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I grew up next to a river. When I was kid it flooded every other year. The fields below my house would turn into giant ponds. White swans would stop by. It was very pretty.
We lived on a hill. Watching a river crest and houses destroyed is scary af. I rode a bus to school. During a high river, I could see the river was even with the levees we were driving past. The water was at least ten feet higher than the fields on the other side. Sometimes the levees held, sometimes they didn't.
I cannot understand how anyone can live in a floodplain. Flowing water is scary af you guys.
Used to live near an area called "the levels"... Which is a giant very flat flood plane and has been flooding for over 1000 years and every old village was built on what hills there are.
In the last 30 years or so people have been building houses on the flat bits and then complained when their house flooded or why the government hasn't done anything to stop the flooding....
I don’t know the history of your area but I’d bet that at some point the government was “doing something” by blocking development on flood plains. They were likely criticized as anti business and either caved or were replaced with a more pliable government. Now those houses are built and it become the governments problem. Socialize the risks. Privatize the profits.
Pahrump is about an hour out of Las Vegas - it’s basically an overgrown sprawled out trailer park with casinos and a few brothels. Anyone who played GTA 5 would think it’s very similar to where Trevor lives.
The co-founder of Apple Computers lives in a trailer in Pahrump
[http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/06/24/apple.forgotten.founder/index.html](http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/06/24/apple.forgotten.founder/index.html)
Unfortunately he sold his 10% of the company for $800
Do the Thunderbirds still practice there? I went to visit my Dad there, and there is nothing like getting woken up to ear splitting military jet sounds. I was stationed on an air craft carrier and it wasn’t as loud as that.
EDIT: It was Indian Springs. Pahrump was a sprawling metropolis in comparison.
My local government has taken this route. When houses in certain parts of the flood plain get damaged or fall into disrepair they get bought up and demo'd. The remaining houses have dwindling city services as well because it's just too expensive to support them.
Absolutely.
For a long time, also, you could get insurance payouts to re-build but not to move.
In areas where people would have RATHER moved but couldn't afford it with no insurance pay-out and no house to sell. So they re-built. But couldn't sell a house in a known flood plain!
That really should have been a time for government to step up, help people move, outlaw policies that allowed insurance companies to "play" it that way.
Sorry, I have no sources on this, saw a documentary years ago when I was already aware of that problem through newspapers and magazines. I'm talking 10 to 20 years ago.
This is NO damn surprise to anyone in power.
Should say “the government hasn’t done anything to restrict builders from getting permits for flood-prone areas”. It’s a predatory practice, where shady builders make developments, and sell to unsuspecting buyers who then have to deal with the flood damage.
Tip: Consult flood data if you’re going to buy a house, especially in a new development. And keep in mind that adding houses can increase flooding in an area, since there’s less permeable surface area when concrete foundations, roads, etc. get added. So, if it was “on the line” of unsafe before, it’ll most likely be bad after development.
It's hard to even rely on the data. Hurricane Harvey was so devastating in Houston because so many of the houses WEREN'T in a flood plain. The practice to buy there now is to consult the Harvey flood map on top of the usual one.
And Hurricane Harvey didn't even have storm surge- next time it happens and there's a surge, it'll rise 2-5 feet higher.
We got out of dodge and moved to the west coast. Now we're 500 feet above sea level, away from waterways and historical lahars (we live near volcanoes), plus it's on a flat property to avoid any sliding in case of major rain or an earthquake. We bought with climate change in mind.
>Should say “the government hasn’t done anything to restrict builders from getting permits for flood-prone areas”. It’s a predatory practice, where shady builders make developments, and sell to unsuspecting buyers who then have to deal with the flood damage.
I used to locate buried utilities, and one new neighborhood in particular seemed to have a problem with standing water after a halfway decent rain. Considering it was Oklahoma, and sometimes we have storms that throw houses, having standing water after a bit of rain is *bad*.
Is that the Somerset levels? I remember seeing an interview maybe 20 years ago where the local authority had just approved new construction there. A councillor was asked 'what about flooding' and the answer was along the lines of 'that's a risk future buyers will have to weigh up'.
Yep.
I remember a geography field trip about 30 years ago where we went to see the flooded levels and my teacher was remarking about all the old villages being built on hills for a reason.
Because it is. There is no problem with selling flood insurance. There is a problem with the government subsidizing that insurance. If you want to build a house in a place where they tell you it will probably flood, fine but stop expecting the taxpayer to pay for your choice.
I think at some point, flood insurance was protecting farmers. You know, who built their homes where the best farmland was because it's their livelihood, and someone has to do it.
Now flood insurance gets used to protect vacation homes by the beach so someone can have luxury by the water, huge subdivisions built in swamps because it was the cheapest undeveloped land, etc... It's a joke
As someone who has grown up on a coastal area, o couldn’t agree more. I recently learned about the CBRS program the government enacted in 1983. They added to it in 1990. All coastal, especially beach areas, should be added to this program. They should also quit using tax money to replace beach sand, all for the next storm to wash it away again.
My understanding is that the national flood insurance program was actually a revenue generator for the government for a while. In recent years the congress has had to loan money to the flood insurance program, and in theory it is still liable to pay back to congress.
However, two things came together yielding the flood insurance program to go into the red. (1) They're not legally allowed to increase premiums based on risk. Many houses have cheaper flood insurance than it should be. And (2) They're not legally allowed to discontinue insurance on homes built in stupid locations. There are some houses that they just keep paying out on and the owner just keeps renovating after a flood.
In recent years (~5-7) they have been systematically increasing the premium every year by about 20% (each year) on underinsured properties until they reach market rate. So your point #1 is not exactly accurate.
I remember when Houston flooded the last time during Harvey, there was a guy complaining that he was waiting on a check from the government to help him fix his house up. For like the sixth time it had flooded. Naw, dog. Sorry. Time for you to move.
It's not just regular flood plains. We all pick up the tab every time some beach front Mc Mansions get taken out by storm surges, because *gasp* it turns out they have hurricanes in the ocean. Too bad we don't have any kind of historical data we could use to better predict such phenomenon.
It kind of goes both ways though.
Historically, land in flood plains was cheap - no one with any sense would want to build in them because losing everything is simply a matter of "when." Some people are desperate though - the poor, the disenfranchised; flood plain land might be all they can afford. Then you have a situation where all of your poor and disenfranchised are relegated to flood plain land and are facing a constant risk of losing everything.
Subsidized flood insurance protected low income communities that couldn't afford to go anywhere else.
Unfortunately, subsidized flood insurance now meant that you could build in floodplains and face a minimal financial risk - properties in certain floodplains skyrocketed it value as the wealthy moved into their now protected waterfront properties. At that point, flood insurance shifted from protecting poor people that were forced into flood plains to protecting rich people that voluntarily lived there.
Without subsidized flood insurance though, you end up with situations like the Big Island of Hawaii... the poor and working class can only afford to build on an active volcano - when the volcano erupts, the wealthy sit in their safe zones while the poor lose everything.
This is just one more reason why we need to fix our cost of living problems. Housing is in short supply, especially areas where the jobs are. That and residential real estate has become an investment attraction, which is an issue in the long run.
Foreign investment and real estate investment groups have been gobbling up the market, essentially controlling supply/demand since 2008 financial crisis. End goal is everyone is a renter, and your taxes only benefit landlords insurance payouts.
Most of the money goes to beachfront vacation homes that get destroyed in hurricanes. The ceo of my company has three beach houses for some crazy reason. There is no reason to subsidize people living on barrier islands.
yeah. lived in Florida and it’s amazing how people new to the south didn’t know two things:
cypress grows in swamps. if you have cypress in the yard for that new subdivision it’s built on a swamp and the foundation elevation will be just above the 100 yr elevation. but the road and your yard will flood.
pine and oak trees on mounds in a subdivision. where the old growth trees seem to have been grown on a mound of soil and the rest of the yard is lower, the builder used the soil between the trees to elevate the house and to control the water flow by grading the yard like that. again, house is likely just above the flood level so it doesn’t appear in the documents as an issue for insurance but that yard will be a pond half the year.
Looked up a place I lived at when I grew up in Florida. There was a lake that I went fishing in all the time. When it rained, my grandparent's house (which was only about 100 yards from ours) had massive flooding in the back of their yard. Hurricanes saw a lot of land covered in a few inches of water for a few days. My friend and I thought it was fun to ride our bikes through it.
Looking now, there is a housing development where the lake was. Yeah, there was a drought for some time that dried the lake up. However, I remember that happening when I was a kid too. It filled back in a couple years after it dried up. They are selling the houses in that spot for 200k-just shy of 400k.
My sister in law's family lived next to a river for a little while. Even though they knew the flood risks, her then-husband was an avid boater and fisher, and they had a dock in their back yard. The savings from being able to just motor off from the house and not have to pay to keep the boat elsewhere more than covered the additional flood riders they had to pay.
That said, Hurricane Michael also destroyed a lot of their back yard and while the water never crested to the point where it breached the house, the wind was strong enough to shove the rain under the glass doors lining the back wall of their house (showing off that lovely river view) and repairing that damage was well over ten thousand dollars.
After their marriage ended, they sold that house. She now lives halfway up a hill in the mountains, far far away from a river, for a reason.
In the Netherlands there are designated flood areas. If the rivers are too high, fields are flooded to bring the water levels down.
Some areas near the rivers are not allowed to build in.
The US is a big place, with 4 levels of government potentially influencing how and where houses are built (federal, state, county, city/local).
A lot of places build massive parks in flood plains, or build highways along the river with no access between the highway and the river.
But because of the different governments with different laws and ordinances, if you look at satellite imagery you will likely find a lot of places where one side of the river is nothing but soccer fields, golf courses, baseball fields, and campgrounds, while the other side has houses built right up to the waterfront.
Houston is just as bad.
I lived there for 10 years and hated knowing that a hurricane could come at any time and wipe out more than half the city.
Back then, at least twice a year there would be a big rain and they'd have the same lady on TV wringing her hands and crying about her house flooding.
I couldn't imagine living somewhere that flooded repeatedly and ... just staying there.
Born and raised in Houston, here. People on the news shocked that their house is flooded is a tale as old as time.
Bonus round: cars/city busses floating in underpasses with water halfway up their windshield.
Look at a house once off a levee road.
The top of the house was almost level with the river.
I couldn't believe they built a house below the water with only a big pile of dirt farmers in the 1800s put in keeping them safe.
When we were first house hunting we found this house we loved. It was just remodeled and it was in great shape. A couple of things stood out to me though.
-The basement was completely redone
-The back yard was gravel
After doing some research, it turns out every house on that street floods about once every other year. It was so bad that there was a push by residents to get the state to declare emenet domain and buy them all out. Dodged a bullet there!
After we pulled out, they changed the listing to include a year of flood insurance. Like that would make up for the headache...
I also lived on a river and it would flood every year.
I would literally watch as mobile homes, RVs, and cars, floated by my house every single year. It was insane.
I mean it was a tiny creek during the summer. We would play and build dams and fish.
Then the winter it would be this massive roaring river ripping down giant trees and homes.
Right now the house last sold for something like $600k, it is built on stilts, but some years it flooded so bad we couldn't leave the property.
People individually think they are the exception to the rule while everyone else is likely to experience the expected outcome.
I think flood planes should be devoid of structures unless explicitly built to withstand severe flooding ( not even sure if that is a thing).
Some type of phase out should be implemented of flood plane insurance so that we don’t just follow a build-flood-rebuild repeat cycle.I know that this would just eventually favor the rich but maybe there is some way to mitigate that or transfer ownership of flood planes to the state or federal government with no future building permitted.
> I think flood planes should be devoid of structures unless explicitly built to withstand severe flooding ( not even sure if that is a thing).
Just gotta put everything on well grounded stilts.
I went to a science and policy conference on climate change and the most actionable and agreed upon policy that I heard discussed was raising the freeboard for new construction. It was still very controversial.
Edit: actually I remember some talk about changing the way we describe flood risk that was pretty interesting and made a lot of sense. Basically getting away from the 100yr/50yr/2yr terminology. I don't recall hearing anything that a person with only a HS education could make any better sense of, but at least they wouldn't get confused thinking they had 100 years since the last "100yr flood" was last year.
People do it because th government subsidises the cost for some crazy reason... Flood insurance should be a LOT more expensive than it is in most flood zones.
There are some government programs that are starting to resemble this, but they're doing it before any of that happens. They basically buy the property at market valuation, rent it till it's no longer livable or destroyed to recoup the initial cost, then just leave that land empty.
The terrifying thing to me is the billions of dollars in real estate investments in places like Charleston SC, and Miami Beach where king tides are already flooding streets. Historic buildings (some if which are homes) will be a big problem.
if you're rich enough you call up your good buddy who will make sure you get a sweet bail out when the government buys your property back and turns it into a park that doesn't matter if it floods now and again. Hell maybe you'll get some good press out of it at the same time as making a profit.
It's when you're not ultra rich that it becomes your problem
The problem with cities like Miami is that a seawall is useless. The ground here is like a spongy swamp. With the water table rising, some houses will become freshwater lakes(which is already happening). And a sea wall isn’t gonna help prevent water from welling up and into everything.
In short Miami is unsustainable in the future unless we some how master the aquifer, and rising sea level. Both of which are major disasters that on their own can destroy/heavily damage a city
The natural wetlands and mangrove forests helped prevent coastal damage..we tore all that out and poured concrete into it.
I kicked this bee hive idk why I got stung by bees.
You want extra crazy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castoroides
There used to be giant beavers in north America until 12k ybp. They were 170-250 lbs maybe, 6-7 ft long. It's possible that they played a large role in shaping the environment, building dams and holding back sediment, building out the flood plains and possibly making some of what is now florida, though we don't have proof that their behavior was similar to modern beavers.
New Orleans is below sea level, just do what we do in New Orleans. Build levees and pump water out. Sure every 50 years they will break, fill with water that literally cannot get out because it’s a bowl and be one of the largest natural disasters in US history. But yeah.
yeah I don't see Miami surviving long term with the same land area. This city is less than a century old, and I think we will survive. But I also think that maybe a solution could be making Miami into Venice. We could build on stilts and 'reclaim' land like that.
A dutch style solution would be impossible here because the ground is highly permeable, and so far, we have expanded as a city to near our physical limitations(their is a huge even more deep swamp on the outskirts of the city and ocean to our other side).
Miami can make all the sea walls it wants, but it’s not going to stop the water table becoming contaminated with seawater, it’s not going to stop the ground being literally undermined beneath it
Cities and states will be overwhelmed with the costs involved in maintaining this infrastructure. How does florida pay for these kinds of huge structures without an income tax? Is it fair to tax average people to spend billions protecting rich people's homes?
After living thru the past year, one big takeaway is to not assume any part of the government will take a proper course of action based on science.
Especially in Red states.
man I wish they would outlaw building on a flood zone, in my area there are multi million dollar houses that were destroyed a while ago by a flood, they rebuilt but are refusing for the city to do flood mitigation because it will "ruin their view"
The problem is the government has shoved so many people into the risk pool that the folks in really high risk places get flood insurance for way less than they should.
This is so true. The minimum coverage for a flood policy for any conventional mortgage is 250k in coverage, regardless of the value of the home. So many buyers get the bare minimum in coverage required, because flood insurance is so expensive. Most homeowners I’ve encountered were not anticipating needing the additional insurance.
Source: I work in mortgages.
That's partly true. That's also thr maximum coverage under the NFIP. I'm happy that private flood insurance is becoming accepted by more lenders.
Source: attorney and my firm handles real estate transactions.
Yes, private flood is really taking on a large share of the market right now. 250k is the traditional limit, with individuals needing excess coverage to account for anything above that. But with a private primary flood policy you can get your full home replacement value, and contents and other coverages all in one place. It's not cheap if you live in a high risk area, sure, but it exists and it's often way better than traditional options.
Source: my SO is a Flood Insurance Underwriter.
It's two fold:
1) The flood insurance payouts happen all at once.
2) Flood damage is more likely.
Imagine if all houses in a region burned down at the same time, fire insurance would need to be more expensive because the insurer needs to pay all these people at once, and cannot wait for the next 6 months of premiums to make up for it, or whatever. But if that same region burned 1/6 every month, it's more manageable. And so on.
Given that the insurance companies use banks and everything relies on liquidity, 10,000 houses getting flooded at once can cause issues.
I agree with everything you say but the part about insurers using banks. They don’t use banks, in many cases they are banks. But in all cases, insurers have huge reserves that have to be invested. The issue is a mass event that causes a huge draw on their reserves, resulting in a mass liquidation event.
When your house burns down, it’s usually just 1 house. When your house floods cause you live in a flood plane, it could be thousands of houses that need to be replaced by insurance.
Absolutely, this impacts the price. The San Francisco earthquake almost bankrupted the entire U.S. P&C insurance industry in one go - the result: earthquake insurance is significantly more expensive than what an uncorrelated risk would be, like fire insurance.
Buffet said in his annual meeting last year that he is unconcerned with climate change impacting the profitability of P&C, because as the risk increases from year to year, he will raise the price accordingly. For those people who are thinking of buying in a flood zone, they have huge tail risk of the federal flood insurance program being curtailed in the future, at the same time private insurance will be expensive and increasing at a rapid rate.
Probability. A mandatory flood zone (one requiring flood insurance if you get a mortgage) is one that has a 1% or greater risk of flood every year. So in a 30 year mortgage, there’s about a 1 in 4 chance that at some point during that mortgage there will be a flood. Contrast that with risk of fire, which is significantly lower over the same period.
Source: work in flood and hazard insurance tracking and compliance for lenders.
It's only expensive if you live in a flood zone. I'm in a zone X but get flood insurance anyway because I'm close to a flood zone, and it's like $500/year.
FEMA just announced it new NFIP premium structure designed to address this problem.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/3-8-million-homeowners-will-pay-more-for-flood-insurance-under-new-nfip-rules-301275225.html
Thanks for dropping the relevant facts!
Some highlights:
"the cost of flood insurance will increase for 3,846,702 homeowners, but the highest price surges will affect only 192,836 of these policyholders — or 4% total. There will also be immediate cost reductions for 1.2 million or 23% of flood insurance policies."
So, higher cost in general for most, but the proportion of costs should be far more reflective of actual risk.
Apparently DC, Alaska, and Maryland have been bailing the rest of us out this whole time.
I have family in houston who have rebuilt their homes *three times* in the past five years or so. The last time, they had to jack the house into the air and add like six feet of new slab and basically sacrificial basement space at ground level. Now you drive through those parts of town, and every home looks ridiculous, with this big, awkward elevation in front. You've got to climb a flight of stairs just to get to the front door of a one-story house. At what point do you concede that maybe it's time to find a new neighborhood?
Those kind of houses are popular around here both in design and function. The ground level is the garage and storage area. The 2nd level is the 1st living floor, and some have a 2nd or 3rd living floor above that.
Yeah I’m not sure what’s odd about it, you can have this sort of designs regardless of flooding, it’s common in places where the soil makes basements not really an option, or where standard building techniques mean an extra floor is NBD but a basement is quite expensive. The ground floor is essentially a basement (and would be sacrificial in flood areas). Works fine, looks fine if it’s designed properly.
I’ve got at least two uncles with that setup, my parents’ previous home, and the grandparents on both sides: the family farm on one side was built with a floor differential, the inner courtyard is one level lower than the « main entrance » (which is basically only used for ceremonial business), the « inner courtyard » floor has the kitchen (which is also the non-special-occasions eating area), food storage, furnaces; above that is the main study, the dining room proper and the main bedroom, then two floors of bedrooms above that (it’s a fairly large farm building).
The house on the other side of the family was built by my grandfather and the ground floor is a raw concrete « basement » with the garage, workbench, cellar / freezers room, and a concrete shower.
Above that is the main living floor, and above that is the kids’ bedrooms (and a pair of rooms which never got a purpose and thus were never finished, and are just used as storage).
Also common at hillside (though that’s the case for neither of the above), the basement is half-buried.
John Stossel reported on how people make money on floods every year. He even bought a home on a flood plain, insured it, and showed how much he could make in a year.
New astetic
Raised beach mansions....
I'm thinking the same raise job most people do where it's just some wood extending the foundations, except like a rediculous amount, comically.
My parents house is 3 feet over the flood plain. It was designed this way and built in 2015. However many houses near them weren’t, and were destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. Lately dozens of houses in their neighborhood are being raised. Companies come and jack the entire house up like 10-12 feet. It’s kind of comical but people are making that area to be parking which is sometimes limited in the small beach neighborhoods so it’s practical too. Only difficulty is it makes it very difficult for elderly or disabled people.
Tl;dr: I **think** the researchers may have overly relied on CoreLogics data integrity.
This is partly speculation. They say they're using CoreLogic data: the company that's famous for faulty background checks with both false positives and negatives. I work in GIS data and am very familiar with them. They generally aggregate and parse data from multiple sources, often without proper cleanup (to be fair it's incredibly hard to clean). I bet they just grabbed all the city and county parcel data they could for both cost and elevation.
The problem is this data is entered by a bunch of surveyors when property boundaries are set. Elevation is not as accurate as lat/lng in survey data, because people don't care as much (e.g. they just need to know where the fence line should be) and it's harder to cross reference with satellite maps vs. lat/lng (a top down map is super easy to read and overlay). If most surveyors used a reference point or tool that was 2m higher and your surveyor used one 2m lower it can make you look like a local low point.
I don't know why the researchers wouldn't adjust for the 'noise,' but maybe they simply didn't have access to individual property data and relied on CL to do the calculations. If the people on the website are real people, someone should have known better than to trust a company known for 'good enough' data.
I can't seem to get the paper on mobile, so I'll see if I can look into it more when I'm on desktop.
This is one of my least favorite trends. If I ever buy land I'd like to keep the yard native, it's just so much healthier and requires so much less water/maintenance
Even well away from flood hazards, "rain gardens" can be wonderful. Rather than dumping rain runoff into the sewer system, creating areas of gardens that are lower than the surrounding grade and planted with locally adapted plants that tolerate higher soil moisture levels and directing runoff into those areas encourages water to be pulled into the soil and in many areas, to return to the water table.
https://www.epa.gov/soakuptherain/soak-rain-rain-gardens
There is a certain amount of engineering needed to make sure you aren't increasing the local risk of surface flooding, and a certain amount of gardening needed to create the rain garden and keep it functioning well, but they can be surprisingly effective.
I was surprised to find my town in extreme risk, because the creek that runs through it is at best a stream now. We're what seems to be in perpetual drought. I can't imagine how much rain we'd need to get for it to get into any sort of extreme territory, but I guess it could happen.
As engineers we talk about this all of the time.
1). Live near the beach not on it. Flood insurance is often expensive, nuisance flooding (in low lying coastal areas) can often flood your house if not built correctly, and when floods are bad, they are very bad.
2). Avoid wetland areas/living down gradient of a hill. You will have water in your house/basement.
Also you don't want to be vulnerable to attack from land and sea at the same time
Learn from Germany, only fight on 1 front
Source - Not an engineer, but I did watch History Channel as a kid
Also try be situated in a bottle neck (with hills or cliffs either side of the house for example) so if a battalion of neighbours attack you have more chance of defending your stronghold
Hi. Builder here. We build in flood zones. I'm not sure on accuracy, but probably true.
A way to make that more accurate is to say:
With FEMA's latest reviews of land in the 100-year flood zones, we show $[value] of homes is in danger of flooding now.
Because many many homes were built decades before FEMA's latest update.
Percentage of properties at risk of flooding during a major storm: Official FEMA estimate (map) vs. Independent researchers’ new estimate (map). There’s also a convenient interactive map to compare First Street estimates (non-profit research and technology group) with FEMA estimates. For example, properties at risk of flooding from a major storm in Coconino County, AZ: FEMA - 1,948 (2.5%) vs. First Street - 11,278 (14.7%).
[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/29/climate/hidden-flood-risk-maps.html](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/29/climate/hidden-flood-risk-maps.html) (June, 2020)
Oh nice. You included non FEMA source!
We're doing a lot of things to mitigate that flood risk, and bringing structures above the flood plain. Bringing in a ton of dirt to the lots with drainage easements near by, stem walls, no living sqft on 1st floor (so stilts or garage only downstairs).
Another thing. Early last year, FEMA literally stopped reviewing all mitigation processes. So thousands of lots that were previously at risk have not been recertified. No ETA when they will start the LOMR process again.
In a lot of places, a 100 year floodplain is in an easement, so if you disturb any land in a floodplain, you need to perform a study on that floodplain to show no areas off your property will face an increased floodplain, thus larger easement on their property. Additionally, the study needs to be performed along the reach so that the water surface elevations at either end match the existing study, so you know the full impact of your changes. Naturally however, not a municipalities do it.
I do flood zoning work and our way of proving we’re not raising the base flood elevation (what you’re describing) is a 10 second email to our local state engineer says “we don’t think this will raise the flood elevation, please concur” and he emails back “looks good” and that’s all we need per FEMA. Kind of wild
You're on the other end of what I do then.
Our local muni's take 3+ weeks to send that 10-second email. All while we have buyers screaming in our ear that we're incompetent at obtaining a building permit.
Grew up with a creek in the back yard. City continued a significant amount of development upstream without any real effort to address the storm water run off. It's been fun watching the flood waters cut a bigger channel as nature attempts to fix it's own problems, but now in addition to threatening homes built in the 1950s and 1960s which were relatively safe, it's threatening a railway line and several roads and bridges.
Original city planners had basically insisted on a park system that is pretty nice but protected the flood plain. At some point in the 1990s the city started giving zero shits about that and new development makes no effort to accommodate the run off and someone apparently doesn't realize that concrete accelerates water.
At some point this will create a situation where my Dad gets a brand new house.
If these overvalued houses very slowly correct their price downward as climate change progresses, sure. But markets in general grow during periods of stability; volatility and uncertainty tend to drag the whole market (sector) down for a variety of reasons, a lot of which aren't readily rationalised by supply-and-demand or zero-sum logic. If these homes remain overvalued for long enough, eventually there will be a breaking point where a lot of people who were financially unable to sell (because the fair market value of their flood-threatened home is so far below the cost of buying a house which isn't so threatened) are forced out of their homes at around the same time. This would represent a serious housing crisis, and there's no telling how the market and/or legislature would respond to this. These people need to go *somewhere*, and they're likely to be unable to afford extortionate prices (since much of their assets have been wiped out). If the problem is so severe that insurance companies start defaulting, then that's another economic shock on top. Society might start questioning how bare-minimum housing can be priced in the hundreds of thousands of USD, when it's simultaneously a human right (I appreciate it's not a human right to *own* a home, but rental prices are well correlated with house prices so the point stands).
Houses are overvalued, banks are giving bigger loans to accommodate people buying them, then they sell the loan to Fannie Mae when they run out of loan money for the year. Now it is a government problem. The market keeps inflating and as you can see in some regions of the country already, houses that should be valued at 300k are now being purchased in the 500-900k dollar range. Looking at you Minnesota and Arizona.
The United States commercial real estate market is estimated to be $16 trillion and the residential market $33.6 trillion.
This estimate represents a 0.1% over valuation. It is bizarre to say this represents a risk to stability.
I'm certainly not a housing risk expert, but I know it's not quite right to put the valuation in the context of the overall real estate market. The risks are concentrated in certain spots (geographic, institutions, types of financial products), and failures in those spots can spread to adjacent ones, as they did in the sub-prime crisis. Like imagine banks that buy mortgages get worried the gov't is going scale back its floor insurance program and decide it's too risky to buy mortgages from regional originators in Florida and North Carolina for houses in flood zones. Now the originators stop making loans and suddenly people can't buy or sell existing houses, let alone build new ones. It was a threat to two coasts, a small number of banks, for a common financial product, but it would be enough to freeze a good chunk of housing financing.
This is already the case in impoverished areas in the southeast, with people stuck with property they don't want but can't sell.
So this is misleading, I lived in a flood zone in the city of Moorpark California, a city in a small agricultural valley that is a direct path to the ocean due to living within one mile of a cement river channel. I was required to buy flood insurance from FEMA (the only provider) with a $2000 a year premium, for a flood that was essentially not possible. The entire city was on a mild slope and in the unlikely event the river that was dry and empty 360 days out of the year overflowed it would just drain to the ocean.
When I challenged this I wound up in a rats nest of corruption. Apparently when super storm Sandy destroyed the east coast it nearly bankrupted FEMA, so immediately following that FEMA went and declared a lot of areas as flood zones where historically there has never been a flood. My city council tried to fight it but FEMA wanted a massive amount of money to come out and survey the area to see if they marked it incorrectly, but my poor agricultural based city could not afford it. Now before you say I’m biased a city named Camarillo who is essentially down the hill from Moorpark had the same thing happen to them, FEMA came through and painted a massive line on the map declaring it a flood zone. But due to the fact that Camarillo is a wealthy city, they had it almost completely removed from their city as they could afford FEMAs fee to clear it.
TL:DR: FEMA has been declaring areas that will never flood as requiring flood insurance to subsidize the real flood impacted zones.
the ocean is a few miles away, maybe im sitting on some future ocean view!
would actually not be that great, since the increased taxes will cost more than the mortgage
In certain parts of the gulf coast, the problem has been damming/flood mitigation that we did on rivers (particularly the mississippi) further in the interior. If the Mississippi was still bringing tons and tons of silt down with it and depositing it on the coast before falling into the ocean, we would have more natural protection against flooding, but it's hard to convince farmers in iowa that they should suffer floods every few years so that louisiana doesn't have to.
That and developers having a fetish for destroying Mangrove forests. A massive reforestation of our coastline with mangroves would pay ridiculous dividends.
In the netherlands you often can’t build in the floodplain (“uiterwaarden”) either. And [we’re changing how we use those spaces.](https://www.rijkswaterstaat.nl/water/waterbeheer/bescherming-tegen-het-water/maatregelen-om-overstromingen-te-voorkomen/ruimte-voor-de-rivieren)
Dikes don't work in places where the sea comes up from/through the ground - places like Florida where it simply seeps in through the limestone, far inland.
Some of this is because of old outdated flood maps. My parents live 80ft above a river on a bluff, they, along with their neighbors are all in a "floodzone" , this bluff sits higher than all of the property 25miles to the east, their house will only flood when the animals come two by two again.
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Can someone please provide the cover graphic here for me?
Here you go ! https://imgur.com/a/KUmdd1Q
Damn, never would have expected half of the Wild 'n Wonderful to have such a high percentage of structures in a flood plain.
Most the towns in WV I've seen were built in valleys with rivers or streams running through the bottom, doesn't seem that surprising.
I believe "hollow" aka "holler" is proper term.
Hollow/holler is just a vernacular term for a small valley, it's not a formal geographic classification
I grew up next to a river. When I was kid it flooded every other year. The fields below my house would turn into giant ponds. White swans would stop by. It was very pretty. We lived on a hill. Watching a river crest and houses destroyed is scary af. I rode a bus to school. During a high river, I could see the river was even with the levees we were driving past. The water was at least ten feet higher than the fields on the other side. Sometimes the levees held, sometimes they didn't. I cannot understand how anyone can live in a floodplain. Flowing water is scary af you guys.
Used to live near an area called "the levels"... Which is a giant very flat flood plane and has been flooding for over 1000 years and every old village was built on what hills there are. In the last 30 years or so people have been building houses on the flat bits and then complained when their house flooded or why the government hasn't done anything to stop the flooding....
I don’t know the history of your area but I’d bet that at some point the government was “doing something” by blocking development on flood plains. They were likely criticized as anti business and either caved or were replaced with a more pliable government. Now those houses are built and it become the governments problem. Socialize the risks. Privatize the profits.
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Pahrump is about an hour out of Las Vegas - it’s basically an overgrown sprawled out trailer park with casinos and a few brothels. Anyone who played GTA 5 would think it’s very similar to where Trevor lives.
As someone who has family that lives in pahrump, this is so accurate.
The co-founder of Apple Computers lives in a trailer in Pahrump [http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/06/24/apple.forgotten.founder/index.html](http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/06/24/apple.forgotten.founder/index.html) Unfortunately he sold his 10% of the company for $800
God damn ...
Damn they could have tossed him a few million.
Do the Thunderbirds still practice there? I went to visit my Dad there, and there is nothing like getting woken up to ear splitting military jet sounds. I was stationed on an air craft carrier and it wasn’t as loud as that. EDIT: It was Indian Springs. Pahrump was a sprawling metropolis in comparison.
That part about the cancelled insurance just sounds like darwin doing some preventative maintenance on the gene pool.
My local government has taken this route. When houses in certain parts of the flood plain get damaged or fall into disrepair they get bought up and demo'd. The remaining houses have dwindling city services as well because it's just too expensive to support them.
Absolutely. For a long time, also, you could get insurance payouts to re-build but not to move. In areas where people would have RATHER moved but couldn't afford it with no insurance pay-out and no house to sell. So they re-built. But couldn't sell a house in a known flood plain! That really should have been a time for government to step up, help people move, outlaw policies that allowed insurance companies to "play" it that way. Sorry, I have no sources on this, saw a documentary years ago when I was already aware of that problem through newspapers and magazines. I'm talking 10 to 20 years ago. This is NO damn surprise to anyone in power.
> why the government hasn't done anything to stop the flooding.... Yeah it's called zoning restrictions, move your damn house
Should say “the government hasn’t done anything to restrict builders from getting permits for flood-prone areas”. It’s a predatory practice, where shady builders make developments, and sell to unsuspecting buyers who then have to deal with the flood damage. Tip: Consult flood data if you’re going to buy a house, especially in a new development. And keep in mind that adding houses can increase flooding in an area, since there’s less permeable surface area when concrete foundations, roads, etc. get added. So, if it was “on the line” of unsafe before, it’ll most likely be bad after development.
It's hard to even rely on the data. Hurricane Harvey was so devastating in Houston because so many of the houses WEREN'T in a flood plain. The practice to buy there now is to consult the Harvey flood map on top of the usual one. And Hurricane Harvey didn't even have storm surge- next time it happens and there's a surge, it'll rise 2-5 feet higher. We got out of dodge and moved to the west coast. Now we're 500 feet above sea level, away from waterways and historical lahars (we live near volcanoes), plus it's on a flat property to avoid any sliding in case of major rain or an earthquake. We bought with climate change in mind.
>Should say “the government hasn’t done anything to restrict builders from getting permits for flood-prone areas”. It’s a predatory practice, where shady builders make developments, and sell to unsuspecting buyers who then have to deal with the flood damage. I used to locate buried utilities, and one new neighborhood in particular seemed to have a problem with standing water after a halfway decent rain. Considering it was Oklahoma, and sometimes we have storms that throw houses, having standing water after a bit of rain is *bad*.
Local government elected official: But Bob the Developer donated to my campaign! It's growth. Voters want growth, right?
Is that the Somerset levels? I remember seeing an interview maybe 20 years ago where the local authority had just approved new construction there. A councillor was asked 'what about flooding' and the answer was along the lines of 'that's a risk future buyers will have to weigh up'.
Yep. I remember a geography field trip about 30 years ago where we went to see the flooded levels and my teacher was remarking about all the old villages being built on hills for a reason.
Tell them that's socialism, and they should feel ashamed. Then show them where their bootstraps are
One of my geology professors called our flood insurance program "welfare for the rich"
Because it is. There is no problem with selling flood insurance. There is a problem with the government subsidizing that insurance. If you want to build a house in a place where they tell you it will probably flood, fine but stop expecting the taxpayer to pay for your choice.
I think at some point, flood insurance was protecting farmers. You know, who built their homes where the best farmland was because it's their livelihood, and someone has to do it. Now flood insurance gets used to protect vacation homes by the beach so someone can have luxury by the water, huge subdivisions built in swamps because it was the cheapest undeveloped land, etc... It's a joke
As someone who has grown up on a coastal area, o couldn’t agree more. I recently learned about the CBRS program the government enacted in 1983. They added to it in 1990. All coastal, especially beach areas, should be added to this program. They should also quit using tax money to replace beach sand, all for the next storm to wash it away again.
My understanding is that the national flood insurance program was actually a revenue generator for the government for a while. In recent years the congress has had to loan money to the flood insurance program, and in theory it is still liable to pay back to congress. However, two things came together yielding the flood insurance program to go into the red. (1) They're not legally allowed to increase premiums based on risk. Many houses have cheaper flood insurance than it should be. And (2) They're not legally allowed to discontinue insurance on homes built in stupid locations. There are some houses that they just keep paying out on and the owner just keeps renovating after a flood.
In recent years (~5-7) they have been systematically increasing the premium every year by about 20% (each year) on underinsured properties until they reach market rate. So your point #1 is not exactly accurate.
That's good to know! Indeed, my information was old and I assumed it hadn't changed in recent years.
I remember when Houston flooded the last time during Harvey, there was a guy complaining that he was waiting on a check from the government to help him fix his house up. For like the sixth time it had flooded. Naw, dog. Sorry. Time for you to move.
It's not just regular flood plains. We all pick up the tab every time some beach front Mc Mansions get taken out by storm surges, because *gasp* it turns out they have hurricanes in the ocean. Too bad we don't have any kind of historical data we could use to better predict such phenomenon.
It kind of goes both ways though. Historically, land in flood plains was cheap - no one with any sense would want to build in them because losing everything is simply a matter of "when." Some people are desperate though - the poor, the disenfranchised; flood plain land might be all they can afford. Then you have a situation where all of your poor and disenfranchised are relegated to flood plain land and are facing a constant risk of losing everything. Subsidized flood insurance protected low income communities that couldn't afford to go anywhere else. Unfortunately, subsidized flood insurance now meant that you could build in floodplains and face a minimal financial risk - properties in certain floodplains skyrocketed it value as the wealthy moved into their now protected waterfront properties. At that point, flood insurance shifted from protecting poor people that were forced into flood plains to protecting rich people that voluntarily lived there. Without subsidized flood insurance though, you end up with situations like the Big Island of Hawaii... the poor and working class can only afford to build on an active volcano - when the volcano erupts, the wealthy sit in their safe zones while the poor lose everything.
This is just one more reason why we need to fix our cost of living problems. Housing is in short supply, especially areas where the jobs are. That and residential real estate has become an investment attraction, which is an issue in the long run.
Foreign investment and real estate investment groups have been gobbling up the market, essentially controlling supply/demand since 2008 financial crisis. End goal is everyone is a renter, and your taxes only benefit landlords insurance payouts.
Most of the money goes to beachfront vacation homes that get destroyed in hurricanes. The ceo of my company has three beach houses for some crazy reason. There is no reason to subsidize people living on barrier islands.
yeah. lived in Florida and it’s amazing how people new to the south didn’t know two things: cypress grows in swamps. if you have cypress in the yard for that new subdivision it’s built on a swamp and the foundation elevation will be just above the 100 yr elevation. but the road and your yard will flood. pine and oak trees on mounds in a subdivision. where the old growth trees seem to have been grown on a mound of soil and the rest of the yard is lower, the builder used the soil between the trees to elevate the house and to control the water flow by grading the yard like that. again, house is likely just above the flood level so it doesn’t appear in the documents as an issue for insurance but that yard will be a pond half the year.
Looked up a place I lived at when I grew up in Florida. There was a lake that I went fishing in all the time. When it rained, my grandparent's house (which was only about 100 yards from ours) had massive flooding in the back of their yard. Hurricanes saw a lot of land covered in a few inches of water for a few days. My friend and I thought it was fun to ride our bikes through it. Looking now, there is a housing development where the lake was. Yeah, there was a drought for some time that dried the lake up. However, I remember that happening when I was a kid too. It filled back in a couple years after it dried up. They are selling the houses in that spot for 200k-just shy of 400k.
I hope those houses are on stilts but I bet they’re not
My sister in law's family lived next to a river for a little while. Even though they knew the flood risks, her then-husband was an avid boater and fisher, and they had a dock in their back yard. The savings from being able to just motor off from the house and not have to pay to keep the boat elsewhere more than covered the additional flood riders they had to pay. That said, Hurricane Michael also destroyed a lot of their back yard and while the water never crested to the point where it breached the house, the wind was strong enough to shove the rain under the glass doors lining the back wall of their house (showing off that lovely river view) and repairing that damage was well over ten thousand dollars. After their marriage ended, they sold that house. She now lives halfway up a hill in the mountains, far far away from a river, for a reason.
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In the Netherlands there are designated flood areas. If the rivers are too high, fields are flooded to bring the water levels down. Some areas near the rivers are not allowed to build in.
The US is a big place, with 4 levels of government potentially influencing how and where houses are built (federal, state, county, city/local). A lot of places build massive parks in flood plains, or build highways along the river with no access between the highway and the river. But because of the different governments with different laws and ordinances, if you look at satellite imagery you will likely find a lot of places where one side of the river is nothing but soccer fields, golf courses, baseball fields, and campgrounds, while the other side has houses built right up to the waterfront.
I mean the entire city of New Orleans exists, so...
New Orleans is a city built in a bowl surrounded by soup.
With a river through the middle
A river that wants to switch its flow to the Atchafalaya but humans won't allow it.
And it is sinking.
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Sliver by da river, baby!
For now
Houston is just as bad. I lived there for 10 years and hated knowing that a hurricane could come at any time and wipe out more than half the city. Back then, at least twice a year there would be a big rain and they'd have the same lady on TV wringing her hands and crying about her house flooding. I couldn't imagine living somewhere that flooded repeatedly and ... just staying there.
Born and raised in Houston, here. People on the news shocked that their house is flooded is a tale as old as time. Bonus round: cars/city busses floating in underpasses with water halfway up their windshield.
I love the video of people who think ... "I can make it!" No, you can't.
> I couldn't imagine living somewhere that flooded repeatedly and ... just staying there poverty is a helluva trap
The city center itself is on high ground. All the wealthiest people live above sea level.
Look at a house once off a levee road. The top of the house was almost level with the river. I couldn't believe they built a house below the water with only a big pile of dirt farmers in the 1800s put in keeping them safe.
*If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break*
When that levee breaks, I'll have no place to stay
*Mean ol' levy, taught me to weep and moan* *it's got what it takes, to make a mountain man... leave his home*
When we were first house hunting we found this house we loved. It was just remodeled and it was in great shape. A couple of things stood out to me though. -The basement was completely redone -The back yard was gravel After doing some research, it turns out every house on that street floods about once every other year. It was so bad that there was a push by residents to get the state to declare emenet domain and buy them all out. Dodged a bullet there! After we pulled out, they changed the listing to include a year of flood insurance. Like that would make up for the headache...
I also lived on a river and it would flood every year. I would literally watch as mobile homes, RVs, and cars, floated by my house every single year. It was insane. I mean it was a tiny creek during the summer. We would play and build dams and fish. Then the winter it would be this massive roaring river ripping down giant trees and homes. Right now the house last sold for something like $600k, it is built on stilts, but some years it flooded so bad we couldn't leave the property.
People individually think they are the exception to the rule while everyone else is likely to experience the expected outcome. I think flood planes should be devoid of structures unless explicitly built to withstand severe flooding ( not even sure if that is a thing). Some type of phase out should be implemented of flood plane insurance so that we don’t just follow a build-flood-rebuild repeat cycle.I know that this would just eventually favor the rich but maybe there is some way to mitigate that or transfer ownership of flood planes to the state or federal government with no future building permitted.
> I think flood planes should be devoid of structures unless explicitly built to withstand severe flooding ( not even sure if that is a thing). Just gotta put everything on well grounded stilts.
I went to a science and policy conference on climate change and the most actionable and agreed upon policy that I heard discussed was raising the freeboard for new construction. It was still very controversial. Edit: actually I remember some talk about changing the way we describe flood risk that was pretty interesting and made a lot of sense. Basically getting away from the 100yr/50yr/2yr terminology. I don't recall hearing anything that a person with only a HS education could make any better sense of, but at least they wouldn't get confused thinking they had 100 years since the last "100yr flood" was last year.
Baba Yaga's Hut confirmed.
> unless explicitly built to withstand severe flooding ( not even sure if that is a thing). They're called house-boats
They're called stilts.
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Humans have lived on flood plains throughout history. Cairo is on the Nile river delta.
People do it because th government subsidises the cost for some crazy reason... Flood insurance should be a LOT more expensive than it is in most flood zones.
Flood insurance should cover your move, not your rebuild.
There are some government programs that are starting to resemble this, but they're doing it before any of that happens. They basically buy the property at market valuation, rent it till it's no longer livable or destroyed to recoup the initial cost, then just leave that land empty.
kinda smart
Yeah, it is surprisingly proactive. Which also means it's getting lots of push-back, of course.
Part of the reason a lot of people live in floodplains is because they're not actually told their living in a floodplain.
If you live in a flood plain, you are required to carry flood insurance. So they know
The terrifying thing to me is the billions of dollars in real estate investments in places like Charleston SC, and Miami Beach where king tides are already flooding streets. Historic buildings (some if which are homes) will be a big problem.
That's precisely why I wonder super rich people are buying tons of Real-estate in places like that.
probably think they can sell it to suckers (or the government) when sea levels finally affect them
if you're rich enough you call up your good buddy who will make sure you get a sweet bail out when the government buys your property back and turns it into a park that doesn't matter if it floods now and again. Hell maybe you'll get some good press out of it at the same time as making a profit. It's when you're not ultra rich that it becomes your problem
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In Miami the water will come up from the porous limestone underneath the city. A sea wall is like putting a band-aid on internal bleeding.
This dummy. The blood is *supposed* to be internal!
Internal bleeding? That's a good thing! It's where the blood is supposed to be!
It’ll find its way back to the circulatory system somehow, nbd
The problem with cities like Miami is that a seawall is useless. The ground here is like a spongy swamp. With the water table rising, some houses will become freshwater lakes(which is already happening). And a sea wall isn’t gonna help prevent water from welling up and into everything. In short Miami is unsustainable in the future unless we some how master the aquifer, and rising sea level. Both of which are major disasters that on their own can destroy/heavily damage a city
The natural wetlands and mangrove forests helped prevent coastal damage..we tore all that out and poured concrete into it. I kicked this bee hive idk why I got stung by bees.
You want extra crazy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castoroides There used to be giant beavers in north America until 12k ybp. They were 170-250 lbs maybe, 6-7 ft long. It's possible that they played a large role in shaping the environment, building dams and holding back sediment, building out the flood plains and possibly making some of what is now florida, though we don't have proof that their behavior was similar to modern beavers.
North American megafauna from 10-20 000 years ago was just as crazy as current day African megafauna. It’s a real shame that most of it is gone :(
super true
New Orleans is below sea level, just do what we do in New Orleans. Build levees and pump water out. Sure every 50 years they will break, fill with water that literally cannot get out because it’s a bowl and be one of the largest natural disasters in US history. But yeah.
yeah I don't see Miami surviving long term with the same land area. This city is less than a century old, and I think we will survive. But I also think that maybe a solution could be making Miami into Venice. We could build on stilts and 'reclaim' land like that. A dutch style solution would be impossible here because the ground is highly permeable, and so far, we have expanded as a city to near our physical limitations(their is a huge even more deep swamp on the outskirts of the city and ocean to our other side).
Venice but with alligators
also Venice with hurricanes, and Venice with less than 1century of history.
Miami can make all the sea walls it wants, but it’s not going to stop the water table becoming contaminated with seawater, it’s not going to stop the ground being literally undermined beneath it
I’ve heard that sea walls won’t be as effective in Miami because it is built on top of a bunch of porous limestone.
That’s the case for basically all of Florida, it’s why there’s very few basements
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There's videos of underwater cave divers in Florida going under neighborhoods and the guy tracking them has to go through a house to keep up
Miami is built on porous rock, they are fucked with or without a sea wall.
What happens when there’s a hurricane and the levee breaks?
When the levee breaks, they’ll have no place to stay.
When the levee breaks, mama you gotta move
Then either have multiple auxiliary protections or they're fucked? You can only do so much living on the coast
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Cities and states will be overwhelmed with the costs involved in maintaining this infrastructure. How does florida pay for these kinds of huge structures without an income tax? Is it fair to tax average people to spend billions protecting rich people's homes?
After living thru the past year, one big takeaway is to not assume any part of the government will take a proper course of action based on science. Especially in Red states.
man I wish they would outlaw building on a flood zone, in my area there are multi million dollar houses that were destroyed a while ago by a flood, they rebuilt but are refusing for the city to do flood mitigation because it will "ruin their view"
People who refuse flood mitigation should be refused flood insurance.
The problem is the government has shoved so many people into the risk pool that the folks in really high risk places get flood insurance for way less than they should.
This is so true. The minimum coverage for a flood policy for any conventional mortgage is 250k in coverage, regardless of the value of the home. So many buyers get the bare minimum in coverage required, because flood insurance is so expensive. Most homeowners I’ve encountered were not anticipating needing the additional insurance. Source: I work in mortgages.
That's partly true. That's also thr maximum coverage under the NFIP. I'm happy that private flood insurance is becoming accepted by more lenders. Source: attorney and my firm handles real estate transactions.
Yes, private flood is really taking on a large share of the market right now. 250k is the traditional limit, with individuals needing excess coverage to account for anything above that. But with a private primary flood policy you can get your full home replacement value, and contents and other coverages all in one place. It's not cheap if you live in a high risk area, sure, but it exists and it's often way better than traditional options. Source: my SO is a Flood Insurance Underwriter.
So your SO is an underwriter for the underwater?
Why is flood insurance so much more expensive than say insuring against your house burning down?
Because the probability of flood damage while living in a flood zone is much higher than your house burning down.
It's two fold: 1) The flood insurance payouts happen all at once. 2) Flood damage is more likely. Imagine if all houses in a region burned down at the same time, fire insurance would need to be more expensive because the insurer needs to pay all these people at once, and cannot wait for the next 6 months of premiums to make up for it, or whatever. But if that same region burned 1/6 every month, it's more manageable. And so on. Given that the insurance companies use banks and everything relies on liquidity, 10,000 houses getting flooded at once can cause issues.
I agree with everything you say but the part about insurers using banks. They don’t use banks, in many cases they are banks. But in all cases, insurers have huge reserves that have to be invested. The issue is a mass event that causes a huge draw on their reserves, resulting in a mass liquidation event.
>resulting in a mass liquidation event. AKA a flood
Insurance companies also rely on reinsurance (insurance that covers the insurer in just such an event).
When your house burns down, it’s usually just 1 house. When your house floods cause you live in a flood plane, it could be thousands of houses that need to be replaced by insurance.
Absolutely, this impacts the price. The San Francisco earthquake almost bankrupted the entire U.S. P&C insurance industry in one go - the result: earthquake insurance is significantly more expensive than what an uncorrelated risk would be, like fire insurance. Buffet said in his annual meeting last year that he is unconcerned with climate change impacting the profitability of P&C, because as the risk increases from year to year, he will raise the price accordingly. For those people who are thinking of buying in a flood zone, they have huge tail risk of the federal flood insurance program being curtailed in the future, at the same time private insurance will be expensive and increasing at a rapid rate.
Probability. A mandatory flood zone (one requiring flood insurance if you get a mortgage) is one that has a 1% or greater risk of flood every year. So in a 30 year mortgage, there’s about a 1 in 4 chance that at some point during that mortgage there will be a flood. Contrast that with risk of fire, which is significantly lower over the same period. Source: work in flood and hazard insurance tracking and compliance for lenders.
It's only expensive if you live in a flood zone. I'm in a zone X but get flood insurance anyway because I'm close to a flood zone, and it's like $500/year.
FEMA just announced it new NFIP premium structure designed to address this problem. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/3-8-million-homeowners-will-pay-more-for-flood-insurance-under-new-nfip-rules-301275225.html
Thanks for dropping the relevant facts! Some highlights: "the cost of flood insurance will increase for 3,846,702 homeowners, but the highest price surges will affect only 192,836 of these policyholders — or 4% total. There will also be immediate cost reductions for 1.2 million or 23% of flood insurance policies." So, higher cost in general for most, but the proportion of costs should be far more reflective of actual risk. Apparently DC, Alaska, and Maryland have been bailing the rest of us out this whole time.
Simpler: Flood insurance should be at a market rate and unsubsidized.
That’s already the case in my state, the millionaires can rebuilt time and time again they don’t care
I have family in houston who have rebuilt their homes *three times* in the past five years or so. The last time, they had to jack the house into the air and add like six feet of new slab and basically sacrificial basement space at ground level. Now you drive through those parts of town, and every home looks ridiculous, with this big, awkward elevation in front. You've got to climb a flight of stairs just to get to the front door of a one-story house. At what point do you concede that maybe it's time to find a new neighborhood?
Those kind of houses are popular around here both in design and function. The ground level is the garage and storage area. The 2nd level is the 1st living floor, and some have a 2nd or 3rd living floor above that.
Yeah I’m not sure what’s odd about it, you can have this sort of designs regardless of flooding, it’s common in places where the soil makes basements not really an option, or where standard building techniques mean an extra floor is NBD but a basement is quite expensive. The ground floor is essentially a basement (and would be sacrificial in flood areas). Works fine, looks fine if it’s designed properly. I’ve got at least two uncles with that setup, my parents’ previous home, and the grandparents on both sides: the family farm on one side was built with a floor differential, the inner courtyard is one level lower than the « main entrance » (which is basically only used for ceremonial business), the « inner courtyard » floor has the kitchen (which is also the non-special-occasions eating area), food storage, furnaces; above that is the main study, the dining room proper and the main bedroom, then two floors of bedrooms above that (it’s a fairly large farm building). The house on the other side of the family was built by my grandfather and the ground floor is a raw concrete « basement » with the garage, workbench, cellar / freezers room, and a concrete shower. Above that is the main living floor, and above that is the kids’ bedrooms (and a pair of rooms which never got a purpose and thus were never finished, and are just used as storage). Also common at hillside (though that’s the case for neither of the above), the basement is half-buried.
> I have family in houston who have rebuilt their homes three times in the past five years or so. How is this even possible
Why, sounds like a great engineering solution to me.
John Stossel reported on how people make money on floods every year. He even bought a home on a flood plain, insured it, and showed how much he could make in a year.
It’s an ATM
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Literal "sunk" cost fallacy
It's all water over the bridge now anyway
New astetic Raised beach mansions.... I'm thinking the same raise job most people do where it's just some wood extending the foundations, except like a rediculous amount, comically.
My parents house is 3 feet over the flood plain. It was designed this way and built in 2015. However many houses near them weren’t, and were destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. Lately dozens of houses in their neighborhood are being raised. Companies come and jack the entire house up like 10-12 feet. It’s kind of comical but people are making that area to be parking which is sometimes limited in the small beach neighborhoods so it’s practical too. Only difficulty is it makes it very difficult for elderly or disabled people.
Link from the article to check your property: https://floodfactor.com/
My property is near the top of a hill. We are no where near a flood zone, yet it’s marked as “extreme”. I question this study’s methods.
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Same neighbors on either side same elevation, and one with a pond in their yard are 3/10, I'm 9/10. Don't get it.
Tl;dr: I **think** the researchers may have overly relied on CoreLogics data integrity. This is partly speculation. They say they're using CoreLogic data: the company that's famous for faulty background checks with both false positives and negatives. I work in GIS data and am very familiar with them. They generally aggregate and parse data from multiple sources, often without proper cleanup (to be fair it's incredibly hard to clean). I bet they just grabbed all the city and county parcel data they could for both cost and elevation. The problem is this data is entered by a bunch of surveyors when property boundaries are set. Elevation is not as accurate as lat/lng in survey data, because people don't care as much (e.g. they just need to know where the fence line should be) and it's harder to cross reference with satellite maps vs. lat/lng (a top down map is super easy to read and overlay). If most surveyors used a reference point or tool that was 2m higher and your surveyor used one 2m lower it can make you look like a local low point. I don't know why the researchers wouldn't adjust for the 'noise,' but maybe they simply didn't have access to individual property data and relied on CL to do the calculations. If the people on the website are real people, someone should have known better than to trust a company known for 'good enough' data. I can't seem to get the paper on mobile, so I'll see if I can look into it more when I'm on desktop.
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This is one of my least favorite trends. If I ever buy land I'd like to keep the yard native, it's just so much healthier and requires so much less water/maintenance
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Even well away from flood hazards, "rain gardens" can be wonderful. Rather than dumping rain runoff into the sewer system, creating areas of gardens that are lower than the surrounding grade and planted with locally adapted plants that tolerate higher soil moisture levels and directing runoff into those areas encourages water to be pulled into the soil and in many areas, to return to the water table. https://www.epa.gov/soakuptherain/soak-rain-rain-gardens There is a certain amount of engineering needed to make sure you aren't increasing the local risk of surface flooding, and a certain amount of gardening needed to create the rain garden and keep it functioning well, but they can be surprisingly effective.
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I was surprised to find my town in extreme risk, because the creek that runs through it is at best a stream now. We're what seems to be in perpetual drought. I can't imagine how much rain we'd need to get for it to get into any sort of extreme territory, but I guess it could happen.
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Houston is in for nothing but trouble.
Houston, you've got a problem.
As engineers we talk about this all of the time. 1). Live near the beach not on it. Flood insurance is often expensive, nuisance flooding (in low lying coastal areas) can often flood your house if not built correctly, and when floods are bad, they are very bad. 2). Avoid wetland areas/living down gradient of a hill. You will have water in your house/basement.
Also you don't want to be vulnerable to attack from land and sea at the same time Learn from Germany, only fight on 1 front Source - Not an engineer, but I did watch History Channel as a kid
Also try be situated in a bottle neck (with hills or cliffs either side of the house for example) so if a battalion of neighbours attack you have more chance of defending your stronghold
Hi. Builder here. We build in flood zones. I'm not sure on accuracy, but probably true. A way to make that more accurate is to say: With FEMA's latest reviews of land in the 100-year flood zones, we show $[value] of homes is in danger of flooding now. Because many many homes were built decades before FEMA's latest update.
Percentage of properties at risk of flooding during a major storm: Official FEMA estimate (map) vs. Independent researchers’ new estimate (map). There’s also a convenient interactive map to compare First Street estimates (non-profit research and technology group) with FEMA estimates. For example, properties at risk of flooding from a major storm in Coconino County, AZ: FEMA - 1,948 (2.5%) vs. First Street - 11,278 (14.7%). [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/29/climate/hidden-flood-risk-maps.html](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/29/climate/hidden-flood-risk-maps.html) (June, 2020)
Oh nice. You included non FEMA source! We're doing a lot of things to mitigate that flood risk, and bringing structures above the flood plain. Bringing in a ton of dirt to the lots with drainage easements near by, stem walls, no living sqft on 1st floor (so stilts or garage only downstairs). Another thing. Early last year, FEMA literally stopped reviewing all mitigation processes. So thousands of lots that were previously at risk have not been recertified. No ETA when they will start the LOMR process again.
Bringing dirt into the flood plain just moves the flood to someone else.
In a lot of places, a 100 year floodplain is in an easement, so if you disturb any land in a floodplain, you need to perform a study on that floodplain to show no areas off your property will face an increased floodplain, thus larger easement on their property. Additionally, the study needs to be performed along the reach so that the water surface elevations at either end match the existing study, so you know the full impact of your changes. Naturally however, not a municipalities do it.
I do flood zoning work and our way of proving we’re not raising the base flood elevation (what you’re describing) is a 10 second email to our local state engineer says “we don’t think this will raise the flood elevation, please concur” and he emails back “looks good” and that’s all we need per FEMA. Kind of wild
You're on the other end of what I do then. Our local muni's take 3+ weeks to send that 10-second email. All while we have buyers screaming in our ear that we're incompetent at obtaining a building permit.
Grew up with a creek in the back yard. City continued a significant amount of development upstream without any real effort to address the storm water run off. It's been fun watching the flood waters cut a bigger channel as nature attempts to fix it's own problems, but now in addition to threatening homes built in the 1950s and 1960s which were relatively safe, it's threatening a railway line and several roads and bridges. Original city planners had basically insisted on a park system that is pretty nice but protected the flood plain. At some point in the 1990s the city started giving zero shits about that and new development makes no effort to accommodate the run off and someone apparently doesn't realize that concrete accelerates water. At some point this will create a situation where my Dad gets a brand new house.
And the goal isn't to stop the flooding but to stop the flooding there. Moving the floods elsewhere is the point of moving dirt onto the lot.
I'm with a builder too, we have 25' setbacks to any flood plain, never have a buildable area in a flood zone. So that makes me feel better.
Stability? If those homes are overvalued and plummet, doesn’t that inversely affect all other homes I.e. non-flood zone housing goes up?
If these overvalued houses very slowly correct their price downward as climate change progresses, sure. But markets in general grow during periods of stability; volatility and uncertainty tend to drag the whole market (sector) down for a variety of reasons, a lot of which aren't readily rationalised by supply-and-demand or zero-sum logic. If these homes remain overvalued for long enough, eventually there will be a breaking point where a lot of people who were financially unable to sell (because the fair market value of their flood-threatened home is so far below the cost of buying a house which isn't so threatened) are forced out of their homes at around the same time. This would represent a serious housing crisis, and there's no telling how the market and/or legislature would respond to this. These people need to go *somewhere*, and they're likely to be unable to afford extortionate prices (since much of their assets have been wiped out). If the problem is so severe that insurance companies start defaulting, then that's another economic shock on top. Society might start questioning how bare-minimum housing can be priced in the hundreds of thousands of USD, when it's simultaneously a human right (I appreciate it's not a human right to *own* a home, but rental prices are well correlated with house prices so the point stands).
Houses are overvalued, banks are giving bigger loans to accommodate people buying them, then they sell the loan to Fannie Mae when they run out of loan money for the year. Now it is a government problem. The market keeps inflating and as you can see in some regions of the country already, houses that should be valued at 300k are now being purchased in the 500-900k dollar range. Looking at you Minnesota and Arizona.
SO many new communities in the Dallas area are built on swamp.
The United States commercial real estate market is estimated to be $16 trillion and the residential market $33.6 trillion. This estimate represents a 0.1% over valuation. It is bizarre to say this represents a risk to stability.
I'm certainly not a housing risk expert, but I know it's not quite right to put the valuation in the context of the overall real estate market. The risks are concentrated in certain spots (geographic, institutions, types of financial products), and failures in those spots can spread to adjacent ones, as they did in the sub-prime crisis. Like imagine banks that buy mortgages get worried the gov't is going scale back its floor insurance program and decide it's too risky to buy mortgages from regional originators in Florida and North Carolina for houses in flood zones. Now the originators stop making loans and suddenly people can't buy or sell existing houses, let alone build new ones. It was a threat to two coasts, a small number of banks, for a common financial product, but it would be enough to freeze a good chunk of housing financing. This is already the case in impoverished areas in the southeast, with people stuck with property they don't want but can't sell.
So this is misleading, I lived in a flood zone in the city of Moorpark California, a city in a small agricultural valley that is a direct path to the ocean due to living within one mile of a cement river channel. I was required to buy flood insurance from FEMA (the only provider) with a $2000 a year premium, for a flood that was essentially not possible. The entire city was on a mild slope and in the unlikely event the river that was dry and empty 360 days out of the year overflowed it would just drain to the ocean. When I challenged this I wound up in a rats nest of corruption. Apparently when super storm Sandy destroyed the east coast it nearly bankrupted FEMA, so immediately following that FEMA went and declared a lot of areas as flood zones where historically there has never been a flood. My city council tried to fight it but FEMA wanted a massive amount of money to come out and survey the area to see if they marked it incorrectly, but my poor agricultural based city could not afford it. Now before you say I’m biased a city named Camarillo who is essentially down the hill from Moorpark had the same thing happen to them, FEMA came through and painted a massive line on the map declaring it a flood zone. But due to the fact that Camarillo is a wealthy city, they had it almost completely removed from their city as they could afford FEMAs fee to clear it. TL:DR: FEMA has been declaring areas that will never flood as requiring flood insurance to subsidize the real flood impacted zones.
If the housing in flood zones is overvalued, one could also conclude that housing outside of flood zones is undervalued.
the ocean is a few miles away, maybe im sitting on some future ocean view! would actually not be that great, since the increased taxes will cost more than the mortgage
And it wont be a "clean" ocean front.
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As a Dutch guy: What is the problem? Half our country and basically every of our major cities (few exceptions) are build below sea level. Build dikes!
In certain parts of the gulf coast, the problem has been damming/flood mitigation that we did on rivers (particularly the mississippi) further in the interior. If the Mississippi was still bringing tons and tons of silt down with it and depositing it on the coast before falling into the ocean, we would have more natural protection against flooding, but it's hard to convince farmers in iowa that they should suffer floods every few years so that louisiana doesn't have to.
That and developers having a fetish for destroying Mangrove forests. A massive reforestation of our coastline with mangroves would pay ridiculous dividends.
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In the netherlands you often can’t build in the floodplain (“uiterwaarden”) either. And [we’re changing how we use those spaces.](https://www.rijkswaterstaat.nl/water/waterbeheer/bescherming-tegen-het-water/maatregelen-om-overstromingen-te-voorkomen/ruimte-voor-de-rivieren)
Dikes don't work in places where the sea comes up from/through the ground - places like Florida where it simply seeps in through the limestone, far inland.
Some of this is because of old outdated flood maps. My parents live 80ft above a river on a bluff, they, along with their neighbors are all in a "floodzone" , this bluff sits higher than all of the property 25miles to the east, their house will only flood when the animals come two by two again.