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Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

>Florida’s explosion in insurance premiums threatens to ground the state’s highflying housing market

I looked up the place on a map, people now alive now will see that area underwater. So no wonder insurance rates are raising. To me, Florida is the very last place to buy a house in the US if you want the value of it to pass to your Children or Grandchildren.

It is already known at some point in the future, 80% of the state will be ocean. It is just a matter of when, and with how things are going, the "when" is arriving faster.

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Here's a link: https://coastal.climatecentral.org/map/16/-80.1391/25.7865/?...

It's just a question of time. The chance that the property will be flooded every year before a 30-year mortgage has been paid off seems to be about 50%.

That link, if you zoom out a little, makes the situation seem LESS bad than many in this thread are claiming. Even setting it 100+ years into the future, only shows major annual flooding along the coastlines.

A typical house isn't built to withstand minor semiannual flooding either ;)

The really bad forecasts for Florida include areas where a house itself is likely to stay dry, but the water pipes may have problems, or the road network may be interrupted by floods, or the ground is likely to subside or change, or, or.

FWIW I know someone who lives near a river that often floods. One of the houses on their farm is dry, but the ground under one wall has subsided by >10cm in the past 20 years compared to the opposite wall. The walls have visible cracks. The bricks look as if the bricklayers were drunk all day and I can't imagine that any insurer will touch that house.

> 80% of the state will be ocean

I played with simulations and nothing crazy serious is expected even after 200 years. Can you point to the source of your claim?

The thing with sea levels is that it's not the average that you need to worry about but the extremes. If the average goes up, the average high during extreme events also goes up. Like high tide during a hurricane. And of course the issue with global warming is that it predicts both increases in sea levels and incidences of things like hurricanes.

For the amount of damage that hurricanes can do, just refer to the last few ones and consider them a sneak preview of what insurers consider to be likely to be much more regular. Think tens/hundreds of billions of dollars in damage every time it happens

I find it interesting that house ads don't yet include a topographic map or simple elevation indicator, but I really do expect this to soon become standard.

I know I wouldn't buy a house without checking this out first.

Redfin has a “Flood risk” layer option on their maps.

Interestingly, it show only small parts of Flamingo Park having substantial flood risk, especially compared to the rest of West Palm Beach.

https://www.redfin.com/neighborhood/55857/FL/West-Palm-Beach...

In flood prone parts of Australia it is quite common to list "property sits yy meters above 19XX flood level" as a premium signal to the risk averse.

I would suspect that this isn't standard as most properties are worse off by disclosing this information so it would be a net disadvantage to realtors (who often run these platforms).

Isn't rates set per year?

Before you get to "being year round underwater" you'll face phases of "elevated flooding risk" and "frequent flooding", and both of the latter two are already of concern to insurers.

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