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Making Florida More Flood Resistant Is Forcing Hard Choices for Homeowners

40 points by lxm 1y ago

jerlam 1y ago
https://archive.is/uwcdK https://archive.is/uwcdK
brudgers 1y ago
What the fine article does not mention is that the Federal Flood Insurance Program is what allows people to get mortgages on homes in flood zones. While Federal Flood Insurance is not cheap it is a small fraction of the cost of private flood insurance -- the number I heard when flood insurance was part of my professional life was 10% of market value per year (and that was 20 years ago when rates were probably lower than today).
- 542458 1y ago
  What’s the justification for the government subsidizing homes in areas that repeatedly flood? Admittedly I don’t know very much about this, but it just seems like simultaneously wasting money and increasing human suffering.
  - aleatorianator 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    Florida used to be a swing state, and money buys votes.
    - brudgers 1y ago
      Participation in the Federal Flood insurance Program is available to all local governments everywhere in the US. It completely bypasses state governments and hence state politics.
      - lotsofpulp 1y ago
        The federal taxpayer subsidy to landowners in flood prone areas disproportionately benefits voters in some states, and the voters of some states have a disproportionate effect on national elections. Of course, that turned out to be a poor bet by Democrats.
        brudgers 1y ago
        I guess that’s an opinion.
  - floatrock 1y ago
    Perhaps a better framing is to consider whether there is a relationship between "actions the government focuses on" and "people who own waterfront property or benefit from developing underutilized flood plains"
  - AdamN 1y ago
    Like most of these things it's advocacy and mission creep. It probably started off as a niche thing but as it expanded there are all sorts of groups that would lose if it disappeared: Realtors, title companies, local municipalities (police, teachers, etc...), mortgage companies, insurance companies (for all the other insurance). If they got rid of the subsidy people would move away and money would fly away from those locations.
    - stonemetal12 1y ago
      Nope, it was pretty straight forward. It was the 1968 National Flood Insurance Act. Flood prone communities get flood insurance in exchange Gov gets to manage building standards to reduce damage caused by flooding. It was pretty similar to what we are seeing today. There was a hurricane and the Mississippi river flooded. Private insurance started pulling out so the Government decided to step up.
  - Analemma_ 1y ago
    Concentrated benefits, diffuse costs. The people who benefit from subsidized insurance fight like hell to keep it, while everyone else shrugs because to them it’s just one more budget line item.
  - Spooky23 1y ago
    Well, for one, Florida is one of the largest states and an economic powerhouse. It's business environment is completely driven by residential and vacation real estate. They have a regulatory and tax environment that is attuned to extract money from migrating old people and vacationers. Flood insurance has allowed proximity to water = $$$. Water is desirable, but banks dislike risk. People are attracted to the place to avoid income taxation. Anything that slows down the real estate flywheel is a political death issue, and Florida's unique position as an election kingmaker at the federal level gives it alot of power.
  - quickthrowman 1y ago
    There isn’t a good one. The city of East Grand Forks, MN moved entirely after the 1997 floods when they realized that fighting nature is impossible, particularly on the Red River, which flows northward and virtually always floods due to ice dams downstream in Canada. The old town of East Grand Forks that was built on the floodplain is now a park, which is the best use for most river floodplains.
    - FireBeyond 1y ago
      Meanwhile, when government tried to hit Camp Mystic (in Texas, where 27 people died in July) with a flood zone finding, they fought back in court to get the finding removed... ... and now, with one camper still officially missing, no body recovered, the Camp is eager to assure the public that they will be opened again for next summer ...
    - brudgers 1y ago
      You can’t move Gulfport. Pinellas County is among the most built out counties in the country.
      - quickthrowman 1y ago
        Eventually the risk will be priced into homeowners insurance and nobody will be able to afford to live there anyways. It will happen faster than most homeowners in that area think.
        brudgers 1y ago
        Home owner’s insurance does not cover flood. As I said elsewhere, twenty years ago the rule of thumb was private flood insurance ran 10% of insured value per year. That’s why the Federal Flood Insurance Program was created in the Nixon administration. Of course home owner insurance in Florida has been astronomical and hard to get for a long time because it covers wind damage and that’s most of the damage from hurricanes. The solution was a State pool (insurer of last resort) which by law had to be more expensive than any private option. The results were economically rational…remember banks require home owner insurance as a condition of mortgages. Or to put it another way, pricing risk is just table stakes. Pricing in profit is where the money is.
  - brudgers 1y ago
    Without flood insurance banks won’t write mortgages and home ownership has been a Federal policy objective since at least the 19th century, e.g. the homestead act. To be clear, banks once wrote mortgages without flood insurance and that’s how places like Gulfport were originally built out. Not saying any of this is good. Not saying it is bad. Just saying it is.
- cmcconomy 1y ago
  reminds me of the recently enacted FAIR plan in California for last-resort wildfire insurance. It got state dispensation to carry otherwise-disallowed, lopsided balance sheets to cover more people -- but if a small fraction of those people do experience wildfire it'll go bust! -- edit: see below, I was wrong about FAIR being newly enacted
  - throwup238 1y ago
    The California FAIR Plan was created in 1968 so I’m not sure where you’re getting your information. It was entirely self funded by premiums until the Eaton and Palisade fires and unlike the NFIP, still hasn’t been bailed out by the federal government.
    - cmcconomy 1y ago
      thanks - I was wrong about the plan being new. However as of this year it's got ~$600B of exposure and $400MM in funds. at 3MM/residence that's 133 homes before they're bust, right? see: https://ains.assembly.ca.gov/system/files/2025-05/assembly-fair-plan-hearing-deck-5.28.25.pdf https://ains.assembly.ca.gov/system/files/2025-05/assembly-f... https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/02/homeowners-insurance-costs-rising-in-california-fair-plan/ https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/02/homeowners-insurance-...
      - throwup238 1y ago
        > However as of this year it's got ~$600B of exposure and $400MM in funds. The California FAIR plan only has $377 million in liquid funds because it pays premiums for $5.75 billion worth of reinsurance. Roughly 1% of their clientele (by value) would have to lose their homes to put the plan under strain. That's what may happen with the Palisade/Eaton fires, for the first time in nearly sixty years. Current estimates are $5-9 billion in claims, so the current worst case scenario is a multibillion dollar bailout by the state (not federal!) which is well within the state's budget. Also a nitpick: (almost?) no one is receiving $3 million on a FAIR plan even in the Palisades or Malibu. That's the theoretical maximum but since it doesn't cover the value of the land, the actual coverage is much lower. I have a lot more to say about the circumstances of these latest fires (several of my friends lost their homes in both neighborhoods) but suffice it to say I don't think this disaster is representative of future liabilities.
mystraline 1y ago
This is simple. Dont live in flood planes. Dont buy houses in flood planes. And dont build houses in flood planes. And also, dont count on the government, like FEMA, to help. Now with phrases like "climate change", and "green" now banned from federal discourse, we're not permitted to say the obvious. And its safe to say that 10 year flood planes are now 1 year. 100 year is now every 10, and 1000 year is every 100. In my part of the country, we've also moved 2 bands warmer in USDA ag bands in just 25 years. But no, according to the current idiots at the top, banned language, fake news, and not happening.
- Majromax 1y ago
  > And also, dont count on the government, like FEMA, to help. Now with phrases like "climate change", and "green" now banned from federal discourse, we're not permitted to say the obvious. It's a cold calculus, but a government that is ideologically opposed to the science of climate change is more rather than less likely to help bail out flooded properties. With such a… fixed opinion, the hidebound government agencies can't allow themselves to think that the overall risk profile has increased, so they'll be surprised by a hundred-year flood every 10 years. The confounding factor is that the current US political mix combines ideological opposition to climate change science with opposition to well-functioning assistance programs, so on balance there may be nobody left to write the bailout cheque.
  - kamarg 1y ago
    > With such a… fixed opinion, the hidebound government agencies can't allow themselves to think that the overall risk profile has increased This is only true if policy makers are logically consistent. If they're not then whatever they feel like at the time goes. I don't think it takes much effort to see that logical consistency is not something that is highly valued by the people currently in charge.
- lsaferite 1y ago
  Just for clarity, you're claiming that there's data to support that 10-year flood plain areas should be marked as having a 100% chance of having a flood every year and you have enough data to say a 100-year flood plain should be reclassified as a 10-year flood plain? I ask this because those numbers are shorthand for event probabilities given (flawed) observation data over large time-frames. Argue all you want about climate change moving these number due to rising sea levels. I agree it's happening. That being said, hyperbolic assertions such as this don't help. The reality is that our flood plain designations are very flawed, but they are the only current metric we have to assess some of these risks. Every location that receives precipitation or is near water has some risk of flooding and that risk of flooding may be hidden. The whole state of Florida is low elevation. Something like 1/3 of it is very low elevation and subject to sea-level rise causing catastrophic changes in coastline. But the other 2/3 of Florida is something like 100ft (30m) above sea level. The other issue with Florida is that it's the flattest state in the US. That flatness contributes to flooding being difficult to properly predict. > Dont buy houses in flood planes. I'd just like to call out this hard-line assertion as well. Have you looked at a flood plain map? They have hard borders of zones. Those zones are calling out that event probability. If I buy a house 10 ft outside that zone, do you think my event probability went to 0% in those 10ft? Maybe, if the terrain was drastic, but maybe not even then. Every place we humans build has some probability of catastrophic events. Evaluating those risks is difficult. Hedging against those events is why people buy insurance. Edit: Grady, from Practical Engineering, did a good video about this subject - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EACkiMRT0pc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EACkiMRT0pc
pavel_lishin 1y ago
> When Helene’s storm surge hit, three and a half feet of water filled her garage. Nine inches of water swelled antique wood furniture and destroyed her vintage Schwinn bicycle, books, clothes and record collection. Her washing machine was afloat. > In the end, she was able to restore her home without elevating it, after a reassessment found the damage did not exceed half its market value. After almost a year away, she moved back in just in time for her birthday. > “I’m rolling the dice and hoping we don’t have this kind of situation again,” she said. Gambling is a hell of a drug.
- tokai 1y ago
  >destroyed her vintage Schwinn bicycle How is this possible? Unless it was in water for so long that it rusted apart, it would be impossible for flooding to destroy a steel bicycle.
  - WillAdams 1y ago
    Salt water is _very_ corrosive, and once it gets inside a frame, it's hard to get a bike mechanic to sign off on it being safe to ride.
    - chasd00 1y ago
      > it's hard to get a bike mechanic to sign off on it being safe to ride. Is that a thing? A letter of safety by a bike mechanic? To me if a bike can be ridden it’s safe to be ridden. Maybe racing bicycles are different since the intention is to ride them fast but this is a vintage bike.
      - avgDev 1y ago
        You can get really hurt at low speeds if a frame cracks. You won't know when it will crack.
      - lupusreal 1y ago
        Agreed, however it's quite likely that after being under salt water for a while, the frame was in such shape that nobody would look at it once and consider riding it.
Synaesthesia 1y ago
What’s Florida going to do as sea levels rise? Floods and large storm events are only going to become for prevalent in the future.
- crottypeter 1y ago
  They are doing it now. Summed up in a recent headline "Florida Gov. DeSantis signs bill that deletes climate change from state law"
  - imglorp 1y ago
    That law thing is more grandstanding and placation of his base. Nature will do what it's going to do, which is scrub the lowlands clean every few years. Insurance can not be forced to pay for that, so the homeowners will figure it out. Pay to rebuild repeatedly or leave.
- floatrock 1y ago
  Much of Florida real-estate purchases and voting blocs are people with a life/time horizon of 1-3 decades. What you're describing is someone else's problem. Article is a bit less crass about this and wraps it in some good ol folksy humor: > Ms. Poucher said she knew her old home was in a flood zone when she bought it. “I joked that we would probably be dead by the time the sea level would rise up to where our house was,” she said. Despite her sadness at losing it, she said she’s relieved to know she’s safer from floods. Same reason schools are chronically underfunded in the state... the voters' retirement funds are better spent on golf courses than schools.
oldjim798 1y ago
We need to start paying people to leave Florida. Moving that population will be cheaper than trying and failing to make it resistant to climate change
- Dusseldorf 1y ago
  Or at least stop paying them to stay. Let the insurance rates soar to their proper place.
  - GenerWork 1y ago
    They are rising, in some cases by a lot. In fact, an argument could be made that Florida is promoting a healthier insurance market than California is.
    - IAmBroom 1y ago
      See Brudger's comment about this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45428287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45428287 TL;DR: The Federal Government subsidizes flood insurance.
      - GenerWork 1y ago
        I saw it and it has NO applicability to my comment. I'm talking about home insurance.
- twodave 1y ago
  This is a somewhat hasty generalization. Plenty of us who live and have our entire extended family in Florida manage to do so without living in areas of high flood risk. I live less than a mile from the St John’s river, but practically the entire city of Jacksonville would have to be underwater for it to reach my house.
  - Zigurd 1y ago
    "This is fine." Seriously though, if a significant part of the city flooded, the fact you didn't have property damage from a specific flooding event isn't very much comfort. There would be disruption from impassable streets, infrastructure damage, and emergency services pushed to the limit.
jwsteigerwalt 1y ago
A few years ago I spent some months consulting on a large FL based residential insurance agency’s order creation processes. By the end, I was floored by how much Citizens (FL’s last resort insurance) and federal backed flood insurance distort the natural balance of the risk/expense/exposure market. As long as the true cost of the risk associated with a given property is suppressed, moral hazard will prevail.
- prasadjoglekar 1y ago
  While true, this is the devil's bargain we have struck in 2008. Big banks betting on RMBSs got a bailout and removed the moral hazard there. People with mortgages rightfully revolted and this FEMA scheme is one of the ways in which money is being filed out. It all needs to be unwound. How, is unclear.
  - xrd 1y ago
    Fascinating to hear it put this way. If Trump were to rail against FEMA because it was a money laundering scheme for coastal property owners, he might have wider support, but would lose support of Floridians who want that money laundering. It feels like everyone is winking and grinning straight to the bank.
- quickthrowman 1y ago
  Agreed, eventually the time will come to pay the piper and home values in coastal Florida will collapse. Probably better if that happens gradually instead of all at once, but the one-shot scenario seems more likely, another Hurricane Andrew level storm would do it.
GenerWork 1y ago
As someone who lives in Pinellas County, Gulfport is kind of unique in the sense that it's at a very low elevation compared to the rest of Pinellas with the exception of Shore Acres. Any storm surge that hits here will have its effects magnified due to this lack of elevation. I live up near Dunedin, and the only homes affected by storm surge were the ones within 2 blocks of the Gulf. Homes across the street from those homes weren't affected at all.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
jmyeet 1y ago
I wonder if people who have all this smoke for Floridians living in flood zones that they do for people living in wildfire zones, including Pacific Palisades and Altadena. In both cases, taxpayers are subsidizing their existence and their insurance is way below fair market value for the risks involved. So let's say it (many years ago) cost $100,000 to build a house and there was a 1% chance in any given year that the house would be a total loss due to [fire,flood]. Insurance for that event should cost a baseline of $1000. It should actually be more due to variance and how these events aren't isolated (ie years of no losses followed by thousands of homes in a single year). But you get the idea. Now because of inflation it now costs $800,000 to build that same house. Well the risks haven't changed so now insurance should have a baseline cost of $8000. In California they don't because of Prop 108. In Florida, flood insurance is acting as a subsidy. Without it, many homes wouldn't be built and existing houses would have a much lower value because of the insurance issue. But let's take it further. Now because of climate change let's say the annual risk was 4% of [fire,flood]. Well, insurance should cost $32,000 per year but doesn't. But do you see what the issue driving all of this is? You might say it's government policy. Wrong. You might say it's capping insurance costs. Wrong. It's housing cost. Housing is too expensive. What nobody wants to face is the system we've built of treating housing as an investment is broken. It is nothing more than stealing from the next generation and a wealth transfer from the government to already wealthy. But nobody wants to have that conversation.
- draw_down 1y ago
  [dead]
- orwin 1y ago
  Well, i don't have any smoke because well, it's not my country, but i assume people have the same smoke for developers building in wildfire zone than for developers building in flood zones. Especially when those developers are in fact the city mayor, and 13 people died because of him. And he still got re-elected. Your country is not the only one where powerful people face no consequences. People who blame homeowners though are all wrong. calculating risk/reward individually is extremely difficult to impossible, and if some people did not and trusted authorities, you shouldn't blame them.
bluGill 1y ago
This is a bunch of NIMBY trying to make it seem like there is a problem here. You want someone else to pay for the costs of fixing your house: don't be surprised if they then put restrictions on what you can do. Fix your house yourself without insurance if you don't like the rules (I suspect the law won't allow this - but I doubt anyone is seriously considering this option so I'm going to ignore it now that it is pointed out). The rest of the article is complaints that the new compliant houses are different. Which is to say NIMBY cannot stand change and progress. I have no sympathy for this argument, it is their land not yours and your input should be greatly limited.
- quickthrowman 1y ago
  You only need to carry homeowner’s insurance if your mortgage lender requires it, as far as I know.
  - lsaferite 1y ago
    This is correct. You can own a home outright and have no insurance.
- mindslight 1y ago
  According to the article, the improvements they're balking at amount to raising houses with 6 feet of cribbing, and cost about $100k. So, yeah...
  - FireBeyond 1y ago
    Versus the $500K+ it costs us taxpayers to rebuild their homes, sometimes twice in a decade. I'm not entirely sympathetic.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    That is what you need to spend to fix the house correctly - at least according to those who will pay. If you don't like it either pay for it yourself without their help, or move elsewhere.
ubermonkey 1y ago
I mean, I get people are sad if they get forced out of their homes over this, but it's not like it's a surprise that storms and flooding are more damaging and more frequent. I feel zero outrage here.
- bkfunk 1y ago
  > I get people are sad if they get forced out of their homes for this Wow, what a way to dismiss the humanity and worth of millions of people. First of all, in some cases it actually IS a surprise: historical flood data was often quite limited and cities and communities formed before there were accurate estimates of flooding probability, let alone enough understanding of climate change to predict 21st century flooding probability. If you’re thinking “this side of the street floods, but not the other side, just move across the street”, in many places that is not at all the situation. Miami (avg elevation: 5.9 ft) and New Orleans (elevation from -6.6 to 19.7 ft) are large, dense (by American standards) cities that have existed for over a hundred years. Giant swathes of them are in flood plains. You cannot move a third or more of a city’s residents in any reasonable time—there aren’t enough housing units, never mind the schools and utility capacity and businesses and everything else needed to support a community of people. Plus, most Americans, if they own a home, the vast majority of their net worth is in their house. You pull the insurance, that value vaporizes. Sure, from the perspective of the overall economy, that may seem more efficient. But individuals can use economic efficiency for a down payment. Congratulations, you just vanished billions of dollars of assets! Hope that doesn’t affect the banking system or the local economy! And they can’t move across the street—to get out of the flood plain they may have to move a significant distance, and people already live in the higher areas of the city: effectively (especially for low and moderate income families) they have to move > 50 miles away. That means they lose their social network, support system, and likely their job. Moving a long distance is expensive, extremely stressful, and can break the few remaining social bonds that we now know are a huge factor in everything from recovering from bankruptcy to whether someone is too disabled to work, to how long people live. > I feel zero outrage here. I’m not sure anyone is trying to get you to feel outrage? Like it’s a hard policy problem that greatly affects millions of people. Maybe you could just…care?
  - 1y ago

40 points by lxm 1y ago

https://archive.is/uwcdK https://archive.is/uwcdK

What the fine article does not mention is that the Federal Flood Insurance Program is what allows people to get mortgages on homes in flood zones. While Federal Flood Insurance is not cheap it is a small fraction of the cost of private flood insurance -- the number I heard when flood insurance was part of my professional life was 10% of market value per year (and that was 20 years ago when rates were probably lower than today).

542458 1y ago
What’s the justification for the government subsidizing homes in areas that repeatedly flood? Admittedly I don’t know very much about this, but it just seems like simultaneously wasting money and increasing human suffering.
- aleatorianator 1y ago
  [flagged]
- lotsofpulp 1y ago
  Florida used to be a swing state, and money buys votes.
  - brudgers 1y ago
    Participation in the Federal Flood insurance Program is available to all local governments everywhere in the US. It completely bypasses state governments and hence state politics.
    - lotsofpulp 1y ago
      The federal taxpayer subsidy to landowners in flood prone areas disproportionately benefits voters in some states, and the voters of some states have a disproportionate effect on national elections. Of course, that turned out to be a poor bet by Democrats.
      - brudgers 1y ago
        I guess that’s an opinion.
- floatrock 1y ago
  Perhaps a better framing is to consider whether there is a relationship between "actions the government focuses on" and "people who own waterfront property or benefit from developing underutilized flood plains"
- AdamN 1y ago
  Like most of these things it's advocacy and mission creep. It probably started off as a niche thing but as it expanded there are all sorts of groups that would lose if it disappeared: Realtors, title companies, local municipalities (police, teachers, etc...), mortgage companies, insurance companies (for all the other insurance). If they got rid of the subsidy people would move away and money would fly away from those locations.
  - stonemetal12 1y ago
    Nope, it was pretty straight forward. It was the 1968 National Flood Insurance Act. Flood prone communities get flood insurance in exchange Gov gets to manage building standards to reduce damage caused by flooding. It was pretty similar to what we are seeing today. There was a hurricane and the Mississippi river flooded. Private insurance started pulling out so the Government decided to step up.
- Analemma_ 1y ago
  Concentrated benefits, diffuse costs. The people who benefit from subsidized insurance fight like hell to keep it, while everyone else shrugs because to them it’s just one more budget line item.
- Spooky23 1y ago
  Well, for one, Florida is one of the largest states and an economic powerhouse. It's business environment is completely driven by residential and vacation real estate. They have a regulatory and tax environment that is attuned to extract money from migrating old people and vacationers. Flood insurance has allowed proximity to water = $$$. Water is desirable, but banks dislike risk. People are attracted to the place to avoid income taxation. Anything that slows down the real estate flywheel is a political death issue, and Florida's unique position as an election kingmaker at the federal level gives it alot of power.
- quickthrowman 1y ago
  There isn’t a good one. The city of East Grand Forks, MN moved entirely after the 1997 floods when they realized that fighting nature is impossible, particularly on the Red River, which flows northward and virtually always floods due to ice dams downstream in Canada. The old town of East Grand Forks that was built on the floodplain is now a park, which is the best use for most river floodplains.
  - FireBeyond 1y ago
    Meanwhile, when government tried to hit Camp Mystic (in Texas, where 27 people died in July) with a flood zone finding, they fought back in court to get the finding removed... ... and now, with one camper still officially missing, no body recovered, the Camp is eager to assure the public that they will be opened again for next summer ...
  - brudgers 1y ago
    You can’t move Gulfport. Pinellas County is among the most built out counties in the country.
    - quickthrowman 1y ago
      Eventually the risk will be priced into homeowners insurance and nobody will be able to afford to live there anyways. It will happen faster than most homeowners in that area think.
      - brudgers 1y ago
        Home owner’s insurance does not cover flood. As I said elsewhere, twenty years ago the rule of thumb was private flood insurance ran 10% of insured value per year. That’s why the Federal Flood Insurance Program was created in the Nixon administration. Of course home owner insurance in Florida has been astronomical and hard to get for a long time because it covers wind damage and that’s most of the damage from hurricanes. The solution was a State pool (insurer of last resort) which by law had to be more expensive than any private option. The results were economically rational…remember banks require home owner insurance as a condition of mortgages. Or to put it another way, pricing risk is just table stakes. Pricing in profit is where the money is.
- brudgers 1y ago
  Without flood insurance banks won’t write mortgages and home ownership has been a Federal policy objective since at least the 19th century, e.g. the homestead act. To be clear, banks once wrote mortgages without flood insurance and that’s how places like Gulfport were originally built out. Not saying any of this is good. Not saying it is bad. Just saying it is.
cmcconomy 1y ago
reminds me of the recently enacted FAIR plan in California for last-resort wildfire insurance. It got state dispensation to carry otherwise-disallowed, lopsided balance sheets to cover more people -- but if a small fraction of those people do experience wildfire it'll go bust! -- edit: see below, I was wrong about FAIR being newly enacted
- throwup238 1y ago
  The California FAIR Plan was created in 1968 so I’m not sure where you’re getting your information. It was entirely self funded by premiums until the Eaton and Palisade fires and unlike the NFIP, still hasn’t been bailed out by the federal government.
  - cmcconomy 1y ago
    thanks - I was wrong about the plan being new. However as of this year it's got ~$600B of exposure and $400MM in funds. at 3MM/residence that's 133 homes before they're bust, right? see: https://ains.assembly.ca.gov/system/files/2025-05/assembly-fair-plan-hearing-deck-5.28.25.pdf https://ains.assembly.ca.gov/system/files/2025-05/assembly-f... https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/02/homeowners-insurance-costs-rising-in-california-fair-plan/ https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/02/homeowners-insurance-...
    - throwup238 1y ago
      > However as of this year it's got ~$600B of exposure and $400MM in funds. The California FAIR plan only has $377 million in liquid funds because it pays premiums for $5.75 billion worth of reinsurance. Roughly 1% of their clientele (by value) would have to lose their homes to put the plan under strain. That's what may happen with the Palisade/Eaton fires, for the first time in nearly sixty years. Current estimates are $5-9 billion in claims, so the current worst case scenario is a multibillion dollar bailout by the state (not federal!) which is well within the state's budget. Also a nitpick: (almost?) no one is receiving $3 million on a FAIR plan even in the Palisades or Malibu. That's the theoretical maximum but since it doesn't cover the value of the land, the actual coverage is much lower. I have a lot more to say about the circumstances of these latest fires (several of my friends lost their homes in both neighborhoods) but suffice it to say I don't think this disaster is representative of future liabilities.

mystraline 1y ago

This is simple. Dont live in flood planes. Dont buy houses in flood planes. And dont build houses in flood planes. And also, dont count on the government, like FEMA, to help. Now with phrases like "climate change", and "green" now banned from federal discourse, we're not permitted to say the obvious. And its safe to say that 10 year flood planes are now 1 year. 100 year is now every 10, and 1000 year is every 100. In my part of the country, we've also moved 2 bands warmer in USDA ag bands in just 25 years. But no, according to the current idiots at the top, banned language, fake news, and not happening.

Majromax 1y ago
> And also, dont count on the government, like FEMA, to help. Now with phrases like "climate change", and "green" now banned from federal discourse, we're not permitted to say the obvious. It's a cold calculus, but a government that is ideologically opposed to the science of climate change is more rather than less likely to help bail out flooded properties. With such a… fixed opinion, the hidebound government agencies can't allow themselves to think that the overall risk profile has increased, so they'll be surprised by a hundred-year flood every 10 years. The confounding factor is that the current US political mix combines ideological opposition to climate change science with opposition to well-functioning assistance programs, so on balance there may be nobody left to write the bailout cheque.
- kamarg 1y ago
  > With such a… fixed opinion, the hidebound government agencies can't allow themselves to think that the overall risk profile has increased This is only true if policy makers are logically consistent. If they're not then whatever they feel like at the time goes. I don't think it takes much effort to see that logical consistency is not something that is highly valued by the people currently in charge.
lsaferite 1y ago
Just for clarity, you're claiming that there's data to support that 10-year flood plain areas should be marked as having a 100% chance of having a flood every year and you have enough data to say a 100-year flood plain should be reclassified as a 10-year flood plain? I ask this because those numbers are shorthand for event probabilities given (flawed) observation data over large time-frames. Argue all you want about climate change moving these number due to rising sea levels. I agree it's happening. That being said, hyperbolic assertions such as this don't help. The reality is that our flood plain designations are very flawed, but they are the only current metric we have to assess some of these risks. Every location that receives precipitation or is near water has some risk of flooding and that risk of flooding may be hidden. The whole state of Florida is low elevation. Something like 1/3 of it is very low elevation and subject to sea-level rise causing catastrophic changes in coastline. But the other 2/3 of Florida is something like 100ft (30m) above sea level. The other issue with Florida is that it's the flattest state in the US. That flatness contributes to flooding being difficult to properly predict. > Dont buy houses in flood planes. I'd just like to call out this hard-line assertion as well. Have you looked at a flood plain map? They have hard borders of zones. Those zones are calling out that event probability. If I buy a house 10 ft outside that zone, do you think my event probability went to 0% in those 10ft? Maybe, if the terrain was drastic, but maybe not even then. Every place we humans build has some probability of catastrophic events. Evaluating those risks is difficult. Hedging against those events is why people buy insurance. Edit: Grady, from Practical Engineering, did a good video about this subject - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EACkiMRT0pc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EACkiMRT0pc

pavel_lishin 1y ago

> When Helene’s storm surge hit, three and a half feet of water filled her garage. Nine inches of water swelled antique wood furniture and destroyed her vintage Schwinn bicycle, books, clothes and record collection. Her washing machine was afloat. > In the end, she was able to restore her home without elevating it, after a reassessment found the damage did not exceed half its market value. After almost a year away, she moved back in just in time for her birthday. > “I’m rolling the dice and hoping we don’t have this kind of situation again,” she said. Gambling is a hell of a drug.

tokai 1y ago
>destroyed her vintage Schwinn bicycle How is this possible? Unless it was in water for so long that it rusted apart, it would be impossible for flooding to destroy a steel bicycle.
- WillAdams 1y ago
  Salt water is _very_ corrosive, and once it gets inside a frame, it's hard to get a bike mechanic to sign off on it being safe to ride.
  - chasd00 1y ago
    > it's hard to get a bike mechanic to sign off on it being safe to ride. Is that a thing? A letter of safety by a bike mechanic? To me if a bike can be ridden it’s safe to be ridden. Maybe racing bicycles are different since the intention is to ride them fast but this is a vintage bike.
    - avgDev 1y ago
      You can get really hurt at low speeds if a frame cracks. You won't know when it will crack.
    - lupusreal 1y ago
      Agreed, however it's quite likely that after being under salt water for a while, the frame was in such shape that nobody would look at it once and consider riding it.

Synaesthesia 1y ago

What’s Florida going to do as sea levels rise? Floods and large storm events are only going to become for prevalent in the future.

crottypeter 1y ago
They are doing it now. Summed up in a recent headline "Florida Gov. DeSantis signs bill that deletes climate change from state law"
- imglorp 1y ago
  That law thing is more grandstanding and placation of his base. Nature will do what it's going to do, which is scrub the lowlands clean every few years. Insurance can not be forced to pay for that, so the homeowners will figure it out. Pay to rebuild repeatedly or leave.
floatrock 1y ago
Much of Florida real-estate purchases and voting blocs are people with a life/time horizon of 1-3 decades. What you're describing is someone else's problem. Article is a bit less crass about this and wraps it in some good ol folksy humor: > Ms. Poucher said she knew her old home was in a flood zone when she bought it. “I joked that we would probably be dead by the time the sea level would rise up to where our house was,” she said. Despite her sadness at losing it, she said she’s relieved to know she’s safer from floods. Same reason schools are chronically underfunded in the state... the voters' retirement funds are better spent on golf courses than schools.

oldjim798 1y ago

We need to start paying people to leave Florida. Moving that population will be cheaper than trying and failing to make it resistant to climate change

Dusseldorf 1y ago
Or at least stop paying them to stay. Let the insurance rates soar to their proper place.
- GenerWork 1y ago
  They are rising, in some cases by a lot. In fact, an argument could be made that Florida is promoting a healthier insurance market than California is.
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    See Brudger's comment about this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45428287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45428287 TL;DR: The Federal Government subsidizes flood insurance.
    - GenerWork 1y ago
      I saw it and it has NO applicability to my comment. I'm talking about home insurance.
twodave 1y ago
This is a somewhat hasty generalization. Plenty of us who live and have our entire extended family in Florida manage to do so without living in areas of high flood risk. I live less than a mile from the St John’s river, but practically the entire city of Jacksonville would have to be underwater for it to reach my house.
- Zigurd 1y ago
  "This is fine." Seriously though, if a significant part of the city flooded, the fact you didn't have property damage from a specific flooding event isn't very much comfort. There would be disruption from impassable streets, infrastructure damage, and emergency services pushed to the limit.

jwsteigerwalt 1y ago

A few years ago I spent some months consulting on a large FL based residential insurance agency’s order creation processes. By the end, I was floored by how much Citizens (FL’s last resort insurance) and federal backed flood insurance distort the natural balance of the risk/expense/exposure market. As long as the true cost of the risk associated with a given property is suppressed, moral hazard will prevail.

prasadjoglekar 1y ago
While true, this is the devil's bargain we have struck in 2008. Big banks betting on RMBSs got a bailout and removed the moral hazard there. People with mortgages rightfully revolted and this FEMA scheme is one of the ways in which money is being filed out. It all needs to be unwound. How, is unclear.
- xrd 1y ago
  Fascinating to hear it put this way. If Trump were to rail against FEMA because it was a money laundering scheme for coastal property owners, he might have wider support, but would lose support of Floridians who want that money laundering. It feels like everyone is winking and grinning straight to the bank.
quickthrowman 1y ago
Agreed, eventually the time will come to pay the piper and home values in coastal Florida will collapse. Probably better if that happens gradually instead of all at once, but the one-shot scenario seems more likely, another Hurricane Andrew level storm would do it.

GenerWork 1y ago

As someone who lives in Pinellas County, Gulfport is kind of unique in the sense that it's at a very low elevation compared to the rest of Pinellas with the exception of Shore Acres. Any storm surge that hits here will have its effects magnified due to this lack of elevation. I live up near Dunedin, and the only homes affected by storm surge were the ones within 2 blocks of the Gulf. Homes across the street from those homes weren't affected at all.

deleted 1y ago
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jmyeet 1y ago

I wonder if people who have all this smoke for Floridians living in flood zones that they do for people living in wildfire zones, including Pacific Palisades and Altadena. In both cases, taxpayers are subsidizing their existence and their insurance is way below fair market value for the risks involved. So let's say it (many years ago) cost $100,000 to build a house and there was a 1% chance in any given year that the house would be a total loss due to [fire,flood]. Insurance for that event should cost a baseline of $1000. It should actually be more due to variance and how these events aren't isolated (ie years of no losses followed by thousands of homes in a single year). But you get the idea. Now because of inflation it now costs $800,000 to build that same house. Well the risks haven't changed so now insurance should have a baseline cost of $8000. In California they don't because of Prop 108. In Florida, flood insurance is acting as a subsidy. Without it, many homes wouldn't be built and existing houses would have a much lower value because of the insurance issue. But let's take it further. Now because of climate change let's say the annual risk was 4% of [fire,flood]. Well, insurance should cost $32,000 per year but doesn't. But do you see what the issue driving all of this is? You might say it's government policy. Wrong. You might say it's capping insurance costs. Wrong. It's housing cost. Housing is too expensive. What nobody wants to face is the system we've built of treating housing as an investment is broken. It is nothing more than stealing from the next generation and a wealth transfer from the government to already wealthy. But nobody wants to have that conversation.

draw_down 1y ago
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orwin 1y ago
Well, i don't have any smoke because well, it's not my country, but i assume people have the same smoke for developers building in wildfire zone than for developers building in flood zones. Especially when those developers are in fact the city mayor, and 13 people died because of him. And he still got re-elected. Your country is not the only one where powerful people face no consequences. People who blame homeowners though are all wrong. calculating risk/reward individually is extremely difficult to impossible, and if some people did not and trusted authorities, you shouldn't blame them.

bluGill 1y ago

This is a bunch of NIMBY trying to make it seem like there is a problem here. You want someone else to pay for the costs of fixing your house: don't be surprised if they then put restrictions on what you can do. Fix your house yourself without insurance if you don't like the rules (I suspect the law won't allow this - but I doubt anyone is seriously considering this option so I'm going to ignore it now that it is pointed out). The rest of the article is complaints that the new compliant houses are different. Which is to say NIMBY cannot stand change and progress. I have no sympathy for this argument, it is their land not yours and your input should be greatly limited.

quickthrowman 1y ago
You only need to carry homeowner’s insurance if your mortgage lender requires it, as far as I know.
- lsaferite 1y ago
  This is correct. You can own a home outright and have no insurance.
mindslight 1y ago
According to the article, the improvements they're balking at amount to raising houses with 6 feet of cribbing, and cost about $100k. So, yeah...
- FireBeyond 1y ago
  Versus the $500K+ it costs us taxpayers to rebuild their homes, sometimes twice in a decade. I'm not entirely sympathetic.
- bluGill 1y ago
  That is what you need to spend to fix the house correctly - at least according to those who will pay. If you don't like it either pay for it yourself without their help, or move elsewhere.

ubermonkey 1y ago

I mean, I get people are sad if they get forced out of their homes over this, but it's not like it's a surprise that storms and flooding are more damaging and more frequent. I feel zero outrage here.

bkfunk 1y ago
> I get people are sad if they get forced out of their homes for this Wow, what a way to dismiss the humanity and worth of millions of people. First of all, in some cases it actually IS a surprise: historical flood data was often quite limited and cities and communities formed before there were accurate estimates of flooding probability, let alone enough understanding of climate change to predict 21st century flooding probability. If you’re thinking “this side of the street floods, but not the other side, just move across the street”, in many places that is not at all the situation. Miami (avg elevation: 5.9 ft) and New Orleans (elevation from -6.6 to 19.7 ft) are large, dense (by American standards) cities that have existed for over a hundred years. Giant swathes of them are in flood plains. You cannot move a third or more of a city’s residents in any reasonable time—there aren’t enough housing units, never mind the schools and utility capacity and businesses and everything else needed to support a community of people. Plus, most Americans, if they own a home, the vast majority of their net worth is in their house. You pull the insurance, that value vaporizes. Sure, from the perspective of the overall economy, that may seem more efficient. But individuals can use economic efficiency for a down payment. Congratulations, you just vanished billions of dollars of assets! Hope that doesn’t affect the banking system or the local economy! And they can’t move across the street—to get out of the flood plain they may have to move a significant distance, and people already live in the higher areas of the city: effectively (especially for low and moderate income families) they have to move > 50 miles away. That means they lose their social network, support system, and likely their job. Moving a long distance is expensive, extremely stressful, and can break the few remaining social bonds that we now know are a huge factor in everything from recovering from bankruptcy to whether someone is too disabled to work, to how long people live. > I feel zero outrage here. I’m not sure anyone is trying to get you to feel outrage? Like it’s a hard policy problem that greatly affects millions of people. Maybe you could just…care?
- 1y ago