I always found it crazy that flood insurance would pay people to rebuild... on a flood plain. I've read stories where people rebuild once a decade or so. Seems clearly irrational and people living outside of floodplains should subsidize those that don't.

Similarly if you are high risk of fires or earthquakes you should pay a premium on insurance and that insurance should depend on reasonable mitigations. A friend moved into high risk area and they required a clear area near the house and a rooftop watering system to get the insurance that was required to get the home loan.

So yes, the country should either pay for mitigation (levees, fire control, earthquake resistant building costs etc) where it makes sense or ban developments in high risk areas. Paying for people to live below ocean level makes no sense.

You do for fire risk and standard homeowners insurance doesn't cover earthquakes, you need a separate policy, which is non-free, so you are clearly paying a premium for it.

Any insurance company that is willing to be represented by agents too lazy too verify a home is a fire waiting to happen is gonna lose money big time. It seems the logical approach to handling house in a wildfire prone area orvavflood plain would be to simply charge stupid high rates or not offer the insurance at all.

Which is exactly what insurance companies do. It is usually very difficult to get flood insurance in a flood plain. Rather than taking that as a clue that people shouldn't live there, all too often, the government steps in to subsidise the risk. I don't want to over simplify, things are complicated and sometimes it is appropriate to subsidise such risk, but sometimes it is not.

Well, Amsterdam is currently 2 meters below sea level already and it will be pretty interesting to see what happens to New Amsterdam, I mean, York. For one thing, Manhatten is essentially floating already, they have to pump it out continuously otherwise it sinks.

edit - ok, around sea level, it isn't at 2 meters below. I stupidly thought google would be correct.

New Orleans seems to be arguing that it only makes sense if 75% of it is paid by someone else... forever.

Depending on your point of view maybe half the world did, one way or another. Though I really shouldn't point fingers, being British.

Diverse responsibilities are divided between county, water board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board_(Netherlands) , province, and the "federal" government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate-General_for_Public... .

Nowadays, mostly tourists. But, they come willingly to be fleeced, being priggish.

Small parts of Amsterdam are that low. Most of the city is above sea level and the main parts are several to 10s of meters higher.

Aka if we priced insurance at the right level. You'd likely see people stop buying homes on some of these flood plains. As insruance would cost too much.

"Currently, the NFIP’s debt totals $24.6 billion, nearly six times the program’s total annual receipts of $4.3 billion"

https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/115th-congress-2017-2018/re...

And Planet Money, as always, has a great take:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/09/29/554603161/epis...

80% of the policies (the non-subsidized ones) are thought to be actuarially sound, barring unintended consequences of out-of-date flood maps.

So, I'm not terribly surprised. Were it operating like a traditional insurer, it might even be doing fine (especially if it had some other reforms such as eliminating or having better oversight over WYO policies).

We knock stuff down and change or rebuild it all the time, there’s no such thing as permanent against the weather. Or just changing tastes and technology, I mean indoor plumbing is less than 100 years old. Shit changes.

Huh? The house I grew up in was built in 1895 and had plumbing from the start.

It looks like rich people started getting indoor plumbing in the early 1800s (the White House got it in 1833) and it was widespread in new construction by the end of the century.

Isolated rural houses often much later.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/att-a...

I have family in southern/central Ohio and, while they've always been a risk, there has been a marked uptick in the occurrence of tornadoes. Xenia, OH very famously has been hit multiple times by serious tornadoes. Where my parents are, where I did most of my growing up, in southeastern Ohio, is a little safer because of the Appalachian foothills, but I fondly remember the tornado sirens blaring every Wednesday at noon during the spring, summer, and fall.

A friend of mine from high school, who is a meteorologist and storm chaser today, was telling me the last time that we spoke that tornado alley is potentially / actually shifting eastward over time. I haven't tried to verify what he was saying, because I trust him given his career choices, but it does seem to bear out from the anecdata that I have available.

It seems pretty hard to account for this in advance.

It's one matter to make insurance really expensive due to very obvious risk or make other pricing adjustments based on projections and quite another to axe a city.

In reality the risk of loss across the region is not nearly as high as implied.

If the price of the insurance was so high that it was a second mortgage, then that would still devastate real estate prices and still cause economic decline in the region.

We have words for these things because they've been threats since the dawn of time - nowhere has ever been especially safe safe from things going horribly wrong. The biggest problem always has been and will remain a lack of preparedness by communities for disasters.

[0] https://www.c2es.org/content/hurricanes-and-climate-change/