In Ontario, you simply are not allowed to build in a flood plain. This is in response to Hurricane Hazel in the 1950s, who's floods killed people.
Even further, if your home is destroyed in a major flood, you aren't allowed to rebuild it- clearly, wherever you are it's not safe from flooding.
It's a very effective system. The only problems is has these days are A: people who fight it because they bought property they want to develop, but can't, and B: the fact that where flooding occurs is changing due to climate change and geology/geography changes in the last 50 years.
Ontario is the most populous Canadian province, which I didn't know, with about 14,000,000 people. That is a bit more than twice the population of the Houston metro area.
The problem in Houston isn't construction in a flood prone area (the whole place is flood prone) but that construction upstream puts more drainage downstream. With Ontario's policy, construction of a suburb 50 miles away may make an existing neighborhood worthless.
> construction of a suburb 50 miles away may make an existing neighborhood worthless
That would only happen if that suburb were being built in an existing flood plain. Ontario's policies aren't just about being near cities, it's the whole province.
The little I know on the topic is because I married a water resources engineer. Her previous job was up north of Toronto, working at a conservation authority, telling developers that no, they can't build at all on that part of the land and also the part they can build on, they must add additional stormwater management ponds.
The entire province is working to protect everyone.
When they were built, everything upstream was prairie. Rain falling on that area would mostly be absorbed or cause localized ponding. The rest would enter the river in question, Buffalo Bayou, I believe.
(Wikipedia has a dandy map of the Buffalo Bayou watershed: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Bayou). It's interesting to note that it's almost entirely contained between the 99 "Grand parkway"(?) and Houston---I'm old, I remember when there was farmland between Katy and Houston.)
Now, much of the area upstream has been converted to less permeable urban use, with the result that more water becomes run-off and ends up in the bayou. None of that construction is in any particular danger of flooding, itself. The article describes some of the legal and political fights that were involved in trying to say, "no, you cannot build any more net-impermeable in the Bayou watershed."
With an integrated flood prevention policy, such as is supposed to exist in the UK and is claimed in Ontario, the people developing upstream would have to show that they've considered the effect on downstream, and mitigate any impact.
Like the GP, I only really know about this because a family member does modelling in that area.
Texas seems to have a unique ability to address that with these massive cities like Houston.
Where I live, our city sewers, built 1890-1910 are getting 4-5x their design capacity as the outlying suburbs have been paved and populated.
It’s a weird system because the county owns the treatment plants, but the piping is owned by the municipality. Localities (towns or cities) control zoning and approvals in most cases. So an impoverished city bears the burden and local impact of overwhelmed combined sewer flow (and cost for remediation like overflow basins) while the burbs bear little or no cost.
At least in Houston they at least have the ability (if not the will) to control development.
Isn't it possible to make the building codes such that houses must like the google image search for "flood proof houses" - little boxes that stand on legs? Far better than telling someone their land is worthless.
I remember hearing stories of homes in Houston that had been elevated after previous floods to make them flood proof. They were elevated high enough to survive the highest flood on record. But this one was higher..
I've always wondered what the marginal cost is for raising a home (e.g. +0.5 meter). I imagine there's some cost, and at some point you run into zoning laws. But if it's your primary residence and is in a flood prone area, why not just put it ~3 meters up and be safe like they do in coastal Florida?
Cool find! The $75-$80 is the cost per square ft of house though. I'm curious about the cost of additional elevation. I.e. to parent comment's point about "elevated" houses still being flooded because they weren't elevated enough.
I'd assume that once it's jacked, adding or subtracting vertical height is basically free.
Harvey flooded things way outside of flood zones. Huge swaths of land that havent flooded in centuries got flooded. Theyre calling it an 800 year flood.
I don't disagree with limiting construction in flood plains, but you can't issue a blanket statement saying 'no rebuilding.'
As has been pointed out many times in recent weeks, they then want the "big government" to fund their rescue and recovery when that mistake bites them.
Through the National Flood Insurance Program "one percent of homes have been responsible for more than 25 percent of the claims." In various ways the program is not allowed to deny issuing policies.
I'm not sure what the relevance of insurance claims is. Flood insurance would be a scam if they only insured low-risk homes, and it would be horribly inefficient to only insure high-risk homes. When 99% of the insured cover the 1% that make claims, that looks like it's working as designed to me.
In the podcast IIRC one house has had $4M worth of claims across 4 floods over 8 years... the claims should be paid on existing policies, but new policies shouldn't be issued for that house unless major changes are made.
The relevance is covered in more detail in the story but it basically comes down to not being able to charge market rates. The cap is well below what normal actuarial practice would call for but politics makes changing that hard.
Exactly. I have no problem with idiots that want to build in flood plains, but I get upset with federally-subsidized flood insurance program and FEMA who come in to rescue people who make shit decisions.
Absolutely not partisan. I would prefer if my (federal) tax dollars didn't help anyone affected by hurricanes. I understand my point of view is way outside of the mainstream, where all of the politicians compete to see who can appear more concerned.
Primarily, I think it would bring incentives closer to the people making decisions. I think it would have pretty dramatic effects on where people choose to live, how they construct their houses, and their level of disaster preparedness. And these are all very good things. Secondarily, it would ever so slightly reduce the federal budget. I don't have any illusion that it would be a meaningful impact on the budget, but I have very similar attitudes towards a wide swath of other federal programs.
This is a great question. It's exactly the type (there are many more) of question that isn't asked and debated to conclusion, and this is a big part of why politics will never get fixed in the US.
Emotionally, I feel different about Puerto Rico because it’s island that got completely destroyed. It’s not like they can get in their car and go someplace safer.
But there is a lot of land in the middle of the country that is not prone to hurricanes and floods (?)
This is the cognitive dissonance of trying to explain away the underlying truth that you want to help people you sympathize with, but not the people you don't.
But presumably you do have a problem helping them rebuild their homes where they live. And you don't have that same problem with the people of Puerto Rico, because... it's an island. Surrounded by big water.
Whether or not you can drive a car to a neighboring state is not a compelling factor on whether or not people should have to pick up and leave their home because other people no longer consider it feasible for them to live there.
Puerto Ricans have freedom of movement as well. Pay them fair market value for their houses + transportation and move them to Florida. PR is at much larger risk than the Houston metropolitan area to future disasters.
Sorry, I see now that I worded my phrase in a way that was likely to be misunderstood. I meant "rescue" in a metaphorical sense that people are getting financially rescued by FEMA assistance.
In many areas of Texas you cannot build in a 100 year flood plain. In others, flood insurance is a requirement as are certain construction limitations, e.g. in Harris county [0]. Now, according to you these laws can't exist in Texas, but they do. Maybe you shouldn't say these things you don't understand, especially about a very liberal area.
$500 a year for flood insurance is still heavily taxpayer subsidized and the article you point to also says
Can I build on property in a floodplain?
A: Yes. However, floodplain development restrictions apply to grading, new construction and some renovations. Contact the Harris County Permit Office at (713) 956-3000 for more information on these requirements.
Worse. What - anecdotally - seems to happen is that these are areas reserved for lower income neighborhoods.
The well to do reap the benefits of having cheap labor nearby, pat themselves on the back for their generosity and kindness, and only lose occasionally if there's a flood. On the other hand, such floods devastate those areas for years if not decades. The destroy/rebuild cycle is simply breakeven. It pairs so well with poverty. A pairing the well to do rarely see.
Right. But that's the exception not the rule. And that is worth mentioning. Else too many people continue to b
Perpetuate the myth that poverty is a choice.
That wouldn’t be a bad idea - as long as there is full disclosure. To save money, I might rent in a place like that and make sure I have no valuables that I couldn’t take with me in my car. It’s rare that flooding in those areas happen without enough warning to get to safety.
Even with full disclosure, what is a poor person supposed to do? It is precisely the rich who could mitigate the risk, by either buying insurance or by building to a high enough standard. Poor people have to hope for the best, because the savings go directly to other necessities.
You might. If you have a choice. That's often a pretty big if. Furthermore, any aid is often to rebuild not relocate. It's hard to break that cycle when the systrm promotes it.
Even with full disclosure, what is a poor person supposed to do? It is precisely the rich who could mitigate the risk, by either buying insurance or by building to a high enough standard.
Poor people have to hope for the best, because the savings go directly to other necessities.
That’s why I specifically said “rent”. If you only rent, don’t keep a lot of valuables that you can’t move at the drop of a dime in your car, what would the harm be?
This also pre-supposes that the government is willing to help with temporary housing. If they are willing to help the owners of $500,000 plus homes, why not spend much less and help the poor with temporary housing assistance?
In my case, when I first graduated from college and living on my own, why would I have cared if my apartment flooded? I could have put my clothes and my computer in my car taken the rent money I was paying and stay in an extended stay until I found another place. I wouldn’t care about my 20 year old bedroom set, my sleeper sofa, or my computer desk I bought from Walmart.
If you are working two part-time jobs earning $8 / hour, renting is your only option. The poor often don't have enough food to eat for the week, much less own a car. They wouldn't own much either.
I am surprised the insurance company didn't know. But they can be an answer and it's free market. One needs mortgage insurance or may want insurance otherwise. Well, in the flood prone areas it gets prohibitive because the risk is higher. People will move away or eat the risk(with full knowledge)
Given standard homeowner's policies don't cover flooding, do they even care? They still get to collect the premiums but aren't exposed to any additional risk.
Interesting the banks holding the mortgages don’t insist then. Didn’t people just walk in 2008 when their homes were worth less than mortgages, seems it would be a comparable situation. Maybe not, but there are a lot of ways to discourage risky ownership. One could improve standards too
So people should be given a choice - either accept a government set amount to buy up your property and to help you relocate or pay for your own repairs. Why should other people keep paying to rebuild homes in flood plains?
The whole of the NJ shore is a "flood plain." But as long as it's the playground of the wealthy, the whole of NJ taxpayers will subsidize such nonsense.
Vacation? Irrelevant. Live? Again, doesn't matter. The thing that matters is ownership. And as long as rich people want to put massive house on the beach, the whole lot will be underwritten.
"Stronger than the storm"? Or come on now. And the taxpayers paid for that spin as well. After Sandy there was zero sense of "wait a minute, maybe we should think about this?" Instead, the politicians did what they do best. They bought votes with taxpayers' money.
Yeah, all types are there. But who benefits the most?
There's some strange rules around flood insurance. I don't have a mortgage but I do have pretty fancy insurance from a private insurance company. Flood insurance is mandatory, or at least mandatory per their policy.
They admit that there's pretty much zero chance that I'll flood, but they want me to be insured against it anyhow.
My elevation is 3800' and I'm pretty much on the top of a mountain. If it floods and impacts my house, there's not going to be anywhere to file an insurance claim. I'm not sure it's even physically possible for me to flood. I don't think the planet has enough water.
But, no... They want me to pay for flood insurance.
Yet, I lived very close to the water in Winston-Salem, NC and had minor flooding most every spring. My house was mortgaged there and flood insurance was mandatory.
The flood insurance was less than it is here. This house is worth more, but it's not going to flood. Blizzards, ice storms, and really strong winds are all probable. Flooding is damned near impossible. The snow cap could all melt at once and I could wash away, but I don't think that counts as a flood.
A lot of what you might think of as storm damage is classified as flooding. Still, you may just want to shop around for a different private insurance without the flood policy requirement.
Huh... I wonder why they'd classify it as flooding?
I suppose that, at least theoretically, my basement could get water in it from the snow melt, but that seems unlikely. There were drainage channels put in just in case. I only get 12' to 14' of snow per year.
The valleys flood. They flood every year. They are quite far below me. The difference between here and the top of the mountain is maybe 150' in elevation.
Hmm... I dunno? I do know this insurance group covers pretty much everything, which is nice. I have a couple of large events and guests that come during hunting season. So long as I'm not charging admission, they cover all that.
As you mention water seeping into the basement is one common issue but even without that there are a few more.
EX: Someone sets up a garden with a small earthen wall. They get ~6 inches of rain which seems insane for the area which due to poor drainage pools behind the earthen wall until the weight of water bursts the wall. Followed by a wave of water causing surprising amounts to dammage.
The insurance adjuster then says sorry this was caused by standing water not wind / rain.
The important point is drainage issues are generally classified as flooding as are mud slides.
Oh, I agree, they'll never do it. It's sort of like gun control in America- it's too late to actually do things right, but at least the rest of the world can show Texas how it is done right.
We just asked you not to post unsubstantive inflammation again, and then you posted it again. We've banned this account, and we're happy to unban accounts if you email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll post within the guidelines in the future.
I prefer the buyer-beware solution to this problem. Educate all you want, but if I want to build on a flood plain (especially now that there have long been contractors which can build flood-proof homes on stilts), I should be allowed to.
FEMA should not be encouraging this by always serving people in known floodplains. I'm sure insurance companies already encode this in premiums (except apparently the ones which did not tell the insured about this issue in Houston).
This presumes you're the only one at risk here- you aren't. In a modern society, risk is shared.
When you build a home in the middle of a flood plain, you're putting the emergency services workers who have to try to help you at risk. You're having the city build infrastructure that has to be repaired/replaced every time there's a disaster. And we all know full well it will be the poor who live in these areas and lose their homes when disaster strikes- putting themselves onto welfare and bankruptcy that the rest of us wind up paying for.
There is no such thing as individual risk anymore. Welcome to the 21st century.
Or how single payer health insurance encourages the public to endorse policies which restrict people's freedom to take risks (dietary, recreational, humanitarian), even good risks (like entering said floodplain to help people who made the poor decision of building there and staying during hurricane season).
The thing is, flood insurance is provided by the Federal government, and is heavily subsidized. No insurance company in their right mind would write a policy for these homes, and therefore the only way you’d be able to build there is if you paid cash.
However you are not allowed to die for making this decision. Emergency services have to be spent rescuing you.
I recognize the American mindset of independence is different than the Canadian one of interdependence. It is too bad most of American society didn't have to survive an brutal overwinter in its formative days.
> I recognize the American mindset of independence is different than the Canadian one of interdependence.
You're not the only Canadian here, bud. ;- )
> However you are not allowed to die for making this decision. Emergency services have to be spent rescuing you.
That's really the problem here. It needs to be possible to bargain access to these services, or pay for them at a higher rate. The homeowner must be directly exposed to the cost of living in a floodplain and having rescue workers come to them.
We do that with fire services and police services. However that is because the risk is not really loss of life, just property.
We decided as society that human life is not cheap and disposable. And while I recognize that argument begs the question.. that "we as society" may or may not include an individual who may disagree, the heart of the point is the individual isn't patamouny to how the world works.
Feel free to fly over Richmond B.C., an entire massive city built on sandy soil that will sink in the next big earthquake before you get too high on that horse.
How many times do we need to see the inability of people to manage risk to stop saying things like this?
Flood plains exist for a reason. They are supposed to flood. Your house and the infrastructure to support it undermines its purpose and makes the risk of flooding for everyone in the region worse.
The erosion of the Mississippi delta is a great example of tragedy of the commons in this scenario. We’ve spent billions on flood remediation and levees to build in floodplain, and as a result the whole delta is disappearing. New Orleans will wash away someday as a result. Every billion invested in supporting stupid decisions to build will cost $10 billion or more in destruction and misery in the future.
I grew up in this area. I can confirm it’s not common knowledge how these dams work. I learned a lot seeing Harvey.
Everyone does know the dams are there. But in an otherwise flat city they are just big mounds of dirt running for miles. They don’t hold water most of the time. Even with heavy rain any minor flooding goes away in a couple days. I never really understood why a 20-50 foot tall dam was needed. I remember once joking with a friend that if the water ever filled up over the dam that means the entire state of Texas behind the dams is under water. It actually did not make sense to me why they built the dams so big until Harvey.
In any case, someone knew and should have been a required disclosure when buying a home. However, I don’t think it would have helped. People would have bought there anyway because this kind of flooding was unthinkable. Although they would have known they needed flood insurance. But then, insurance companies probably wouldn’t offer it.
> People would have bought there anyway because this kind of flooding was unthinkable
Exactly. These people did, and now they are eager to claim they never knew it was possible. And of course real estate agents and developers want as little responsibility on them as possible, too. So suddenly no one knows anything.
I think if you had run the same query by the same group before Harvey, you would have gotten more affirmative responses.
This is exactly why regulation that limits development for safety (flood plains, electric code, fire safety) is good for most homeowners (who will make short-sighted or optimistic risk evaluations) despite displacing a few on the margin into worse housing situations.
You don't even need regulation. You just need a private market of flood insurance that will be naturally prohibitive where the risk is high. The problem with leaving it up to regulation is that there are too many interested parties in seeing their area does not get marked as high risk. This encourages to FEMA to leave maps out of date to avoid a public outcry.
The problem is that flood insurance doesn't work, as an insurance product.
Insurance amortizes across populations to create the illusion of amortizing over time. It doesn't actually amortize over time. The variance on floods even on a national scale is too high to make it work.
I have two concerns with that approach. One, the combined cost may not be reflected in the "sticker" price, and people may have some difficulty estimating a combined cost. I think this happens with cars, but may be mistaken. People look at the sticker price and maybe ignore the cost of insurance until they take it home? Maybe that's just a figment of my imagination, though.
My other concern is that insurers may not appropriately price in the cost of insuring a flood area. Of course, people will flock to the lowest price insurer. Then a 100- or 1000-year flood rolls around, like Harvey, and the insurer goes bankrupt and people still lose their homes and money. This can be mitigated by insuring the flood zone insurers, or something like that, but doesn't that still amount to flood zone regulation regulation?
Re: marking areas as "high risk" and not — obviously a binary distinction is a poor fit and some sort of gradient scale would be more appropriate.
Insurance isn't a single layer affair. Insurance companies have macro-insurance that covers the entire business in case they misjudged risk. It is legally required in (almost?) all insurance contracts to insure the company offering the insurance. Sometimes those meta-insurers are state agencies, sometimes they are private.
The problem with leaving it out of regulation is that you get the exact scenario that is playing out in Texas - people buying homes and not getting flood insurance and then when the homes are destroyed the "consequences of the market" came through but now you have millions of homeless people whose chief asset just got literally washed away.
If flooding were something localized to single homes every now and then society as a whole could endure the "expense" of having a few homeless destitute people on occasion when their homes just disappeared and it would not be a major problem. But this isn't just microeconomic consequences. When entire neighborhoods are demolished and nobody had flood insurance it causes major problems for the rest of us.
Just because it is hard does not mean it is not worth doing. The alternative is to keep sticking fingers in ears while billions of taxpayer dollars go to rebuilding in areas that are at extreme risk to be destroyed again.
It's incredible that the city, or for that matter the Army Corps of Engineers, allowed anyone to build homes there. "Totally irresponsible and reckless" would be my most favorable assessment.
More than that, Americans as a society FUND them to build homes there (through mortgage interest subsidies), and then FUND them to rebuild there when it inevitably floods (through under-priced federal flood insurance).
The Army Corps should buy up as much of the land possible around the resouivor while the prices are depressed to prevent future development on it.
EDIT: My comment assumes that they would acquire additional funding to do this, as they are the best agency to acquire and hold the land to prevent future development (vs a traditional land trust for conservancy).
TFA says they bought 24,000 acres for about $170 / acre (today's dollars) in the 40s. The surrounding 8,000 acres in fact is perfectly buildable with the right codes in place.
"Stilting" houses is not a big deal, if flooding is to be expected. It's done all the time on the coast, and apparently should have been done here. The storm was once-in-a-lifetime, but there's no telling when the next one will hit.
"Communities that participate in the NFIP are required to adopt and enforce local regulations for development in mapped Special Flood Hazard Areas (SFHAs) to reduce the risk of flooding (see 44 CFR Parts 59 and 60)." If the zoning doesn't meet the minimum requirements, then NFIP is not available, which is a deal-breaker.
If the minimum requirements are not sufficient, they can be updated. If the area wasn't properly designated a SFHA, that should be fixed and all new construction and substantial renovation must conform.
This shit probably is not complicated, we just aren't versed in the field. I guessing that TFA fails in researching and educating the reader on the extensive regulations currently present.
If it had been a required disclosure, people would have been required to sign one more paper that they didn't read at closing, while the title agent said "... and this ... drone ... but that's not gonna happen ..."
(May 31, 2016) The trouble with living in a swamp: Houston floods explained
>The worst rain the city remembered fell in 1929, and a worse one struck in 1935. Buffalo Bayou rose up to the second story in parts of downtown. Buildings collapsed. Swaths of city were destroyed.
>Talbott has a simple solution: allocate $26 billion, more than a fifth of the state's 2015 budget, mostly to buy property adjacent to the waterways, bulldoze and expand the canals. That amount of money, he said, could get all of Houston prepared to weather a city-wide, once-in-a-century storm.
I also grew up in and still live near this area. I’ve seen the Barker Reservoir flood at least half a dozen times. When I first moved to Katy it didn’t cause much of a problem. It didn’t have a through road and only had a gun range in it. It is definitely insane to me that more study isn’t done as Houston and it’s suburban areas grow. Katy now effectively bleeds from west Houston to the next small town west(Fulshear) with all of that prairie and old rice land now covered by homes and businesses. My parents live on the far west side of Katy and their street didn’t even flood. My fathers rain gauge measured 38” of rain fall the weekend of Harvey. Something needs to be done to rectify the flooding in Houston.
That said I’ve a friend who now has been flooded 3 times in three years. He lives near Addicks Reservoir in bear creek. You have to stop rebuilding at some point.
"It is definitely insane to me that more study isn’t done as Houston and it’s suburban areas grow."
More study has been done, according to the article, but it's hard politically to tell people that they cannot build any more in the 500 sq. mi. drainage basin, again, according to the article.
I grew up between Highway 6 and Eldridge on West Little York. Those two reservoirs flooded both of those roads more times than I can count between I-10 and Clay Rd and Highway 6 south of I-10. I don't know how anyone who has lived in Houston for more than a few years does not know that by now.
That said, through the worst of floods, my childhood home never flooded. Harvey flooded it.
Yep sounds like what I witnessed. I didn’t mean to come off like I never saw flooding. Mostly roads, ditches and park floods. Which I didn’t see as much a risk as rarely a home would flood (to my knowledge). It was more just an inconvenience of living in that area. Again I didn’t understand the need of 20 ft mounds. The juxtaposition of all the development behind the dam and the heaviest of rains (pre Harvey) not creating much flooding in a relative sense is what never made sense to me.
But growing up in the area did either of you really think
that a flood was not possible?
floodplain or not, after seeing 1 rainstorm here it should be clear to anyone that flooding can happen if you're under the wrong cloud at the wrong time..
I wasn't a home buyer and am pretty sure I would have done this research if I had been. But, the point is that people that grew up here didn't have this as common knowledge; in hindsight, yes, but it's almost beyond the pale that the city would knowingly allow homes to be built in a known flood zone.
Yes. But no one knew they would intentionally flood this area as a plan to save the inner city. In hindsight makes total sense they would and that it was designed just that way.
in an otherwise flat city they are just big mounds of dirt running for miles
Same. As a child I couldn’t figure out why we had these big berms and called them a damn. Turns out the terrain slopes so gently (1 ft./mi.) that you can’t even tell
In a non-recourse state if you default on your mortgage the lender cannot come after you personally for the remaining balance. All they can do is foreclose and then sell the house. If what they get from the sale is less than what you owed, the lender eats the difference.
I would have expected the mortgage companies to have been on top of this, either not lending for homes in that area or requiring the borrowers to have flood insurance.
[1] along with Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Idaho, Minnesota, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, and Washington.
>In a non-recourse state if you default on your mortgage the lender cannot come after you personally for the remaining balance.
Sort of. There are lots of caveats (taking out a second mortgage removes some of this protection, for example).
Also, in Washington, at least, this is only true if the lender opts to handle it this way. They get a simplified process if it's non-recourse but if they know you have lots of other assets, then absolutely CAN take you to court for the difference, it's just far more costly and they can't use the simplified procedure.
From what I have heard, non-recourse (in CA) only applies to original purchase loans. Once you refinance, which most people do as rates change, it does not apply. Not that this distinction makes much of a difference - most people want to believe their land is still worth millions.
Probably because they knew the Feds would never allow so many people to lose their homes. It's sort of like the fabled "Greenspan put" [1], if something bad happens you can count on Uncle Sam to pump things back up.
There used to be big green feilds where people would fly their kites along the river in the Karlín neighborhood of Prague. The feilds were privately owned, but it was illegal to build on them, because they were seasonal flood grounds. Now, new and very fancy offices and appartments are being built there, despite the fact that we often have over a meter of floodwater there. I have no idea what changed. In the same neighborhood is an old rotting building called the Invalidovna [1], which was partly destroyed by flooding. It is about 200 meters from the shore of the river. Everything closer will be flooded even worse. This is an issue that is of great interest to me in the analysis of property rights. When the old building code was in effect, privately owned land was turned into a defacto public park. No one wanted the city to lose that park, but the private property was owned. Doesn't the owner have the right to do with their land as they please? But really, it is in the interest of no one except the owner that the owner should build there. Even the people who buy the appartments are getting screwed in a way.
And what is the fairness of declaring the land a flood plane in the first place. People owned that land before it was declared a flood plane. The government, with the stroke of a pen makes land worthless or worth millions. It is just one of those great examples of how capitalism is chaotic, unjust, and senseless and why we should never assume that someone deserves to be rich and others deserve to be poor.
"No one wanted the city to lose that park, but the private property was owned. Doesn't the owner have the right to do with their land as they please? But really, it is in the interest of no one except the owner that the owner should build there. Even the people who buy the appartments are getting screwed in a way."
I think this is easily solved by requiring the owner to post a bond that approximates the future risk exposure that public entities (like FEMA, the National Guard, state police, etc.) face due to the new buildings now in place.
That and, of course, full disclosure in sales literature/contracts.
In this way the private property owner exercises their right to dispose of their property as they see fit but the general public is not shouldering a public cost.
Perhaps in such a case the government should apply eminent domain to the land. This ensures that the previous owners are duly compensated, and guarantees its continued availability as a park.
There is great pressure to build on designated flood plains all over the western world as population density increases. Rules are changed to enable building after there are a couple of decades of people 'forgetting' the geographic realities.
You could make a case that the terrible northern california wildfires in Sonoma county are a variation on this theme. Virtually identical huge fires happened in 1964, when there was far less building and population.
http://www.sfchronicle.com/thetake/article/Wine-Country-fire...
People forget, subdivisions are built, and people assume someone somewhere did their due dilligence and that it is 'safe' land...
"Surprising as it was to residents, the destruction of Coffey Park wasn’t a mystery to fire scientists. They view it as a rare, but predictable, event that has exposed flaws in the way fire risk is measured and mitigated in California. Because it was outside the officially mapped “very severe” hazard zone, more than five miles to the east, Coffey Park was exempt from regulations designed to make buildings fire resistant in high-risk areas.
California fire officials developed hazard maps in the 2000s that for the first time, tied building codes to geographies based on risk. Max Moritz, a fire specialist with the University of California’s Cooperative Extension, said the maps were an important step forward in assessing fire danger.
But the Coffey Park catastrophe has shown that the methodology, and the law underlying it, were too narrow."
“I don’t want to stay in this community,” he said. “I have to go far away from these reservoirs.”
The value of the property will drop and people will move right back in. Reading the article it sounds like the city and county still aren't willing to take any real action to move housing out of the flood reservoir.
I wonder what will make City officials take a wider view. As long as short term gain is the largest deciding factor, we can expect more such tragedies.
The same people who fight the hardest against “government subsidized health insurance for the poor”, beg for “government subsidized flood insurance for homes that cost $500,000+”.
if you've never been here during a rainstorm, this all sounds doable.
After you've seen a heavy one, you realise flooding is a fact of life..
really, what people should do is just start building houses on stilts like they do in coastal areas or similar, because sooner or later, it will flood here.
Last two homes I’ve purchased have had this info as part of the escrow/mortgage docs. I bet most people don’t bother to actually read that hide stack of paper they’re signing.
Most of the stack (when I closed) was a mortgage contract which was marked up as a uniform contract, plus what must have been one page per year of the finances for each payment. I double checked some key terms, but mostly relied on it being a uniform contract.
Everything else was short and readable, but there were a lot of them.
This is a really stark example of the chasm between politics and engineering, and why the latter often finds the former incomprehensible and distasteful. The engineers did their jobs. The politicians and the public didn’t understand it, or didn’t care, and disaster ensued.
> Some local government officials, like Harris County Commissioner Steve Radack, say they’ve warned residents for years about the risks of living in or around the reservoirs during town halls and other public events.
Wait. Isn't the job of government officials to not issue building permits in the first place?
> Several local officials — including Houston’s “flood czar” and a neighboring county executive — said they had no idea the neighborhoods had been built inside the flood pools. Several real estate agents said they didn’t realize they were selling homes inside the pools.
It lacks what most people consider zoning, although the various jurisdictions making up Houston all have various land use regulations and most neighborhoods have deed restrictions.
Another problem is Houston is in Harris County and the land to the north and the west that contributes to flooding the Buffalo Bayou route to the ocean are in different counties and multiple different municipalities. This would require the different government entities to cooperate on a solution that limits each others development. The state government is fairly dysfunctional in this area and raising money to fund anything by raising taxes does not look likely for the forseeable future - their solution so far to fund public schools is to cut taxes which force them to unfund them a little bit more each year, leading to ubiquitous fund raisers by parents for their local schools.
Yes, it's unique even worldwide, and every city planning student learns about it.
There are few minor exceptions, but basically everybody can do what he wants and neighbors are fighting each other without the help of city officials. And you wouldn't trust those officials anyway.
Historical loss data is definitely collected by insurance companies for analysis by their underwriters.
Sometimes they share that information with each other. For example, some limited loss data is shared among companies for auto claim information associated with auto policy holders. (Not all companies participate. GEICO is the biggest holdout, last I knew.) I have not heard that companies share property damage loss information with each other, but they may do so the same way they share auto claim information.
On the other hand, not sharing may give them a competitive advantage. For example, Allstate systematically reduced their coverage of coastal homes in the New Jersey / New York markets about 10 years ago, because their threat models indicated that the area was due for a major hurricane. This obviously reduced their losses when Hurricane Sandy hit.
Katrina got all of the big insurers to take a closer look at their exposures from hurricanes, and I would not be surprised to learn that premiums for coastal properties all along the East Coast and Gulf Coast have skyrocketed in the last decade. The risk is very high. They enjoyed over 10 years of low losses, but then this year they got hammered in Texas and Florida.
So, would companies share detailed information with each other? Probably not, but they probably have a good idea of what their competitors have paid out for major events, and they definitely know where the risks are geographically.
Are they going to share that detailed information with the public? Hell no. They bought it, they paid for it, it's theirs, and they're going to keep it.
The easiest way to determine if there's a high risk is to ask for a quote on a property before you buy it. That will tell you a lot. For example, if you're thinking of buying some property in southern California and wonder if the fire risk is high, just ask for a quote. If wildfire risk is high, Allstate (for example) will simply tell you they can't write a policy for that property. Other companies may write a policy, but the premium will be higher than surrounding areas with lower risk.
Flood insurance is a special case. No homeowners policy offers coverage for flooding, because it is the textbook example for adverse selection in property and casualty insurance. (That is, only people who live in a flood plain will buy flood insurance, so the risk is not spread across a large enough population. Fire, on the other hand, can happen anywhere, so everyone buys coverage.)
For this reason, the government offers flood insurance for those who live in flood plains. Interestingly enough, even then not many people buy the coverage.
Edit: Earthquakes are another example of adverse selection. If you live in California and have investigated premiums for earthquake coverage, you already know this. No, it is not covered by your homeowners policy. No, I don't want to pay for it when it happens, because I live in an area with extremely low risk for earthquakes (and flooding). And yet, when it happens, I will surely be paying more taxes to cover someone else's losses.
> He said he still considers it a “unique event” and doesn’t think it’s likely those homes will flood again any time soon.
Of all the things that came across in this article as disastrous this really caught me. This event wasn't "unique," something similar happened nearly 30 years ago.
The question that needs to be asked is: when will this happen again?
I agree they should be available, but it may not have made a difference. Most people don't read any records when purchasing a home or base such a decision on things like this.
I've had flood plain maps included in my mortgage paperwork, but I've also had the other parties sit their being verbally impatient while I actually look through everything instead of just signing where they show me.
You should have reviewed the map during due diligence, not at closing. Closing is for checking that the terms of the deal are properly documented not for research.
Well I can tell you the map was not available prior to closing. I requested it and all documents. Town and County governments only referred me to the Metropolitan District, whose board cancelled meetings and ignored all attempts. Closing was the first time I saw anything. That's why I didn't feel bad making them wait.
It's not the seller's fault the county is a pain in the ass. Again closing is not for due diligence. Even if you had found an issue, you would have lost your escrow. I would be pissed too if a buyer tried to find a reason to back out of a deal at closing. That's not what that's for and you could have cost them a ton of money if you had found an issue.
[Edit] fyi the proper way to make the seller care about such things is to extend due diligence and let them know you'll need a flood map before you'll move forward on the deal.
I would be pissed if I bought property that knowingly floods, but the seller's agent insists it is the responsibility of the buyer's agent to discover this.
I don't "think" it's the buyer's responsibility. It literally is their responsibility (excluding special circumstances). The large majority of contracts are written with the assumption that the buyer performs due diligence during a specific period. Once that period is up, there are penalties for backing out. The buyer is in violation of the contract if they back out of the offer. Rights have little to do with contract law in this case by the way.
Note we're talking about public records such as flood plains here, not the seller lying on a disclosure form or some other form of fraud.
My point is that any experienced seller (and the lawyers and agents and banks...) is going to be confused and likely pissed if you show up to closing expecting to do all your research then. That's not what closing is for. Due diligence exists for a reason.
>> is going to be confused and likely pissed if you show up to closing expecting to do all your research then.
To be clear, the seller in this case also happened to be the developer in charge of the quasi-government entity responsible for these documents. The county referred me to them because State law gives them responsibility for those documents. They had violated time frames in the contract multiple times before this, I only proceeded because I wanted the house at that location and wasn't willing to walk away despite their violations.
I gave the title insurance company and the seller written notice of several weeks that I was still waiting on documents, and that if I didn't have them until we closed, I was going to make them sit there while I looked it all over. So I really don't care if they were confused or pissed, and I really don't care if you think so, either. I asked for them early in the process, didn't get them, so I was going to look them over and make a final decision when I got them - which was at closing, because they chose it to be at closing. I had money already on the table, and it was a calculated risk that I would eventually be okay with the documents, but I wasn't prepared to proceed with the rest of the mortgage without them.
My point is that it was obvious to me that in most of the mortgages they handled and in most of the contracts this developer / builder (one of the biggest in my area) handles, most people were not looking at these things EVER.
Of course those other parties, at your closing, bear no risk themselves if you sign (regardless the contents of the papers) and stand to lose their commission if you don't.
Which is extra screwed up even from the respective employers' perspective. They're loaning me more than 10 times more money than I've ever borrowed. Several times my salary. My ability to take care of the house and honor the terms of my homeowners' insurance is the only thing protecting their investment. Don't they WANT me to take it really seriously and know what I'm committing to?
When I bought a house, my agent got me all the documentation a day or two ahead of time so I could read through it before the closing day. I can't imagine trying to read and sign that giant stack of papers while people are waiting on you.
Ultimately the politicians knew and were politically pressured by the developers to not take any strong action. So because of this, according to this article, the only mention of flooding risk was in the plat documents which are a drawing of the lots which no one probably looks at unless they have a property line dispute with their neighbor.
The Harris county flood map shows Lakes on Eldridge, for example, as being outside the 100 year flood plain-- so if I was looking for information before buying a house in that neighborhood, I would've gotten as far as this and then felt reassured and stopped looking.
If you live near these reservoirs, you drive by them daily or at least weekly, and see them turn into giant lakes after a mild storm (which for us can mean dropping several cm/in in the course of an hour or even minutes), and are also aware that we get big storms from time to time.
Thinking you are not at risk of flooding anywhere in the area, or near these reservoirs especially, is basically living in denial.
A quick check on Google Maps shows that right next to LOE is a road named "Addicks Dam Rd." That's a red flag. Zooming out on the satellite view reveals what certainly looks like a reservoir structure. More red flags. Googling "Addicks Dam" leads you to the Addicks Reservoir Wikipedia page which doesn't sound reassuring (even when you consider the pre-Harvey version of that page).
Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but it doesn't seem like there was anything in the way of due diligence to avoid choosing this neighborhood. I certainly believe however that realtors and the local government said that everything was fine in pre-Harvey times, as both had something to lose with saying the opposite. That's why I never rely on those sources alone.
There's a lot of additional information to be gained from Google Maps and OSM, satellite views, walking in the environment, checking historic news, talking with residents, etc. before settling on a neighborhood.
Even if the map was realistic, the 100-year boundary is not the level beyond which the flood risk is too rare to care about. At that level, the expectation is that the house will be flooded at some point.
When I bought my house in TX I had to explicitly go through a separate agreement with the mortgage defining what a flood plain was and how it could affect my property. I'm not even in a flood plain and had to learn about them.
I guess if you buy cash you might not know, but in general it's in the documentation you get while purchasing a house here in TX.
Yeah, the flood plain map... They are free and publicly available. Typically your county will be the one to ask, but they are available at the state and federal level as well.
As others mentioned, you can get a flood plain map from several sources. However, some of them can be wrong.
The federal map for our home is wrong and puts us in a flood plain. But that map was from before our development was built, which slightly relocated a creek. For whatever reason, our county refuses to submit their updated map. But the previous homeowner got a special note at the federal level saying it isn't in a flood plain.
California homeowners are dealing with some rather serious problems of their own at the moment. They're still counting bodies from the wildfires. However excellent the CA regulatory regime is it appears there is some work to do there as well.
I purchased a house last year in the Oakland Hills. I learned when I started calling around to secure insurance for it that it was in the "maximum wildfire risk zone", which meant none of the big national insurance companies will touch it - making it difficult to insure. And you can't get a mortgage without that insurance, so you have no excuse for not knowing the risks.
In addition to that, the City of Oakland (and other cities in the area) have strict fire prevention ordinances for those who live in these high risk areas. You are required to maintain a defensible space around your house, to remove dead trees and shrubs, clean up dry leaves, keep grass short, remove tree limbs < 6' from the ground, etc etc. and the fire department comes by at least once a year to inspect your property to make sure you do it. If they find you in non-compliance they fine you $330 on the spot and schedule another inspection for a couple weeks later. Again, no excuse for not knowing your risks.
Similar regulations are in place for utilities and businesses to reduce the risk. Seems to me California is doing a much better job dealing with natural disaster preparation, but there's only so much the state can reasonably do.
Based on aerial views of the burned out subdivisions the problem is zoning. The structures have almost no separation from each other; only 5-10' on average as seen in video from Santa Rosa[1]. In subdivisions where the fire spared some homes the line between the burned out properties and the survivors is often a street; a modest residential street provided enough separation to stop the fire.
So CA and its various governments have been either allowing or requiring developers to plat large homes on tiny lots with next to no separation. Fed by wind the fire leapt from one home to the next burning out whole subdivisions. While the efforts you cite to control brush are admirable they can't prevent this; the houses are too tightly packed and will burn en-mass with no help from brush at all given enough wind.
Bottom line; this is indeed a regulatory problem. Obviously that rankles those that habitually give CA every benefit of the doubt in all things but physics doesn't care.
An aside: I'm getting tired of hearing people talk about "unique events". We've had a lot of them recently. Maybe in future the weather is going to follow a different path from that which prevailed in the last century.
I love that the responsible state and county officials blame congress,and that the article lets them get away with it. They should blame Californians and jihadis while they are at it.
How’s that elimination of “job-killing regulation” working for ya? Things like this are the point of local government.
The Houston situation is as much the fault of regulation as its the fault of not having some.
Houston itself was only built up to the degree it was on the backs of federally subsidized flood insurance and huge amounts of public money spent to build the dams around it. If developers had to eat the real cost of building in a flood zone, many fewer would have done so.
Even further, if your home is destroyed in a major flood, you aren't allowed to rebuild it- clearly, wherever you are it's not safe from flooding.
It's a very effective system. The only problems is has these days are A: people who fight it because they bought property they want to develop, but can't, and B: the fact that where flooding occurs is changing due to climate change and geology/geography changes in the last 50 years.
Texas may want to consider such a system.