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Comment by kelp | Hacker News Reader

And 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.

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I'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.

I 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.

New 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.

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