Should We Keep Building in High Disaster Risk Areas?

All over the country, developers are receiving permission to build in floodplains, wildfire corridors, and other disaster-prone areas. Sometimes, they do so with government encouragement.

What’s happening?

• Houston—for which housing shortages have been a perennial problem—is rebuilding in the flood plain not long after Hurricane Harvey’s devastation.
• A subdivision in Hawaii—currently under direct threat from molten lava—was built as part of a local government development project, despite knowledge at the time that the area was in an active volcano zone.
• Development in California’s most fire-prone areas has accelerated rapidly in recent decades, unabated by the growing incidence, devastation, and cost of wildfires, including last year’s catastrophic Tubbs fire.
• Charleston, South Carolina, continues to allow development in its substantial, high-risk floodplain without requiring protections that many other coastal areas now mandate.

What’s the cost?

According to a special Reuters report, across the United States, newer construction in flood-prone areas generated more than $9 billion in claims for structural damage on the cash-strapped National Flood Insurance Program between 2000 and 2015. Some of these were built or rented out in violation of the program’s rules, which local authorities often fail to enforce.

Scientific American reports:

"The number of acres burned by wildfires each year has increased slightly over the past few decades, but the amount of taxpayer dollars that federal agencies spend on fighting them has grown sharply. In 2017 that bill ran to $2.9 billion—$2.4 billion of it footed by the U.S. Forest Service alone… [T]he agency’s fire-suppression costs have more than tripled since the early 1990s."

Research shows that natural disasters worsen poverty, as “the rich move away from disaster-prone areas, while the poor are left behind.”

What do you think?

Should regulations on development in high disaster-risk areas be tightened? Should taxpayers not be required to foot the bill for damage that occurs in these areas? How should we deal with the likelihood that people of least means are the ones worst affected? Hit Take Action, then share your thoughts below.

—Sara E. Murphy

(Photo Credit: aoakley)