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Comment by msrenee | Hacker News Reader

People are more likely to build in flood zones if they can purchase flood insurance. There's a small town here where every house is within a flood zone off the river and they were underwater for about a week a couple years ago. Built right back up and now there's 2 or 3 new housing developments going in.

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The entire coast of Florida is comprised of vacation homes and condos right in the path of hurricane storm surge on tiny sandy keys a few feet above sea level.

Fortunately, the feedback loop is finally disintegrating. Unfortunately for those left holding the bag, it's disintegrating by insurers fleeing the state and leaving properties uninsurable - just deserts for those who knew the risks and thought they could profit off the situation, but terrible for locals forced out of their homes.

I too have little sympathy for those who rebuild and increase development in a river floodplain.

Flood insurance is needed to get the mortgage - if it's not a legal mandatory requirement, people will buy (and even build) anywhere they can.

Flood plains are often desirable in various other ways, too.

Flood insurance is generally very expensive. That's should be a massive downside. I won't even look at a house if I know it needs flood insurance. I've seen a few that I would have been interested in had they not required the insurance - meaning I found the flood risk to be acceptable and there were mitigating factors if it did occur.

> There's a small town here where every house is within a flood zone off the river and they were underwater for about a week a couple years ago. Built right back up and now there's 2 or 3 new housing developments going in.

Yeah we got the same shit in Ahrtal, Germany. The government decided to do nothing and so, predictably, three years after the last flood, a few weeks ago the next flood came - way smaller than the 2021 flood, but still decently destructive.

IMHO, after devastating flood events governments should declare the affected area uninhabitable, insurances and governments pay out fair market value, and the land is then flattened and condemned for future settlement. There is just no way that with the escalating severity due to climate change this land will ever be safe from flooding again.

[1] https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/ahrtal-unwetter-auswirkungen...

So everybody having an insurance pays for this abuse?

Hopefully an insurer would be aware of the flooding history and set premiums accordingly.

The flood plane thing is pretty extreme (and usually involves some sort of corruption, since zoning is involved), but pretty much everywhere on earth is seeing a correlated increased risk of building damage.

The insurance companies are using this as an excuse to increase profitability. Focusing on corner cases is a distraction. Only a tiny percentage of houses are built in flood planes.

A much larger percentage are in the sorts of towns that completely burn to the ground these days, or are in places that became flood planes since the housing was built (e.g., a big chunk of silicon valley).

Other areas face other new/more common correlated disasters, like tornados, widespread crop failure, high wet-bulb days, grid/industrial collapse due to winter storms, etc.

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