One in five Texans lives in a floodplain, state’s first-ever analysis shows | Hacker News Reader

One in five Texans lives in a floodplain, state’s first-ever analysis shows

texastribune.org

38 pointsDoreenMichele25 comments

What's the first thing people / developers do after houses are wiped out by a flood in a floodplain? Build more houses in the same spot. It is pretty common still, in Houston, for people to openly disclose if their house didn't flood during Hurricane Harvey when trying to sell their house. If they did flood, you look for the negative signal there. I heard people keep rebuilding because they can usually get affordable 'Insurance of Last Resort'.

Lol. Affordable. Not for long. Look at what is happening in Florida wrt home insurance.

So you may live in a flood plane and you have an unreliable power grid? What else?

Florida insurance rates are expected to increase by 40% in 2023.

https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/homeowners-...

That's a pretty sweat deal if you can still get insurance.

You can still get insurance --- but the real question is, can you get coverage?

A couple of major hurricanes and a lot of these so-called insurance companies will fold up like a wet rag.

> and you have an unreliable power grid

I'd argue there is a bit of an anti fragility element here. The fact that the approximate black swan event did occur absolutely forced changes throughout. I'd agree things are probably still not ideal but the power grid is about engineering and tradeoffs.

Consider this game theory: Why would Samsung continue to aggressively construct semiconductor factories in Taylor, TX after having suffered a 7-8 figure wafer scrap incident due to the very same grid outage? I can assure you of one thing: There is no way in hell they are running those factories using standby generation, UPS, etc.

Hasn’t TX had multiple years of grid failures? Not really a “black swan event” if it keeps happening.

"Fragility" is a *feature* that is engineered into the TX grid by right wing politics.

1) No connection to outside grids for backup capacity. Have to maintain that dream of seceding from the union.

2) Their "free market" real time power auction punishes any provider who tries to plan for reserve capacity and extreme events. They are sure to lose out in this auction to those that don't.

3) During extreme events, power prices spike through the roof so people couldn't pay their bill even if they had power. But now government has interfered in this "free market" and set limits on this. Communists!

Yes, the ones that are the most vocal about "small govnt" and "free market" are the ones that are the first to wait for handouts and bailouts. I say: no thanks. Want your stupid policies? Those come with consequences. People need to separate reality from pipe dreams.

They are the real freeloaders. They love them some government assistance --- they just don't want to pay for any of it.

https://www.kltv.com/2021/02/18/gov-greg-abbott-provide-upda...

...the Governor announced he is requesting a Major Disaster Declaration — which includes Individual Assistance, Public Assistance, and the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program — from the White House.

The Florida home insurance market has some other issues going on (read corrupt regulators and rampant fraud from insurance companies)

You can build in the same spot, but it seems some insurers require raising the property to do so. This was more common with beach houses which sometimes look like they're thirty+ feet in the air to me. But now it's happening in Houston suburbs as well. Driving around Myerland or near any of the bayous and you'll see little 50s ranches at ground level next to a modern two story house that's also sitting on an elevated lot.

What's truly absurd to me is thanks to (I hear) outsized influence from builders on city and county government and little to no zoning laws, we've seen development in reservoirs that were previously runoff areas! I mean I remember the flooding that happened after Alicia and driving by the flooded and closed Addicks Reservoir. Fast forward thirty years, and that same area was developed and subsequently flooded by Harvey.

Unfortunately only now the Army Corps of Engineers is saying they'll settle claims with homeowners in the area but only at the expense of granting the ACE a flooding easement, when the ACE should have had the power to block development and leave that land as a catchment in the first place.

Insurance of last resort is steadily increasing in price. So like property taxes, it will eventually price people out.

I somewhat suspect that the new minimum elevation requirements are overkill. Since the completion of the bayou drainage project, it seems to me that significant rain events are drained much more quickly and the water level in the bayou doesn’t rise as much.

In the three years leading up to Harvey, I believe there were three incidents where waters overflowed the bayou, but none of the storms since then have done that (and there have been some significant ones). But it is of course entirely possible that there just hadn’t been the right pattern of rainfall since Harvey that marked the prior instances of flooding.

I guess TX Real Estate is cheap for a reason.

It's cheap because unlike in CA, NIMBYs can't stop new houses.

It is also cheap because property tax acts as a lid on prices. If the price goes up in Texas the tax goes up accordingly, but the same is not true in California due to Prop 13. And Texas has some of the highest rates in the country.

CA tax increases are capped. So if you buy today and next year the value of your house goes up a LOT your increase is capped.

The other part that sucks is inheritances. Then the price is not re-evaluated. Now you have people sitting on a $2,000,000 house with a value of 200,000.

The inheritance trick is really limited now. The parent (or whoever is passing the house on) had to have been living there, and the inheritor has to move in and make it their primary residence.

That broad brush paints regulatory agencies as petty and selfish.

Or maybe it's cheap because one out of five houses sold are in a flood plain.

Also, it's not the NIMBYs stopping unchecked development.

I mean in the last few years property has got pretty out of control here in TX.

Another gift from the Johnson administration.

He set up a task force to look into flood insurance. They came up with recommendations and one of them was "under no circumstances should it be subsidized"

To grow in the littoral, Johnson pushed it with subsidies

So wait --- have right wing politicians in Texas finally accepted that global warming is for real? No longer just a hoax created by lefty scientists?

Or are some still clinging to their fallback theory --- that increasing CO2 levels have nothing to do with it? Pulling billions of tons of carbon out of the ground every year and burning it in the atmosphere is totally irrelevant?

Right wing politics is rooted in magic and magical thinking. But realty is nothing if not persistent.

Au contraire, reality is ephemeral. Right wing politics is all about turning back the clock, larping as time travelers from a bygone era.

The reality is --- you can never really turn back the clock.

Thinking otherwise is just "magical thinking".

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