This isn't the whole of the problem, and it isn't the whole of the solution. It's a worthwhile discussion but it's gonna be political.

I had to give up on a dream farm because I discovered it had been red-tagged. It was a lovely 1928 farmhouse by a bend in the river on 70 acres for a ridiculously low price; no amount of real estate savvy could figure out why for me. Eventually i got gud at this stuff and discovered that the whole of the structure ended up on the 100-year floodplain when FEMA came through and redrew their flood maps. Consequence: the county would not permit any work on the place. there would be no furnace installs, there would be no new windows, there would be no work requiring city say-so. People could continue to live there (and, as I understand it, buy fucking flood insurance!) but the minute it needed a new roof it was a derelict. Period. The end.

There's a property down the way from me that is at the bottom of a long slope towards the river. It's also in the 100-year floodplain. Guy started listing it at $3.8m; he's come down to $750k but never gets past "pending" on Redfin. 'cuz if you wanna live there, the first thing you need to do is move the house 150 feet east.

I have no doubts that the owners of these two properties had their retirements tied up in them. I have no doubts that FEMA moving the floodplain basically wiped them out financially. But I also know that the river in the first instance has flooded above the 100-year twice in the past five years and I know that the river in the second instance flooded above the 100-year Monday. We had like an inch of rain in 24 hours. in Seattle. And it flooded out fourteen apartments between here and my in-laws' place.

Near as I know my dream farm washed away some time in 2015. That's a claim that didn't get made because on the assessor's form the structure value is $0. It's also the death of a hundred year old farmhouse.

Went out to the Big Island. Kona side? Where the airport is, where the tourists go? Big resorts up on a cliff. Hilo side? Where the hurricane hit in '67 and the laws were passed that you couldn't get a permit for anything that hadn't been redeveloped with hurricanes in mind, IE built on stilts? It's a shantytown. I got pictures of a building with a pottery studio on one side, an ice cream parlor on the other side, and the space between them had ferns six feet high growing in it because you can't get a permit to fix the roof. Out where the rich people are the grass isn't even tall. Out where the natives live you're basically squatting.

So yeah. Current flightpath is wipe out the poor people, make them move away from their homes, or make them buy flood insurance. 'cuz here's the thing: our flood maps and our floods don't match up so the yellow red and purple areas on your map aren't eligible for subsidy. I'm not... and I'm 50 yards from the river.

Aggravating the issue is that our flood control in this country is done by the Army Corps of Engineers, the guys who brought you Katrina, and their basic approach has been "dam and culvert everything." Dams silt up and culverts kill wildlife. Not only that, but pretty much every dam and culvert we have was designed around hydrology of the 1930s which meant not only are they adapting to conditions from an era before global warming, they're built around the population patterns of the 1930s. Dealing with this is literally going to remake the landscape, which means there's a lot of opportunity for people with some influence to steer things their way, which means lots of assholes are going to get rich and lots of people are going to die.