edit: also it's worth considering that the worse the land in terms of risk, the poorer the people who will be forced to live there because they were priced out of everything else. with climate change accelerating this will increasingly be a factor, and it is unconscionable to expect those people to bear the burden of insurance themselves. this is what a civilisation is for.
What we call a civilization should have education at least equivalent to a seven year old sand castle architect. Not hubris so large we go broke attempting to occupy the waterspouts of the world just because there’s pipe and cable there.
How do you fix that, short of moving the entire town (which is going to cost almost as much as rebuilding it)? The dunce that established the town is long dead, and his relatives probably moved away to better pastures.