Bittle at the Baffler on flood and sea level impacts in the USA:
“a neighborhood that feels more like an unclaimed frontier than a subdivision in one of the nation’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas. Dogs run free across acres of empty land, the sound of a falling acorn echoes for blocks”
“Funded by the federal government, local governments in coastal states are buying out thousands of homes in vulnerable areas every year, reshaping and breaking up communities as they go. In their wake, the departed residents of these communities have left what may be the country’s first climate ghost towns, abandoned places made uninhabitable by the warming of the planet.”
“the federal bureaucracy tasked with handling response to these disasters still treats them as individual events rather than constituent parts of a larger crisis”
“No one would argue that these projects are useless, but they represent an outmoded way of thinking, one that assumes Mother Nature wreaks havoc in a relatively stable and predictable manner. Recent storm events in particular have disproved that assumption, becoming so monstrous and erratic over the past decade as to make designing the flood barriers of the 2030s and the 2040s a task akin to dressing for the weather on this day ten years from now.”
“what about the lessons no one sees coming? The other question, of course, is why invest in a barricade that you know will someday burst, if not in the 2040s then in the 2050s?”
“While the program often had to borrow money from the Treasury, the sums were once small and quickly repaid. But as the pace of natural disasters has escalated, the cost of flood recovery has outstripped the amount the program’s five million participating households can afford to pay into the central pot, and it has fallen into unprecedented debt. ”
“one house in Houston that flooded on twenty-two separate occasions between 1979 and 2017, filing an insurance claim each time.”
“The people who continue to live in these areas are doing something so risky that the government will at some point no longer be able to subsidize it, whether by repairing homes after a flood or fortifying them against the next one. ”
” “You have some places where there are high property values, high development, and people are incentivized to build there,” she says—think South Beach or the Hamptons. “But then you have these other communities in the same states, where [people are] not living there because it’s prime real estate or they’re wealthy, they’re living there because they historically can’t afford to live anywhere else.” ”
“Where buyouts do occur, they lead to different outcomes for the rich and the poor, disproportionately benefiting wealthier and whiter families who have the means to sustain themselves as they buy new houses and settle in new communities.”
“Even if New York City one day builds a seawall around Manhattan, protecting the East Village forever from the kind of dissolution that took place in Arbor Oaks, hundreds of smaller and less affluent communities will fall apart piece by piece in the coming decades as the storms continue.”
“Americans displaced by weather events often have at most the right to material compensation for whatever property they lost during a natural disaster. Such a system, pegged as it is to real estate valuations, will always reproduce the inequality that existed prior to the catastrophe, if it doesn’t make that inequality even worse.”
“In 2018, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) finally released new rainfall predictions for Texas, the agency found that storms which were previously considered once-in-a-century events could now be expected every twenty-five years.”
“When the new maps take effect in the early 2020s, Wade says, the floodplain will get much larger … the floodplain area will likely expand from a thin stripe on either side of a creek into a swath of land a mile wide, covering thousands of homes and businesses. ”
“A lot of our job, really, is to physically uncover the environment so we can have a more resilient place,”
” “[There] are entire neighborhoods that are now within the hundred-year floodplain,” and many residents are living there because that’s what they can afford. They aren’t likely to find comparable housing elsewhere for what the county can offer them in a buyout.”
“Our future is part of what we lost,”
“families who can’t move or don’t want to will become the living collateral of the retreat process, their neighborhoods emptied and lives uprooted because of forces well beyond their control: not only the weather itself, but the policies of the people who govern them. ”
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/on-the-waterfronts-bittle
- Homeowners insurance does NOT cover flooding
- Flood insurance is obtained through the government’s flood insurance program
- Flood insurance does not cover the basement of a house
- Flood insurance covers a lifetime maximum of $250,000 in coverage
This means if you make a claim for $150,000 the maximum coverage for the life of the property drops to $100,000.
