> 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.

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.

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

Didn't Key West do this also, or something similar?

> 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]

[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...