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Leaving morality etc aside looking at weather patterns and how over extreme weather events will increase is it really a good investment?
by xbmcuser 4y ago
Leaving morality etc aside looking at weather patterns and how over extreme weather events will increase is it really a good investment?
- yurishimo 4y agoThat's precisely why people are moving there. They're hoping to make a quick buck flipping flood destroyed homes to unsuspecting new residents moving in from out of state in 6 months when people forget about all of this.
- refurb 4y agoHow do you "make a quick buck" buying an empty lot, building a new house and selling it at market rates?
- a2tech 4y agoMost of these places won't be completely destroyed. The house will mostly be there so they'll do some cosmetic repairs, repair the most obvious damage, landscaping, and then try and sell it down the road.
- kcplate 4y ago> looking at weather patterns and how over extreme weather events will increase You know I keep hearing that repeated, yet after living through the last 43 hurricane seasons to date, I am not really seeing that blatant evidence of an increase in extreme weather events. During hurricane season, we have hurricanes. Some years are worse than others, some storms are worse than others.
- madduci 4y agoI wonder if they will ever build in European style with proper bricks and not wood
- avidphantasm 4y agoBrick construction has terrible shear strength, exactly what you don’t want in wind-resistant construction. Also, the insides of the house aren’t brick and will still be destroyed by flood waters.
- yardie 4y agoHomes in South Florida are built using concrete blocks. This makes the homes sturdier but also a lote more expensive.
- rsfern 4y agoFlorida actually has pretty high building code standards for new construction. I think a lot of the issue is from older housing stock, especially from before like Hurricane Andrew in the early 90s https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Building_Code https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Building_Code
- chasd00 4y agoThis is the post I was waiting for. All rebuilt homes will be subject to the post Andrew codes and will be a lot different and more expensive. The new homes compared to the homes that were destroyed is an apples to oranges comparison.
- cpursley 4y agoInsulated concrete form (ICF) would be an even better solution. Stronger than brick, energy efficient and fire resistant.
- KoftaBob 4y agoMost homes in Florida (in the last couple decades at least) are built with "Concrete block construction" to adhere to Florida's hurricane codes. Concrete block also combats things like termites/mold/mildew, which are a bigger problem in that area. Source: https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/FLRC2020P1 https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/FLRC2020P1
- qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
- LatteLazy 4y agoAs long as the government pays all your rebuilding costs and subsidizes your insurance, why not?
- jillesvangurp 4y agoThat will stop being a thing after a few rounds of record breaking floods. At some point insurers will withdraw their hands from the whole thing. Government and public support will run out at some point.
- LatteLazy 4y agoI remember people saying that a decade ago... Red states are self interested and won't say no to handouts as long as they receive them. Blue states believe we're "all in this together". So neither "side" has an incentive to raise the issue. Plus no one wants to be the guy who refused to help that poor down on their luck american who got their house blown away on the TV...
- lotsofpulp 4y agoInsurers withdrew a long time ago. This article is from 10 years ago. https://publicintegrity.org/environment/government-subsidized-flood-insurance-premiums-are-about-half-of-full-risk-price/ https://publicintegrity.org/environment/government-subsidize... > Virtually no private market for flood insurance exists for most residential and commercial properties. While the rest of the country may not want to subsidize coastal FL and TX, I doubt the issue could gain enough political steam to overcome advocates from beneficiaries of NFIP.
- dougmwne 4y agoThese are retirees for the most part so their horizon is somewhat shorter.
- boring_twenties 4y agoYep, my parents are moving to the Florida coast. I carefully floated the notion that their property will be underwater in 30 years, and they were just like, who cares, we're probably not going to live for 30 more years anyway.
- whoooooo123 4y agoDon't they care about having something left at the end to pass on to their inheritors?
- plouffy 4y agoInsurance money when the next floor happens.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y agoGen Ashes will have it all
- nerdponx 4y agoJudging by the voting behavior of their demographic, not at all.
- dougmwne 4y agoMany really do not. I live in this area and have seen enough to know that plenty are focused on their own lives and not on leaving an inheritance.
- jedberg 4y agoAs long as the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) exists, yes. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/09/29/554603161/episode-797-flood-money https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/09/29/554603161/epis... tl;dl: They are the insurer of last resort. They have paid out 10x the value of some houses that are constantly flooding.
- yieldcrv 4y agowow, pays to read federal legislation... and who are we kidding, pays even more to write it! I'm a master of my areas of the federal code, I was not aware of this area!
- zzleeper 4y agoI find it insane how the US govt constantly subsidizes certain activities without many people realizing. NFIP, the implicit guarantees on FHLBs, and a bunch of others just lead to misaligned incentives all over the place :/
- chiefalchemist 4y agoAnd yet we're told Uncle Sam believes in the free market? We don't have Capitalism. We have Crony Capitalism. The latter has little to do with the former.
- krapp 4y ago>We don't have Capitalism. We have Crony Capitalism. The latter has little to do with the former. As any true Scotsman knows.
- codyb 4y agoThere's also the fact that if we don't subsidize places where natural disasters occur millions of people are going to start moving rather quickly. Everywhere's a disaster zone now, we need to account for that, do our best to warn people, and do our best to help people get back to it. This is true here, and around the globe. Mass migrations are _destabilizing_. It's not crony capitalism, it's common sense for stability. And there are certainly places that are absolutely irredeemable and shouldn't have insurance. But this idea that letting people whose homes are destroyed in natural disasters need to be hung out to dry won't be worse than helping them get back onto their feet both for them and most likely for you is a bit odd.
- the_lonely_road 4y agoRealistically is it even that bad of an idea? The damage numbers are big but that damage areas really are quite small. What area of Florida has has the closest time of period of two devastating hurricane strikes? Is that time period measured in decades? I’ve been in Florida for 25 years and haven't suffered a direct strike or flood damage yet. Plenty of close calls turned into hurricane parties but it would have been a pretty poor decision to leave because of fear of catastrophic loss and I’m guessing it’s the same for everyone here. If these houses being bought don’t expect catastrophic loss in the next 30 years then it’s as sane a decision to purchase as anywhere else.
- randallsquared 4y ago> [...] it would have been a pretty poor decision to leave The fact that market-based flood insurance would be too expensive for most people to purchase it in most places in Florida tells us a lot about the expected outcome, and "I haven't been too unlucky yet" isn't exactly an argument against that.
- olalonde 4y agoHurricane activity didn't change much in the past 100 years[0]. Same for droughts and heavy precipitations. The only thing that is clearly on an up trend is temperature. [0] https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-tropical-cyclone-activity https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
- Slava_Propanei 4y ago