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Most homebuyers and renters not warned about flood or wildfire risk
- SQueeeeeL 6y ago"The market will regulate environmental risks", or we can just lie to consumers lol.
- MattGaiser 6y agoA big part of the assumption that markets will regulate risk is that buyers will approach things somewhat suspiciously. That’s not how people tend to approach home buying it seems.
- blueline 6y agothat's not how people tend to approach most things in life. humans aren't calculators. even very intelligent people tend to suck at estimating/weighting risks homebuying is probably near a worst-case scenario for this because it's 1. one of the biggest purchases most people can ever make 2. loaded with emotion, cultural norms, and other things that make it very easy to make bad/risky choices
- shadowgovt 6y ago3. Knowing whether a home is "good" is actually a technically-skilled area and most people don't have the skill. I know someone who lucked out because his wife was the daughter of a man whose whole family worked construction (including him), and she paid attention. When they went to buy their first home, he saw no issues with most of the properties, while she could see "Foundation's cracked here, that smell is untreated basement flooding... See back here where this retaining wall was built? Where do you figure the water goes after it hits that wall? That's a nice little creek behind this house; it's a shame you can see from the silt pattern that it's been walking south for awhile as that hill rolls down and will be under this house's foundation in five years."
- seiferteric 6y agoIn some sense it will, but it will do so in a discontinuous manner going from affordable to not affordable overnight while most people who say this think it will do it smoothly and gradually over time lol. We are seeing this now with fire insurance in many areas.
- renewiltord 6y agoIt does it pretty well for a couple of these. Flood insurance is nigh impossible without a government intervention for instance.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- renewiltord 6y agoInteresting. The disclosures that I received in California were highly detailed. That was part of the problem: no one wants to give you an executive summary. Also there seemed like nearly every place had some risk level. So it was hard to judge.
- beamatronic 6y agoAt least they’re warning us about all the things that could cause cancer
- sidewndr46 6y agoSame here in Texas, on an otherwise uninteresting purchase. All sorts of disclosures of things that are almost inconsequential. I'd have to pull up my documents but it was stuff like "In 1993, 3 boards were replaced by X after Y happens". A former boss of mine said that when he bought a house in Nevada they had him sign a notice acknowledging that gambling was legal in the state he was purchasing a house in.
- kelp 6y agoIf I remember correctly, I got hundreds of pages of disclosures when I bought my condo in San Francisco. Recently bought in Tahoe and less disclosures than San Francisco, but certainly quite clear about fire danger.
- myself248 6y agoEven if laws require disclosure, you have to define what authoritative source defines the risk for a given property. If that source lags behind reality, or fails to give a picture of future trends, people still get caught unaware. Isn't this fundamentally the role of insurance? They have the incentive to look forward and anticipate risk, and if flood insurance is particularly expensive or just plain unavailable on a given property, you should look at why. Is there a generic form like "Give me insurance quotes for every possible type of coverage" that a prospective homebuyer could fill out and submit to a few different insurers, to get a picture of such red flags?
- beamatronic 6y agoI don’t think standard homeowner insurance covers floods or wildfires but otherwise you’re right.
- JackFr 6y agoIt most definitely does not cover flood or rising water. Insuring against flood is a money loser which is why it needs to be subsidized by the government.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoInsuring against floods in certain areas is a money loser. But those areas have a lot of valuable voters who can determine elections, so the politicians that cater to them by providing them taxpayer subsidies win the elections, hence taxpayer subsidized flood insurance.
- pc86 6y agoIf it's a money loser doesn't that just mean that it's priced too low?
- beamatronic 6y agoOr that the existing models are not working
- mcfly1985 6y agoMost home buyers waive inspection contingencies. The market is one big fomo frenzy for the past decade when fed artificially suppressed interest rates below inflation. I bet home buyers would happily ignore reading any pamphlet explaining their risks related to natural disasters.
- russell_h 6y agoOutside of the Bay Area, and maybe a few other especially hot real estate markets, I’m sure that isn’t true. I’m in the process of buying a home in Washington and my agent says she’s never had a client waive the inspection contingency unless they’re buying a cheap fixer-upper to flip.
- wrs 6y agoI’ve participated (as a bystander, thank goodness) in some recent home offers in Washington where all contingencies (including inspection and financing) were expected to be waived if you wanted to win the bid. These were neither cheap nor fixer-uppers, but they were in central Seattle. Edit: Also, the expectation was auto-escalating offers, eBay style. The owner set a date to take offers and picked the best one.
- i_haz_rabies 6y agoThis is also the case in rural Ontario.
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoThere is no way I'd buy anything rural without extensive inspection of well and septic, foundation, property, etc. In the last 15 years I've purchased in both Toronto and in rural Ontario with the full set of conditions; financing, inspection, etc. As a buyer I simply won't do it otherwise. We have a 6 acre hobby farm near Hamilton. But I also just don't bother to go look at properties with language in the text like "Accepting offers on...". We won't play the multiple offers game. In Toronto maybe this is the only way to get a home, but we were able to avoid it there back in 2005 by just hunting in areas that weren't "cool." My experience is there's always almost other places that come up, where the seller has more scruples. We might sell our hobby farm soon. I would fully expect any potential buyer to demand inspection.
- gotoeleven 6y agoIf you've ever gone through the process of buying a home in CA you'll see there are already hundreds of pages of "disclosures." Stuff like "if you get a loan you have to repay it" and "sometimes housing prices go down." Im not sure who this is helping. The whole process is certainly larded up enough that there is zero chance any additional disclosures will be noticed.
- beamatronic 6y agoSince it’s a non-recourse state, you really don’t have to pay that mortgage back!
- SilasX 6y agoExactly. When you have "ultra important warnings" for everything, it becomes that much harder to know what you should really care about. Hence the phenomenon of alarm fatigue (or the "boy who cried wolf"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue
- hirako2000 6y agoAsk for Pdf and use control-f
- sokoloff 6y agoDoesn't this presume you already know what risks are important/what you're looking for? IOW, what do you type after c-f?
- HarryHirsch 6y agoYou have a brain in your head, the risks are always the same: flood, fire, earthquake and unstable hillside.
- renewiltord 6y agoSure and you'll miss a bunch this way.
- HarryHirsch 6y agoThe nagging suspicion is that it isn't the flood/fire risk that's the problem but that all desirable areas were built out 100 years ago. That leaves everyone without generational wealth to be pushed into risky areas. There's whole neighbourhoods and towns built where they shouldn't be, and with climate change it's only going to get worse.
- kelp 6y agoAnd try to build higher than 4 stories in already built up places like San Francisco. Local groups will do everything to stop you. The heart breaking thing is Bay Area environmental groups like the Sierra Club are aligned with the anti-development crowd. They actively fight infill, but won’t acknowledge or see that encourages sprawl.
- HarryHirsch 6y agoI'm thinking of places like New Orleans. The original city was built on a river bluff but then it expanded into the river bottoms. You have that phenomenon all along major rivers, towns expanding from upland settlements onto agricultural areas that are 100-year floodplains. Of course, when the inevitable flood comes and everything is under water the urge to rebuild is stronger than accepting reason and settling elsewhere, also because money is missing, especially for the flooded-out people.
- aluminussoma 6y agoI looked at purchasing a home in another cheaper locale and also came to this observation. This area has regular floods. New neighborhoods had flood problems. Old neighborhoods did not. The areas without flood problems, and close enough the to main job corridors, were priced high enough to defeat the benefits of moving for the sake of a lower cost of living.
- peterwoerner 6y agoNew Orleans is even worse because the Mississippi ought to be changing course so it moves through downtown. They have an extensive series of levies to prevent this from happening.
- sk2020 6y agomsc.fema.gov/nfhl It’s pretty trivial to find if a property is in a floodplain. A mortgage is such a significant financial burden that I would hope most people would thoroughly research a property before signing a contract. However, many people can’t be bothered to care until their mortgage underwriter forces them to buy insurance. Most of those assume everyone just gets bailed out whenever their house at the bottom of a valley floods. I was a FPA for 2 years for a mid-sized city.
- wrs 6y agoWhen I lived in Palo Alto 25 years ago, and one of California’s periodic droughts ended, a lot of recent arrivals were VERY surprised to discover than a lot of Palo Alto is a flood plain area. When they moved in, it hardly ever rained, much less flooded. (Also, I suspect they may not have bought earthquake insurance.)
- lozaning 6y agoI rented a room in a house in San Jose through the absolute garbage company that was HubHaus. The person who owned the home and rented it to hub haus had bought the home like 4 years before I moved in and had a bunch of work done by shady contractors without a permit. Well in 2019 Cali finally got out of its drought and the deck that sloped into the house connected to my room had water pool on it and then leak into the house. Landlord claimed it had never happened before and so clearly it was my fault. Hub Haus being the spineless crooks they are sided with the landlord despite clear evidence of code violations and lack of permits.
- sk2020 6y agoI’d say that’s poor workmanship rather than flooding as defined by NFIP. Sloping an addition away from a structure is pretty basic. The contractor might be bonded, but you don’t own the property, so I wouldn’t say there’s much recourse for you, unfortunately. Generally speaking, residential construction is very high risk for meager returns. Market incentives just don’t align with spending an additional 2-3X on labor to use expert craftsman.
- freeopinion 6y agoI get that is isn't always obvious when you're in a flood plain, but... Some years ago I visited a home in the U.S. southwest where the owner complained that they were the surprise victim of a flood within a year of purchasing the house. It seems that they had no idea that their house was positioned in the dead center of a wash. I don't think they even knew what a "wash" was. Even after the flood. I took them outside and pointed to the road coming to their driveway. Me: "See that embankment you come down about 40 feet from your driveway?" Them: "Uh-huh." Me: Turning to the left, "See that embankment that goes up about 50 feet past the other side of your house?" Them: "Yeah..." Me: "Doesn't it kind of look like two river banks with no water in between?" Them:"Umm... But there _is_ no water." Me: "That's because it hasn't rained in over 100 days. 360 days a year, this will be dusty dry." Them: "Exactly" Me: "There are more than 360 days in a year." Sometimes, nobody thought to warn you because it was painfully obvious. Like the rattles on a snake. Unless you've never heard of a rattlesnake before.
- JamesBarney 6y agoYou seem to imply that this story shows how obvious it is for people to know when they're in a food plain. I think it shows the opposite. This person bought a house, was a victim of a flood, and still didn't realize they were in a flood plain.
- kemiller2002 6y agoI'm just curious, I live in the Midwest U.S. and here if you live in a designated flood plane, you have to buy flood insurance. There is no way to not know you are in a flood plane. I think the rule is that if it flooded within the last 100 years, it is automatically designated a flood plane too. Is this not how the rest of the U.S. operates? (within some variation of course)
- city41 6y agoDoes that 100 year rule apply to undeveloped areas? My neighborhood is 20 years old and before it existed, it was wilderness in the middle of nowhere. I wonder how well flood data is tracked for that type of land.
- dboreham 6y agoThis seems fine as long as I'm not going to be forced to pay to make these people whole when their home is flooded.
- shadowgovt 6y agoWhether or not they have insurance, you will. It blows back on a whole community when a chunk of the community gets flooded out.
- beefman 6y agoOne can't buy a house in California, at least, without being given a "statutory natural hazards disclosure"[1] and signing multiple documents certifying that you've read it. It includes detailed maps about flood and fire risk. You can also order a report for a rental property for a nominal fee.[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardized_Natural_Hazards_Disclosure_Statement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardized_Natural_Hazards_D... [2] https://orderform.disclosures.com https://orderform.disclosures.com
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mywittyname 6y agoUnfortunately, people are brushed through those warnings by the real estate agent as, "you know how California is..."
- pc86 6y agoIf you'll sign paperwork without reading it while spending millions of dollars on a home, there's not much that can be done to save you.
- Schnitz 6y agoThese packets sometimes just disclose every risk in life that ever existed, which means they don't tell you anything...
- beefman 6y agoThe JCP-LGS reports actually have good signal/noise ratio, at least in the bay area. I've examined many dozens over the last decade, from Santa Cruz to Marin. In many cases, I've checked them against 3rd-party reports on dams and faults. Financial risk from earthquake is especially high (though widely variable) for property owners in the East bay.
- Balgair 6y ago
- jartelt 6y agoAt least in the bay area, several homes I looked at had clear disclosures stating that they were in "very high fire hazard zones." The bigger issue for us was what to do with this info. The best the realtor can do is say your homeowners insurance may be more expensive. But, the realtor won't know if insurance companies will decide to stop covering homes in high fire danger zones. I think many people see the high fire danger zone disclosure and just hope that the state government will force insurance companies to keep covering their homes.
- hardtke 6y agoI had a real estate agent tell us "that house is uninsurable due to the roof." It was a wooden roof in a high fire zone. A good agent can be useful. The state of California can't force insurance companies to write new policies or to not cancel existing policies. To make matters worse, insurance companies can't generally raise rates on existing policies so their only recourse is cancellation. If all else fails there is a high risk FAIR plan as insurer of last resort, but it is much more expensive and covers nothing but fire.
- Armisael16 6y ago> California can't force insurance companies [...] to not cancel existing policies. The state did exactly that less than a year ago: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/climate/california-fire-insurance-climate.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/clim... Absolutely right that you can’t force the companies to write new policies, though.
- speeder 6y agoTwo funny stories about it: 1. Was looking for a place to rent near tech companies here in brazil, one house was obviously heavily modified to withstand floods, all doors were made of aluminum, there was in multiple places tubes to get rid of water, raised platforms for expensive objects and so on. Asked realtor about it, he said the area used to flood often, but all that stuff was a relic of the past, because there was no flood last year so he was sure it wouldn't flood again. 2. I rented another house, place didn't look like a floodable place, it flooded anyway because there was river channeled under the house, when there was rain in another town upstream the river managed to gush out of the drains and become above ground along its original course, cars on the street even floated away. My stuff got destroyed so I asked the realtor why he didn't warn me, he replied that last flood was 20 years ago so he didn't think it was relevant because he believed it wouldn't ever flood again... EDIT: just to make clear, these was two different realtors, also although both places was in same city, they were in wildly different areas.
- asdf333 6y agoi guess you could say his livelihood was dependent on feeling very optimistic that floods wouldn't happen.
- tpoacher 6y agoSharing my horror story. Rented a flat (with 3 flatmates) in Oxford as a student. The place was 'close' to a river, for a generous definition of the word, but, certainly not right next to it, or close enough to even think about flooding when we rented the house. Two months later, the river floods. Every single house in the area was equiped with sandbags which they took out, because apparently this was a very common occurence in the area. The house basement got completely flooded, like 1.5 meters of water, (and destroyed some stuff we were storing in the process). It got to the point where we were worried it would reach the electrics and short-circuit. The agency washed its hands on the matter. Fast forward a few months, the agency was arranging house viewings for the next tenants, and it happened to be flooding season, with the basement again having 1.5 metres of water. They deliberately chose a day when we said we would not be at home for their viewing, and said to the prospective tenants that they could not show them the basement because we had 'locked' it or something, "but there's nothing down there anyway". Apparently that group signed the same day.
- Schnitz 6y agoHere in CA the disclosure packets that I've seen all included the FEMA map and you had to initial it. The risk of failing to disclose something is way too high. I've even seen a lot of things like "while we think there's no asbestos there could always be in a house that old", which obviously then makes the whole thing useless.
- jdeibele 6y agoMy aunt and my mom both died in the same year. When selling their houses for their estates the realtors both said "you can skip the disclosure part" because I didn't own the house myself. I did happen to know that my mom had had asbestos removed from the kitchen in her 1972 home. It was required when she remodeled. But I had never been to my aunt's home (1000 miles away) until she had died. It was built the same year and I bet it did have asbestos in it because it had never been remodeled.