francisco
1922 San Francisco
1928 San Francisco
... then you 're in the neighborhood of what parts of Florida have been getting.
It's not that the whole state keeps getting hit by hurricanes. It's that individual locations have been hit multiple times in a decade. So no, California is not comparable.
A lot of federal disaster aid is just Californian's own money being used to help them when needed. This is true for other states like NY.
Lastly, California does indeed offer a very high deductible form of earthquake insurance, and it isn't federally subsidized like FEMA is.
New York got hit bad with Sandy. Thirty years or so and we might level it too.
It turns out that with climate change, nothing is going to be safe. And with the pacific shelf, we will always have that as an issue too.
Public funds must no longer be allocated to clearing snow from roads every year just because selfish people decide to live in NYC.
All this money is a straight up handout to allow some specific people to keep getting a high value lifestyle on someone else's dime.
This is in addition to hurricane funds, the most recent of which was just last year in 2021.
And while FL has received significantly more FEMA funds than NY[2] (6.8B vs 405M), NY likewise receives significantly more than say their neighbor VT (56M) or far away MT (a mere 11M). Is all the money spent in NY likewise a "straight up handout to allow some specific people to keep getting a high value lifestyle on someone else's dime"?
[1]: https://www.fema.gov/locations/new%20york#declared-disasters [2]: https://www.fema.gov/emergency-managers/national-preparednes...
In Europe, rivers are often surrounded by parkland on either side as they flow through cities, such as the Elbe in Dresden. It's gorgeous public space, which benefits everyone, but it also is there for another reason -- the river floods fairly regularly, and so by leaving that as uninhabited park space the floods can happen without causing too much damage.
If you want a map of areas likely to be damaged by hurricanes in the next 10/20/50 years then it's basically the entire coast of Florida.
In NYC, after Sandy, a new map with vastly expanded zones was published. Within a day or two, it was replaced with one with significantly reduced zones. I don't know that this was in response to political pressure...
Anyone who is keeping up on climate change research and anyone with any sense knows it's just not wise to invest in property on the Florida coast unless you do so knowing that at anytime your home could be washed away.
You have to be willfully ignorant to think it's a good idea to move to those areas.
I can see why you would want to move closer to family, but did you really not believe that the Fort Myers area could be destroyed at anytime from a major hurricane? Do you really think that sea level rise (which is more about its impact on storm surges) coupled with increasingly more powerful hurricanes is not a problem in the near term? Are you unaware that GHGs in the atmosphere are accelerating, there is no evidence that warming will stop soon, and plenty to suggest that things will increasingly get worse in the near term?
After floods or wildfires or tornadoes or earthquakes, you'll see some buildings are a pile of rubble and others just need brushed off.
These locales should be making these requirements a part of their building codes. But I suspect they are addicted to FEMA money and actually prefer having local stimulus in their economies every few years.
So, does my impression accord at all with reality? Are apartment blocks, corporate and government buildings really more robust and better sited or is this just a misleading impression caused by the images that are easily available?
[1] https://earth.google.com/web/@27.81056621,-82.6048196,1.6031... [2] https://earth.google.com/web/@26.58803101,-81.96774613,5.888...
As a point of comparison, however, up here in northern Illinois, you can get 2-3x the replacement coverage from a name-brand national insurance company for that price. And we do have tornado risk.
Which is to say that your insurance is expensive, but I wouldn't call it a barrier to living there. Much like property taxes - if you saw my bill, you'd probably fall out of your chair. Turns out the total cost is high everywhere. ;)
It still doesn't save your home if you build at 5ft above sea level and a hurricane brings 15ft of storm surge.
Running a functioning insurance?
If you want to pay rates which allow them to rebuild your home for you every ten years (annual rate = your home's cost / 10), I'm sure they'd be more than happy to do it and collect their small profit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Flood_Insurance_Progr...
>As of August 2017, the program insured about 5 million homes (down from about 5.5 million homes in April 2010), the majority of which are in Texas and Florida.[3][4] The cost of the insurance program was fully covered by its premiums until the end of 2004, but it has had to steadily borrow funds since, primarily due to Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, accumulating $25 billion of debt by August 2017.[3][5] In October 2017, Congress cancelled $16 billion of NFIP debt, making it possible for the program to pay claims. The NFIP owes $20.525 billion to the U.S. as of December 2020.[6]
If I built a house that could not manage a foot of snow on it's roof in Maine without collapsing, and every year it collapsed got a big check from the feds to rebuild the exact same structure in the exact same place, surely someone would be willing to tell me I'm being stupid?
It's literally Einstein's definition of "insanity"
Texas and Florida might need changes, but losses from Sandy aren’t the reason.
That definition of insanity was not invented by Einstein, nor did he ever say it.
Not sure about the US but in Australia flood insurance has skyrocketed nationwide after the last few years of extreme flood events, even people living on the top of hills pay more for general policies.
According to McKinsey non-hurricane/weather events will skyrocket from ~20-40/year to almost 250/year causing constant water damage. Let alone from hurricanes like Ian or Irma.
This is a problem for golf courses, lawn care, and agriculture: not humans—at least not anytime in the foreseeable future.
Locals complain about it because it's expensive, and because the resulting coastal house on concrete stilts isn't aesthetically pleasing. But it's the only rational thing to do in 2022 if you want sustainable coastal development.
In Florida, where things are more "laissez faire", things may be bit different.
This likely is making for a good deal of misaligned incentives, where public disaster relief expenses could be much less if building codes were raised in these areas, but such change is likely to be slow in coming and we should expect the status quo to continue for some time.
Individuals who didn’t support those attacks and want to work together, sure. The state as an aggregate entity? Absolutely not.
https://www.tampabay.com/content/new-reps-ron-desantis-ted-y...
Everyone kept asking me when I was going to buy a house and telling me how much money I was going to make on the appreciation and it was all so preposterous, like a bitcoin moon fantasy. In all likelihood, within my lifetime my part of Florida will return to the sea from whence it came. I have always seen the floodwaters because they have always been there. Now everyone else can see them too.
Build better, plan better, or leave.
Economic loss means anything not transacting is counted.
Disney, Universal, Sea World closed for a few days? "economic loss"
Joes house on the beach: "damage"
I don't have access to the article, but I imagine half of this amount is just the first category, since Florida is a tourism state.
That being said the government should stop covering beach front property, either get private insurance at a fair price or don't build at all.