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...
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Who's talking about allowing anything? The debate is about whether these people will be subsidised.
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.
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).
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.