The state deals with flooding and sea level rise by buying homes in flood prone areas.
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As floods become more severe, A New Jersey program provides a model
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So, your plan is to run offshore wind turbines in reverse, to blow hurricanes back out to sea? Certainly creative, but I don't think that math is going to work.
/s
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Current law forbids FEMA from requiring that properties be sold; instead, FEMA must provide insurance. (And don't even get me started on the legal shenanigans that realtors pull to force FEMA to redraw floodplains!) Various groups have been trying to get this changed since at least the 1970s, but Congress remains firmly in the pockets of developers.
To give you an idea of how deep this insanity runs, the camp in Texas that flooded and killed several dozen children will be rebuilt on the exact same spot because "that's what the children would have wanted".
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Most are becoming aware of that Now. But these towns were first laid out 100+ years ago, and the natural thing at the time was to build by the river, because then you had flat land, water and often transport. I'm in NZ, and there are a number of towns that are known flood risks. Christchurch city had to basically abandon a couple of suburbs after a large quake, that dropped the land about 6ft. Parts were only 6ft above high tide sea level to start with. So this sort of buy out was needed.
But back in the day it was nice flat land to build houses on, and no one had ever seen it flood.
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View from France here.
The culprits are most often :
Honestly in this situation, only a national/federal can manage and impose the necessary actions:
I think there is also an important role for insurers. They must absolutely stop providing any kind of flood insurance in the affected regions.
And finally, I don't believe much in rebuilding houses higher. If the entire region is a floodplain, the issue is not a few homes, it's the entire infrastructure. Better move somewhere else.
The culprits are most often :
- the local mayor who wants moarrr sales & property taxes
- real estate developers who just want to flip the cheapest McMansions no matter how durable it all is
- the owners, who want cheap homes, often by the sea, and who either don't care, don't believe, or don't want to know about flooding risks
Honestly in this situation, only a national/federal can manage and impose the necessary actions:
- updating agressive (and at least 50 years out) flood maps
- preventing the building of any permanent structures in these zones
- managing the retreat in those areas (buying homes, destroying them, recreating marshes and stuff)
I think there is also an important role for insurers. They must absolutely stop providing any kind of flood insurance in the affected regions.
And finally, I don't believe much in rebuilding houses higher. If the entire region is a floodplain, the issue is not a few homes, it's the entire infrastructure. Better move somewhere else.
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These types of programs will need to become the norm, because this type of problem is going to become much more common. As more states (CA, FL, TX) become the insurer of last resort for more of their homeowners, the financial burden will break state budgets. Better to deal with it now so you only have to pay for each property once.
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New Jersey's situation is interesting. Flood insurance is legally required for coastal and river areas. However the problem here is that claims tend to be highly correlated correlated with storms. This is not a good model for insurance style products that are best at dealing with uncorrelated events. The end result is that the insurance is expensive for those who need it. A lot of insurance providers have left the state because they cannot make the numbers work.
Its not all climate change that is causing this. NJ has been converting from rural farmland to suburban and light urban development for decades. This is happening because the land is more economically valuable for housing. As rail and highway infrastructure has improved, housing near Philadelphia and New York City has slowly creeped east and south.
For some older towns closer to the ocean, the development was not always handled properly taking into consideration proper storm drain design. Further west the problem also exists, but is not quite as challenging because storm overflow can be more easily diverted to drain into the Delaware river. Still, this is part of what happened to Lambertville NJ where some older development was built too close to the banks of the river which flooded during a hurricane.
Development now in the state has been adjusted to learn the lessons from the past. However, the need for drainage ponds and storm drains does increase the cost of the development. This made larger suburban "McMansion" type development easier than denser but more affordable housing. Recently though we have seen more townhouse, condo and apartments being built closer to the Jersey transit corridor.
What climate change is effecting is development closer to the shore line. Here the storm drain situation is more challenging due to the fact that the tidal flows will impact the ability to divert water into the ocean. This development also tends to be older around the Elizabeth Seaport/Newark area where there has been expanding economic activity for decades.
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Mayor's are under pressure (here in the States at least) to grow the tax base. As housing costs have risen faster than inflation the cost for providing local services has also risen, This puts pressure on the tax base.
McMansions are appealing because of their low density. They put less stress on local infrastructure and services but command a premium in terms of taxes. That's low handing fruit. Problem is If the low density suburban housing pushes out too much high density development that itself can drive up the cost of living in the area and exacerbate the problem.
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It’s the right choice to keep it from happening again, and wasting even more resources long term. Ultimately, those home should never have been built.
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How about the right to say you get 50% of the value, or maybe nothing? Bad decisions should have consequences. If there's a loan involved, that's what bankruptcy is for. The government doesn't bail out people without health insurance who get too much medical debt.
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This applies only partially to rebuilds (it does in the sense of keeping them insurable, and may have some psychological effect); but it's also worth mentioning that any attempt to upgrade something's risk classification or revise flood maps raises absolute hell on the lobbying side. Some of it is fairly overtly cynical: developer wants to chop up that greenfield and flip that shit so it's someone else's problem as soon as possible and fuck those guys; but you get a bit more sincerely heartfelt(if often equally destructive) opposition from people who don't want documentation of reality updated in ways that indicate that they are basically uninsurable at any sane price or that their town's unflooded tax base is going to be 40% smaller.
People certainly can be stupid and stubborn on their own; but this is one of those situations where the incentives also overwhelmingly push toward people being lied to: between people whose job is selling bags to greater fools and people who don't want to believe that they have been left holding the bag.
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Finally, we have an answer to this question:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-w-pdqwiBw
Although to be fair, I don't think Ben Shapiro was referring to these type of government buy-ups.
On a more serious note, I recently watched this Youtube video on the working class community of Edgemere in New York City, which is one of its most flood prone neighborhoods, but a decade after officials promised to cut flood risks in the long neglected neighborhood, critics say it remains just as vulnerable. The video mentions that a land-buy program was tried, but few homeowners took it, and instead are pushing for the flood protections they were promised.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Uwe74-6C9M
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-w-pdqwiBw
Although to be fair, I don't think Ben Shapiro was referring to these type of government buy-ups.
On a more serious note, I recently watched this Youtube video on the working class community of Edgemere in New York City, which is one of its most flood prone neighborhoods, but a decade after officials promised to cut flood risks in the long neglected neighborhood, critics say it remains just as vulnerable. The video mentions that a land-buy program was tried, but few homeowners took it, and instead are pushing for the flood protections they were promised.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Uwe74-6C9M
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Aside from the question of whether standing aside and watching medical bankruptcies is good policy; I suspect that you are potentially looking at different scopes of impact.
It's cold; but a "sucks to be sickie, I guess" policy is somewhat more manageable because it strikes relatively randomly across the population at large, along with some higher rates among people who are basically EoL anyway; but a "sucks to be literally underwater" policy is much more likely to wipe out a bunch of people in a specific location at a particular time which will presumably have a much greater risk of damage to the local social fabric, housing and job markets, etc.
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Wow 95th largest country? Unfortunately water doesn't give a shit. Water only cares about gravity.
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I think you are assuming a profit margin for the insurance companies that is out of line with reality. The problem isn't that insurance companies are profiting, the problem is that the risks are heavily concentrated in particular regions. The profit involved is dwarfed by the amount of risk that people are worried about covering. Honestly, only way to keep people in certain locations (often expensive locations) at 'a reasonable cost' is for other people in safer areas to subsidize them in some way. A forced, national insurance could do that by forcing less risky areas to pay into the overall pool---but this is a subsidy.
As to your comment about redrawing lines, that is happening right now in many, many places. Places that only saw dangerous conditions once in a hundred years are now seeing problems once a decade. Or, worse, you weren't in a flood prone area before, but development around you has now put you in one.
Relocation and buyouts seem sane to me, but we are far from sane in the US right now.
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We should not build houses in flood plains. If we do, we should not rebuild them when they get flooded. It is not a terrible idea to buy them and demolish them.
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Oregon has seen both sides of this. Vernonia keeps getting flooded but more structures are rebuilt out of the flood plain or raised each year. On the coast it's not so much flooding as beach erosion and some areas are trying to alter the landscape with riprap, other areas say tough luck and let the expensive beach houses fall into the sea. I'm inclined toward the latter since arguably they knew the risks and jetties and rip rap shift the erosion elsewhere.
Portland is also getting more of a clue, the Vanport site is still unbuildable, which is why PIR has not suffered the fate of so many tracks in California and they are finally realizing building on ancient landslides in the West Hills is sub optimal. More wetlands and less concrete does alleviate flooding so that's the right way to go. Personally I live on volcanic rock well away from both floods and forest fires so my insurance is cheap. I'm curious about the costing for the townhouses springing up down the street.
Portland is also getting more of a clue, the Vanport site is still unbuildable, which is why PIR has not suffered the fate of so many tracks in California and they are finally realizing building on ancient landslides in the West Hills is sub optimal. More wetlands and less concrete does alleviate flooding so that's the right way to go. Personally I live on volcanic rock well away from both floods and forest fires so my insurance is cheap. I'm curious about the costing for the townhouses springing up down the street.
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Not correct in the USA.
That's why since 1927 in the USA insurance companies don't cover flooding. The federal government operates and funds the National Flood Insurance Program because insurance companies couldn't do so profitably.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Flood_Insurance_Program
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All should take such offers while they are available. Sea level rise is going to accelerate. Sooner or later governments will give up trying to buy people out, and they will get flooded out.
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And putting the Florida statistic another way, the state’s highest land point, Britton Hill, is at just 345 feet of elevation above mean sea level. There are of course a number of buildings in Miami, and elsewhere, that are higher than that.
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That's the existing national flood insurance program. We used to have a house that was in the flood plain. During the '96 flood here in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, the water was higher than anyone had seen since the flood control dams were built. Our place had water up to the foundation wall, but it stayed below floor level and our overall damage was minimal. We filed no claims, and in any case the deductible would have been far more that what damage we had. Subsequent floods happened a few more times in the 30 years we owned it, but none to that level.
Fast forward some years and we had the floods in Louisiana, Florida and Texas due to hurricanes. Flood insurance rates started rising to reflect the increasing losses. Our house cost us $300/year for fire insurance; flood insurance went from a few hundred per year to over a thousand, with projected increases of 25% annually ongoing. Those huge increases weren't because of local losses, but reflective of losses in other regions. We solved the problem first by paying off the mortgage, which allowed us to cancel the coverage, and then by moving to a house on higher ground, still near the river. If that one floods, the whole valley is going to be underwater.
More recently, Oregon created an updated wildfire risk map to aid owners in understanding their fire risk. There was widespread outrage, due to misinformation, misunderstanding and willful denial of the true risks. "No, you can't build your house in the woods with overhanging trees, and expect to have it protected if a fire comes through." As usual, a mix of rural outrage and Republicans killed it.
https://www.opb.org/article/2025/08...re-risk-map-labor-day-2020-fires-home-owners/
Insurers, however, are acting on the basis of facts and reducing or denying coverage. There was a recent kerfuffle on NextDoor about increasing insurance rates here. I made the point that unlike California, insurers in Oregon are not required to get state approval for rate increases. They notify the insurance department of their plans, but those plans are not subject to a state veto. California by contrast does have rate limiting authority...and the logical outcome of that is the insurers are choosing to non-renew policies there and are exiting the business. So yes, premiums are increasing steeply because of losses, but at least there are still insurers writing coverage. If you have a mortgage and therefore must have insurance, would you prefer a higher price or no source of coverage at all? (At which point your lender might call the loan and demand a payoff?)
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meanwhile in america, houston TX let developers build in an area specifically labeled as a flood reservoir without notifying buyers, and oh look they all got flooded, but they still kept building more which meant even more pavement and worse flooding
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/...s-inside-reservoirs-but-no-one-warned-buyers/
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Responsible governments (at some level) map floodplains and share the data. This includes accounting online change.
Don’t build there. Move away from there. Or accept rebuilding many time over, and tax accordingly.
I know it’s far easier said than done. It’s real hard, emotionally and financially. But friends remind each other that physics does what it does without consulting us first.
Don’t build there. Move away from there. Or accept rebuilding many time over, and tax accordingly.
I know it’s far easier said than done. It’s real hard, emotionally and financially. But friends remind each other that physics does what it does without consulting us first.
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There's no good reason to pay more than market rate for homes. That's what Eminent Domain is for. If anything, they should ensure the market rate reflects the risk of it flooding again, and that no future bailout will be coming.
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In the Netherlands insurance companies do not pay out in case of a flood. They would be immediately wiped out anyway. There's no insurance company that can afford a natural disaster- the government will always have to bail them out.
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The problem being that now instead of insurance rates based on risk, insurance is based on political pressure. Which means that the price signals that would normally keep people from building in these areas is absent.
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I'm in Florida, ~15 feet above sea level, thank goodness, but I'm thinking of a neighborhood I've been in many times that's dense with high-dollar houses and almost every time it rains they get flooded now.
I wish I could just tell stories and give details but if I'm talking about places near me I feel I could dox myself, and I have opinions that aren't favored by the current administration and their orange-shirt goons. Oh well, it's USA in 2026, might as well get used to it.
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In Florida I'd like to see new construction mandates requiring multistory buildings - recreation, storage and utility access on the ground, parking on 2nd or 3rd floor, preferably 3rd but it makes the ramps much more difficult to build, entertainment/kitchen/laundry facilities on 2nd or 3rd floor, if there will be businesses they go on 4th, then living space above that, and finally have a swimming pool on the roof. The pool becomes emergency water for the building in case of disasters and the floor usage requirements are intended to put human life most out of harm's way by having bedrooms higher than everything else (there also needs to be upper floor exit facilities which don't depend on electricity), then protect the most valuable property (an entire business is more valuable than the residential kitchen/laundry/entertainment facilities, so businesses get a higher floor), and automobiles get a compromise between storage height and their value because of the difficulty of raising and lowering them.
This would not only make everything more resilient to flooding, it would force building more high-density housing which is long overdue for many reasons besides flood mitigation.
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Let’s apply common sense first, don’t build in flood sensitive areas without effective countermeasures.
Greetings from The Netherlands.
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I do not think this is off the radar. Most of us know this. It has been predicted it has been in the news so many times.
We chose to ignore it and live our little lives. It is just plain procrastination, but on a global scale. It is silly. Sorry kids...
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As johndel and spril pointed out above, NFIP is a program run by FEMA that allows the gov't to legally require flood insurance in flood zone, and then force insurers to underwrite the insurance, and, of course, the final piece of the puzzle: FEMA reimburses the insurers.
Until we all stop subsidizing the homes of those of us that choose to live on coasts with rising sea levels, none of this will stop. Props to NJ for trying something different.
** I just looked this up to make sure I'm not talking out of my ass, and maybe I am a bit -- it looks like people can now get the insurance directly from FEMA via a portal for NFIP. Doesn't change much if so, just keeps insurance companies from taking a middle man check.
Until we all stop subsidizing the homes of those of us that choose to live on coasts with rising sea levels, none of this will stop. Props to NJ for trying something different.
** I just looked this up to make sure I'm not talking out of my ass, and maybe I am a bit -- it looks like people can now get the insurance directly from FEMA via a portal for NFIP. Doesn't change much if so, just keeps insurance companies from taking a middle man check.
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Toronto had Hurricane Hazel in 1954. A lot of homes along the Humber River were washed away killing over 20 people. They bought out the properties and the people that survived were relocated. Thereafter no more building in a flood plain was allowed. Problem solved.
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Mr. Perfect
Ars Praetorian
Hey, I know this one! Bay-side houses a town over have hydraulic car lifts in the driveway, so when it inevitably floods they can boost the car above the water. To my mind the day one of those becomes necessary is also the day I sell the house to the state and move, but it's an option I guess.
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