Comment by yourapostasy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yourapostasy | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Literally right now, my good friends are being rescued from a rooftop in Houston. No number of bottles of water in their basement or generators are going to help them.

Some of this outcome is a direct result of conforming to commercially-fabricated social pressure. In this particular case, floodplain maps are publicly and freely available, so anyone can build structures that rise well above the highest-projected floods.

Except that developers don't want to have to build on top of stilts or as tethered floating structures. It decreases the available pool of customers looking for a pre-packaged vision of what they "should" buy, and it's more expensive than "conventional" building designs.

This illustrates that for some, a preparedness mindset can include thinking for oneself and outside social norms, with the aim of avoiding placing themselves in a situation that calls for preparedness to begin with. Teaching youngsters how to deconstruct the marketing that militates against this kind of mindset to externalize a future cost upon them in order to lift an immediate profit into the commercial entities standing behind those forces, can passively preempt many preparedness scenarios.

Developers are just responding to market signals. The underlying problem in the U.S. is that the federal government backstops 98% of flood insurance policies and does not charge the actuarial risk price. This government subsidy gives people incentives to overbuild and underprotect property in flood-prone areas.

I like the idea that un-socializing flood risk pools might align incentives better... but my guess is that's not what would happen. Instead, by and large, people would estimate risk the way most humans do, which is to say "badly," and would value the premium money more than protection from events whose cycle is long enough that they seem like freak occurrences to some. If that's the case -- if that's been the case in the past -- then putting the government as the cause is putting the cart before the horse. It isn't that the market bent to the shape it's in because of the government, it's that the government adapted to the shape of the market and provided the socialized form of insurance that people were most amenable to.

Exactly. To this day I don't understand how building on a slab is even considered insurable unless you're basically on a hilltop.

Sounds like a good case for better building regulations and less reliance on hand-wavy free-market woo

The classic Queenslander house is built up high so it can stay cool and probably also good for a flooding scenario.

It all depends upon how they are built. I remember a number of Queenslanders ended up floating away because the waters went above floor level. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-02/floodwaters-sweep-away....

They tend to not do very well in cyclones unless the builder has been very careful about tying the stumps to the floor to the walls to the roof.

That's fascinating, thanks for the info; the Texas coast has some houses with a similar design [1]. While some use wood stilts, some are going into full fortified designs [2]. Even further afield, using principles established with invisibility cloaking research might offer even more protection in the future [3]. If plasma gasification-produced slag-based pozzolanic concrete can be proven safe and efficacious, then the pillars could literally be partially built out of garbage, co-generating energy and rock wool at the same time.

[1] http://pictures.escapia.com/PTARES/1866960517.jpg

[2] http://www.texasgulfcoastonline.com/News/tabid/86/ctl/Articl...

[3] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14829-invisibility-cl...

Fun fact I met the author of #3. Nice guy.

Those are common along the Carolina coast (which gets hit with Atlantic hurricanes). They're supposed to be built with strapping that connects the roof to the walls, the walls to the floor joists, and then to the posts. Building up like this gets you above the storm surge and gives you a place to park the car (you'll lose the car and the lawnmower, but that's minor compared to losing the house).

They're also supposed to have hurricane-rated glazing. One thing that destroys homes is when an opening gets made, allowing the wind inside. So having strong glass (or boarding-up) is a big deal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com