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It seems to me that flooding the neighbourhood to save the city was a perfectly justifiable decision, but it also seems perfectly reasonable to compensate those whose homes were thereby destroyed.

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I would agree, assuming it wasn't clear that they were in a flood plain. The fact that they were makes this pretty easy to resolve: you should have had flood insurance. If you didn't, that's you're problem (since these areas were listed on maps as flood plains).

I agree, it seems exactly that simple.

That's what flood insurance is for. In a socialist democracy you'd be right, but in case of the USA, it seems more appropriate to require that homeowners get insurance.

I think in this case, you would actually require federal-government-decision insurance. The downstream residents very well might not have flooded had the federal government done nothing (of course we can agree that what they did was probably best). We should not pretend that another entity directly causing this shouldn't be held responsible, even if it was the right decision.

They might have, sure, but the plan for doing so was in place before the houses were built. They can't claim to be surprised about this.

Flood insurance is a government run program that is pretty "socialist" in the sense you seem to be implying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Flood_Insurance_Progr...

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