CDZ How to handle the hurricane helpless

[usmbguest5318]

You hear the same thing after every 'event', "oh we're going to rebuild".

Everyone living in these areas knows this will happen in the future again over and over. I agree with the above post if you live in a floodplain or other area known for yearly catastrophes you have to build your house on stilts at the least. At the most just depopulate these areas permanently. It is too costly to rebuild all these structures over and over.

At the most just depopulate these areas permanently.

As abstractly rational as that idea is, it's impractical. It is insofar as even were individuals to "exit a market," the real estate market of the local floodplain in which they live, their exodus will depress land and labor values; however, at some point, low-cost seeking entrepreneurs will return -- the infrastructure "beginnings" are still there even if people ages ago deserted the place. Just as now, enterprise managers will quantitatively evaluate the costs and risks of "opening shop" there and if the business case provides ROI given their risk aversion, they'll again invest in the floodplain.

Businesses have only one motive for everything they do: overall profit maximization in accordance with the cost-benefit (risk) profile they find acceptable (worth it) to assume. For example, if one wants to buy property on Barbuda, Key West, or any other place that Irma "clobbered," right now is likely going to to be the best time in the foreseeable present and future to do so because the market for land and labor, as a result of Irma, just got pushed from a seller's market to a buyer's market.

An exodus from a mainland U.S. floodplain would make for a more gradual transformation from a seller's to buyer's market, but that's what would happen. And make no mistake, whatever be the "next big thing" that, similar to "dot com," spawned millions of excellent jobs will spring up in an area that is currently depressed, but that has plenty of infrastructure but that suffered a big downturn as the "age of production" (short lived to be sure, but it did exist) ended.

 

[Toronado3800]

Local governments are too weak to resist the temptations of rezoning in favor of developers who make the councilment feel big, or worse.

 

[usmbguest5318]

Local governments are too weak to resist the temptations of rezoning in favor of developers who make the councilment feel big, or worse.

????

In all honesty, businesses aren't what directly need the sagacity of government experts to guide their decisions or to anticipate the need to design and build a city/town's infrastructure and basic layout so as to mitigate the most devastating impact of hurricanes, which is flooding. Individuals are who need that from a government.

Admittedly, there's really nothing that is practical to do in some respects -- we can't stop hurricane rains from falling or water from rushing in from the ocean. What government planners can do is (re-)design the lay of the land so that as various municipal projects are undertaken, the land is planed so that when rain falls, it flows quickly away from homes and toward "something" else -- be it a river, a lake or the ocean -- rather than lingering in residential neighborhoods for days on end.

That sort of thing won't happen "overnight," but neither does it need to. It needs to commence and be funded so that it indeed gets accomplished.