Florida is pretty low on federally funding dependency ranking.

I doubt FEMA money is actually used for the immigrant stunt and Florida is not unprepared for hurricanes. Florida actually has pretty good stormwater management infrastructure, mostly because it has to. Homes in South Florida are also required to be built out of concrete block and have hurricane windows. Point being: Florida is decently prepared for storms. Could it be better? Of course. But I would not say Florida is complete unprepared. I do think there needs to be changes to insurance and government aid though. We're distributing (read: subsidizing) a lot of the cost of living in an expensive area. We're seeing ripples of this with insurance companies not wanting to insure houses in Florida. That or making it more expensive to get insurance directly (premiums) and indirectly (you can't have a roof over 10 years old in some cases because, by law, they have to pay to replace a roof if a few shingles come off).

I say Florida a lot because I lived there up until recently, I can't speak for other states.

Legal immigrants? The feds flew or bused illegal border crossers who were processed and released to many states, including Florida. Yes it was a political stunt to move them again, but how is it worse than what the feds are doing?

The reason people live in coastal regions is because there are outsized economic benefits to the hinterlands that may outweigh the damage these storms inflict. The interface between land and sea is crucially important for the survival of civilization at our scale.

Under "2 and done", do you restore critical port infrastructure to dunes if they get destroyed by a hurricane twice? Port infrastructure can't exist on its own, it needs a community behind it which needs schools, parks, houses, etc.

This is a problem that the insurance industry will need figure out so they can price risk to the area that's wiped out, the way the home is constructed, etc.

In my mind the debate is how FEMA subsidies will distort the insurance markets. Perhaps they could serve as a "2 and done" re-re-insurance provider?

A great counterpoint to this argument is that an insurance oligopoly might "price gouge" after a big event like Ian, which could kill the community that's needed to support the vital port infrastructure. Ultimately if FEMA subsidies were removed from the picture, shipping costs would increase to price in the risk of hurricanes for the area. Either way we're all paying for it somehow.

> flying legal immigrants to other states

Can we please not do this flamewar thing? Asylum seekers are technically neither legal nor illegal immigrants yet, but everyone knows this will cause an argument that's completely unrelated to the article.

Calgary did this after the 2013 Bow river flood. They bailed out the homeowners. But if they choose to rebuild on those lots, next time they get zero. They are on their own.

If catastrophic hurricanes are really going to happen every 10 years, should the federal government be subsidizing the coastal lifestyle and building you a new house each time?

Consider: 100B/100M taxpayers = $1000 per person. Can you really say that the average citizen of Wyoming should pony up $100 a year so Floridians can build up against the unsheltered sea instead a few miles inland?

Yeah

Clearly they aren’t fit for development.

Or privately funded to keep rebuilding, yeah. Why should the rest of us have to keep paying for you to rebuild your house because you picked a stupid location and/or didn’t build strong enough in the first place?

If the irresponsible people who insist on living in hurricane prone areas pay for their own repairs, then I have no problem with them living there. If they ask for me to pay for it, then that gives me moral buy in into whether they should be allowed to live there.

Public funds should not pay to rebuild the same property more than 1-2 times within N years. You either:

a) Build the property to withstand all but 1-2 statistically expected hurricanes within that N year period. This is possible, it's just costly.

b) You don't get public funds

c) You get private insurance

d) You don't build

> So all this coastline should be dunes and park spaces?

If they cannot be safely built upon, sure. Same reason no one builds houses on the edge of Kilauea's active craters. Hurricane-resistant construction is possible, it's just more expensive. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/14/us/hurricane-michael-flor...

Human brains are funny. Obviously the absurd part of all of this is people (literally) building their houses on the edge of the ocean and expecting this to not happen.

However because it's all we know, it seems that the real absurdity would be the government designating these sites as 'no-build' zones-- or at least FEMA washing their hands of any damage that should happen to these sites.

This should be a wakeup call that many aspects of our current way of life are unsustainable, not that it's just standard operating procedure to rebuild from the ground up every 20 years only for everything to be washed away again.

Exactly. That's the idea.

They should be allowed to live there as long as they want to fund it.

People who live on Cape Coral are going to have to internalize the fact that they fell for a real estate swindle, they are partly or mostly at fault, and their own personal financial situation will be impacted.

People in the Pacific states and the northeast are going to need to internalize that it isn't OK to use the Sun Belt as a relieve valve for their NIMBY policies, and the federal government might even need to take measures to disincentivize those states from exporting their populations to Gulf Coast swamps.

"So all this coastline should be dunes and park spaces?"

Yes. That makes sense to me.

What's the downside?

There is a huge difference between "don't use the space at all" and "don't build buildings that are unsuited for the location".

There is also a difference between "my roof was damaged by high wind" repairs and "my house and everything I own floated away due to storm surge" repairs. I'm not trying to speak for OP, but typically the style of "2 and then done" plans are for the latter style of damage (where the damage is into the low-mid 6 figures), not the former (where damage is low-mid 5 figures).

If an area is regularly rendered uninhabitable by major weather events then rebuilding in that area is a liability for all involved. When buildings and property are destroyed their contents are dispersed or leak, representing an environmental hazard; people and animals returning are exposed to evacuation risks in following weather events; and then there's the obvious tax and insurance liability discussed elsewhere.

We've been treating these areas as fit for habitation and we're watching in realtime as they become uninhabitable. While it may have been more tolerable to live in these regions in the last century when global temperatures were lower we're at an inflection point; we're going be forced to concede spaces as too dangerous for regular habitation because storms are only going to increase in severity and frequency.

As a society we have a few options: 1, we continue to rebuild and pay the costs until it becomes completely cost prohibitive; 2, dramatically rethink how we build in the area and construct buildings that can cope with several feet of storm surges; or 3, accept reality and begin the process of resettling people in areas that won't be submerged in 100 years. It's likely that we're going to pursue option 1 for the next 10-30 years because collective change is hard but we ought to start having these conversations well in advance of insurance companies writing off all of Florida as uninsurable.

This doesn't even begin to touch on the benefits of allowing areas to revert to wetlands, but considering that they act as excellent buffers from the storms we're observing as well as carbon sinks, but it's worth stating that retreating from these areas makes more sense on ecological and financial grounds.

To be honest, that sounds amazing.

Having those coasts be parks with hundreds of miles of low-impact infrastructure like hiking/biking/walking paths, maybe simple low-key restaurants that aren't a big deal to rebuild every decade, etc.

Put all the heavier infrastructure like housing developments a few miles inland. Then everyone can enjoy these idyllic beach lands a little farther from all the buzz of cities. Everyone in the city can still easily go to the coastline-spanning megapark, but now the beach isn't lined with gaudy condos.

Sign me up!

As a Floridian: Yes.

It doesn't have to be all or nothing. There's also probably room for stronger building codes in riskier areas. This hurricane (and others in the past) literally changed where the coastline is in some places.

But from some of the pictures I've seen, you do have some neighborhoods where one side is slightly higher than the other side and thus survived much better. Maybe some of those houses shouldn't have been built, and berms strategically placed and other things. One house not being built may under some circumstances prevent multiple other houses from being destroyed down the road. This seems like a low hanging fruit kind of thing if the priorities are there, before getting into beefing up infrastructure and more expensive options.

The amount of damage from hurricanes is trending higher and higher as time goes on, so something has to give and currently it seems federal flood insurance is doing all the giving.

I'm pretty sure flood zones don't account for hurricane storm surge. That describes regular seasonal flooding risk.

If you want a map of areas likely to be damaged by hurricanes in the next 10/20/50 years then it's basically the entire coast of Florida.

Well that’s lucky, otherwise you might have ended up underwater on your loan.

There is a lot of political pressure from the owners and sellers of property, among other interests, to minimize the information.

In NYC, after Sandy, a new map with vastly expanded zones was published. Within a day or two, it was replaced with one with significantly reduced zones. I don't know that this was in response to political pressure...

> I think there is a lot of blaming going on here against homeowners who really didn’t know better.

Anyone who is keeping up on climate change research and anyone with any sense knows it's just not wise to invest in property on the Florida coast unless you do so knowing that at anytime your home could be washed away.

You have to be willfully ignorant to think it's a good idea to move to those areas.

I can see why you would want to move closer to family, but did you really not believe that the Fort Myers area could be destroyed at anytime from a major hurricane? Do you really think that sea level rise (which is more about its impact on storm surges) coupled with increasingly more powerful hurricanes is not a problem in the near term? Are you unaware that GHGs in the atmosphere are accelerating, there is no evidence that warming will stop soon, and plenty to suggest that things will increasingly get worse in the near term?

It was a Cat 5 in all but name. Max winds were measured at 155 MPH, Cat 5 starts at 157 MPH wind speed.

Hey, in the middle of BF Indiana, I am going to be having a very boring life years after NYC and SF are underwater!

One of the reasons SF is so expensive is the building codes. After the 89 earthquake somethings were not rebuilt. When the local Government allow homes to be built with lax standards simply because they want them to be cheap I agree they do not deserve to be rebuilt on the tax payers dime. Might also make the Condo safer.

That goes for severe blizzards for NYC as well, because I say so.

Public funds must no longer be allocated to clearing snow from roads every year just because selfish people decide to live in NYC.

But there is no subsidy for earthquakes insurance like the national flood insurance program. Perhaps we should get rid of the national flood insurance program?

> People don't live in hurricane zones because it's fun.

People absolutely live in Florida for that reason; people flock there for retirement.

> Under that rule, what exactly is your plan for replacing all the life-critical logistics infrastructure across the entire Gulf coast?

Strict building codes, no more building below sea level as with New Orleans. Even a few miles from the ocean can often be enough to change "my house swam away" into "we had some trees downed".

Definitely. Revise the building codes, and after doing so, if it becomes prohibitively expensive or just not worth building in that area, then we'll know that it's no longer a viable place to build.

No one is being told where to live. But there is no reason to subsidize property prices in areas by providing federal taxpayer subsidized insurance. Providing taxpayer subsidized insurance allows people to buy properties with a larger mortgage (for which banks require flood insurance), which allows property prices to rise higher than they would have without taxpayer subsidized insurance.

I think you're misunderstanding what they're saying. They're saying that federal funds should not be used to repair/replace infrastructure in places that are highly prone to natural disasters. If you have two total-loss natural disasters in less than 50 years either the infrastructure is unsuitable to the risks, or there is no infrastructure suitable for the risks.

Are you saying that unmitigated flood prone areas _should_ be habitable? And the cost of that underwritten with public funds?

There are people who have their house rebuilt every ~15 years from hurricanes with public funds.

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

>The NFIP is managed and administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) through the Federal Insurance and Mitigation Administration (FIMA).[1] The program is designed to provide an insurance alternative to disaster assistance to meet the escalating costs of repairing damage to buildings and their contents caused by floods.[2] As of August 2017, the program insured about 5 million homes (down from about 5.5 million homes in April 2010), the majority of which are in Texas and Florida.[3][4] The cost of the insurance program was fully covered by its premiums until the end of 2004, but it has had to steadily borrow funds since, primarily due to Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, accumulating $25 billion of debt by August 2017.[3][5] In October 2017, Congress cancelled $16 billion of NFIP debt, making it possible for the program to pay claims. The NFIP owes $20.525 billion to the U.S. as of December 2020.[6]

I think being that you're so ruggedly individualistic, maybe pull yourself up by your bootstraps and pay for your own repairs?

If you're footing the bill for fair market insurance, those places quickly get returned to the environment because it makes no economic sense to build there. Or it does, and the federal government still doesn't have to pay for it.

> Should parts of CA or other earthquake prone areas be labelled uninhabitable?

Major earthquakes happen an order of magnitude less frequently than major storms - but there's merit to reconsidering how much infrastructure we build right next to fault lines. So, possibly?

> What about areas where forest fires are routine?

Without appropriate fire breaks or building construction, possibly - if your house and property isn't constructed to survive a wildfire, then it's _going_ to burn. We can either adapt now or pay much higher costs later.

> Flood prone areas?

Oh jeez, yes, the fact that we build in flood plains is absolutely bonkers.

> Tornado prone areas?

Maybe, but it's a much lower risk than hurricanes. We really need to account for risks during building construction; our current approaches aren't working that well.

> High UV?

High UV is a bummer, not an repeated existential risk to all inhabitants.

> Poor air quality?

Poor air quality is also a bummer but is something we have more control over. Similar to high UV, poor air quality doesn't represent a regular, frequent, unavoidable, catastrophic risk to all of the inhabitants and all property in the vicinity.

> It makes no sense whatsoever to dictate that people cannot live on the coasts due to natural disasters which happen everywhere, all the time.

It makes even less sense to build in areas that are all but guaranteed to be destroyed several times per century. If you can build infrastructure that'll actually last or are willing to accept all liability when the inevitable occurs then by all means, build your house on stilts and cover the cost of reconstruction. But beyond freedom of choice, I don't understand why we think it's okay to assume obvious risk and expect society to provide compensation for a risk that's been known for decades if not centuries.

If earthquakes strong enough to destroy many buildings happen in the same location every five or 10 years, then yes, that area should be considered uninhabitable.