Most homebuyers and renters not warned about flood or wildfire risk
npr.org
npr.org
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.
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.
I used to do permitting for construction of aerial and buried fiber networks.
Typically if you're doing some sort of thing where floodplain data is needed, you'll start by finding the dataset from USGS/FEMA/USGIS/etc. Import that in, you'll get a whole bunch of data that depending on package (i.e. if you are doing stuff in AutoCAD instead of working with real GIS software) you might have to shape to get more proper information; floodplain data looks like a bunch of contoured lines (often semiparallel to each other.) based on the survey, and have different embedded metadata accordingly.
So you'll do your drawing based on that, and ideally at some point, a Surveyor goes out and will Verify the map. They'll do this by probably re-pulling the original survey data, going out to the site, and basically making sure you didn't lie in your map.
This last part BTW is an important check&boundary, and IMO the more important one than municipal approval. A good professional surveyor knows that if he does the wrong (i.e. potentially harmful) thing, he could lose his license and livelyhood forever. Professional Seals are something that I have a lot of respect for.
FWIW, this is often the easier part of getting a permit as long as you are building sanely. The city is where politics, money, and process gets broken.
realistically they're measuring "big floods" and "bigger floods" in a way that is consistent, however the stated time frequency with which they supposedly occur is so extremely inaccurate that it does not rise to the level of 'science.'
Private Mortgages may require flood insurance depending on factors, depends on the bank and their rules. Govt Backed mortgages (i.e. FHA) will require for 'high risk' areas. However you can still have a flood within 100 years in your area but not be required to have insurance (I live in such an area.) Typically this is for cases where flooding is going to be very minor; i.e. in this area it can happen but it's a small enough flood both in size and depth it doesn't meet the criteria. As a result, savvy folks just make sure not to keep anything expensive out of their basements. Less savy folks take extra trash out after a bad rain.
To the savvy real estate buyer, I recommend https://floodfactor.com to accurately quantify the flood risk of a potential property. They have stepped in where FEMA has dropped the ball.
I'm sure we've all talked ourselves into a stupid decision or two because you really wanted something.
What you have described is an indictment of our educational system on several different fronts, and a testimony of the need for broad education not just giving people enough to know a narrow field where they can earn money but be ignorant and uniformed of everything else.
Their inability to see what seems like common sense to people familiar with washes is one example. Your inability to see that people without any background knowledge on a topic will have trouble understanding the topic is another example.
this is a bit much. all you need to understand to recognize the potential problem is the basic fact that water flows downhill. this is sort of like buying a house right next to a college dorm during the summer break and complaining that no one warned you college kids like to party.
Imagine a “renter’s/buyer’s” general ED course in high school, and requiring the passing of a local “buyer’s test” prior to signing. It would be prudent from an investment standpoint and a “Welcome to the neighborhood” for newcomers who have never lived in a flood plain, experienced a tornado, etc. or even owned a home.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardized_Natural_Hazards_D...
You can certainly request the paperwork before signing it, but you'll be spending a week reading legalese. Even then, negotiating terms is going to take time too. In a hot market, the seller is more incentivized to just go with the next highest bidder and skip the legal negotiating that they themselves may never have read either.
I'm not saying you are wrong, but it's never really done for a reason.
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?
Perhaps developers should have to bond new housing against floods prior to construction. Fully funded, third party bonds. Sensible locations will more or less be free.
The obstacle to a functional flood insurance market are all the people who can't afford market premiums, who have complained to their politicians, demanding that the rest of society subsidize their property risk.
Around me a basically large area that flooded yearly was somehow magically rezoned, developed all the houses sold and then boom a few years later.. guess what guys... 'we're soorry'
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.
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.
The state did exactly that less than a year ago: 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.
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.
Edit: Also, the expectation was auto-escalating offers, eBay style. The owner set a date to take offers and picked the best one.
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.
Aside from the stress of weekly rushes to view, inspect, bid, and bid-up, the process primarily compressed the entire process into a short period of time. The biggest inefficiency was that essentially all buyers were forced to become journeyman experts at the compressed-time process.
It seems like it is healthiest for homes to be on the market for about two weeks. Part of the trouble with short-duration listings is that it is a high-stakes version of the optimal-stopping problem. I think a little more holistic visibility into the market's offerings might yield better matches between buyers and homes.
Choosing an abode for the next few decades amidst weekly auto-escalation bidding wars just doesn't seem healthy for the future dwellers.
A good example of the kind of change I’m talking about is development in 100-year flood plains in Houston[0]. 30 years ago, a naive home buyer would not have had to worry about it, because flood plains were off limits. What changed? Greedy developers? Ignorant planners? More population? Perhaps all of it. But now you have to be educated to make the right call.
[0] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/...
Using Houston as an example, 50 to 100 years ago it was the norm to bring in fill dirt from other regions, flatten and grade a piece of land, and construct a gridded residential neighborhood with total disregard for natural drainage. Flooding was dealt with by artificially channelizing bayous and streams, which is why Houston's urban waterways look so unnatural. Many of these older neighborhoods along the gulf coast were unsustainable and are not being rebuilt after hurricanes.
Starting around 30 years ago, local, state and federal policymakers started to get a clue. Neighborhoods were more commonly build to accomodate the drainage patterns -- this is why developments from the 1990's, 2000's tend to have large retention ponds, (example: https://www.google.com/maps/@29.5517845,-95.4295706,3a,75y,2... )
while neighborhoods from the 1950's-60's do not.
As I understand it, in competitive urban markets it has become common for sellers to do a pre-inspection and then sell / provide that info for interested parties. This potentially makes for a faster sale and may create a more competitive situation if more potential buyers see less risk in the condition of the house and are willing to make an offer. But, at least in my state, anything a seller learns about the condition of their home must be disclosed so this could also backfire.
Any time you can remove a contingency in a competitive situation it will be a potential advantage, but caveat emptor all day long - sellers seldom have a complete understanding of their home and property so it is to the buyer's best interest to do everything they can to inform themselves before completing the purchase.
Most inspections are "pay us <stupid_number> to point out the obvious and we don't include <list of anything that requires more than just walking around the house eyeballing things to determine> and our liability limited to <price of inspection>". It's no surprise people wave them.
I researched my own inspector and chose a very technical retired engineer. He identified significant issues with the home that resulted in the price being reduced by 15%. You're an idiot if you waive inspections.
I've never needed to call anyone else so I just assumed they were all like this.
The article says waiving of inspection is out of control and going up, but nowhere near "most".
Of course your local market is probably completely different than the entire US overall.
Economists define the natural interest rate as "the interest rate that supports the economy at full employment/maximum output while keeping inflation constant"[wikipedia]
For the last decade we've seen very little time at full employment and absolutely no accelerating inflation by any standard measure. So by any textbook definition of a natural interest rate we've been keeping interest rates too high.
Agreed interest rates are at an all time low. At the same time, the supply of loans is at an all time high, thanks to new (old) mechanisms like loan securitization being thoroughly commoditized.
Discuss - why shouldn't the price of loans (interest rates) be subject to the laws of supply and demand just like everything else?
They should be. It doesn't work though when the Fed comes along and buys the lion's share of loans.
A $1,000 1 yr bond is a promise to a $1,000 in 1 year. If you'd pay $500 for it than the interest rate is 100%. If you bid it up to $750 than interest rates drop to 33%.
If the Fed comes along and buys loans from the Banking system it increases the supply of loans... (banks are restricted by Basel Capital regulation in the supply of loans they can provide, otherwise too much liability money creation.)
If they buy loans from anybody else - since the Fed creates money to do so (by virtue of also being a bank), they again potentially increase the supply of loans, if the lenders then relend the money.
And the total quantity of debt goes up, its price goes down, and everybody wonders why.
* CA
* Many pages of disclosures
* A recommendation to use C-f in an electronic copy to find the right things
That's not going to work. In CA, for instance, you'll receive a disclosure telling you about leaking tanks on your neighbour's property and so on for a mile or so. And no one, literally no one will provide you with an executive summary that they'll stand by.
But you know what? It doesn't matter. It's your house. Read what you want. C-f if you want.
[0]https://www.car.org/-/media/CAR/Documents/Industry-360/PDF/P...
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.
But it doesn’t follow that all other areas are risky. They may just be less immediately appealing.
Indeed a lot the places that are at high risk of fire, are high end neighborhoods where relatively rich people bought because they are beautiful places to live.
If anything, I expect things to get better as people start to value less risky areas over more traditionally beautiful areas and we start to see some equilibrium.
There's vast amounts of "natural beauty" here, nearly everywhere you could look. And while, sure, the lakeside real estate has a higher tendency to be owned by the wealthier people in the area, there's loads of land with fantastic views and easy access to beautiful woods, streams, hilltops overlooking wide valleys, etc.
The caveat is, of course, that it's rural—you can't have this sort of thing and still be 5 minutes' walk from four different top-quality restaurants, or even, in some cases within a half-hour's drive of a Starbucks.
You have provided another one which is equally valid and supports my point better than my own definition.
The comment I was replying to claimed that all the desirable areas were built out 100 years ago leaving everyone else with only risky areas to live in.
It seems like there are plenty of non-risky areas to build out. If the only problem is that they are rural, that won’t be a problem for long.
Yes, poor people often incur environmental risk by inhabiting undesirable urban land that's risky.
But it is also very common for the wealthy to intentionally take on flood/fire risk so they can be in the most-desirable areas with natural beauty. Many of the big fire hazards are in towns filled with ski resorts, vacation homes, wealthy retirees with ranches. Many of the big flood hazards are wealthy people attempting to live too close to the ocean, or too close to a river, than is safe.
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.
Recently bought in Tahoe and less disclosures than San Francisco, but certainly quite clear about fire danger.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It blows back on a whole community when a chunk of the community gets flooded out.