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

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/07/28/texas-floodplain-water-development-board-flood-plan/

by DoreenMichele • 3 years ago

38 25 3 years ago

texastribune.org

retrocryptid2• 3 years ago

I guess TX Real Estate is cheap for a reason.

umrcumrcu• 3 years ago

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

bobthepanda• 3 years ago

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.

KnackeredHues• 3 years ago

That broad brush paints regulatory agencies as petty and selfish.

retrocryptid2• 3 years ago

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.

pixl97• 3 years ago

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

errantmind• 3 years ago

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'.

x86x873• 3 years ago

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?

jqpabc1236• 3 years ago

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

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

bob1029• 3 years ago

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.

patmorgan23• 3 years ago

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

technofiend• 3 years ago

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.

nocoiner• 3 years ago

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.

jqpabc1236• 3 years ago

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.

klyrs• 3 years ago

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

jqpabc1236• 3 years ago

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

Thinking otherwise is just "magical thinking".

readthenotes1• 3 years ago

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

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

Related Stories