The Associated Press has a story on flood buyouts along the Mississippi. The federal government will apparently provide around 75% of the money for owners of flood damaged properties to sell their property to their local municipality. The municipality that acquires the property is then obligated to demolish the property and not redevelop it, except for parks and the like.
My understanding is that this sort of buyout generally accompanies the flood insurance program. To be eligible for the federal flood insurance program, a municipality has to pass zoning laws prohibiting rebuilding when damage in a flood plain (or maybe a “floodway” – in any case, a designated area, likely to flood from time to time) exceeds 50% of the value of the structure. (I might be getting the particulars a little wrong here, but this is the general idea). The goal is to remove development from areas that are prone to flooding so that, in the long run, we don’t end up spending tons of money to rebuild again and again.
So long as public policy does not say, ‘you choose to live there, so you choose to accept full responsibility for the results’, this is a very rational result. Stop the predictable bleeding of ‘relief’ dollars.
I still don’t like that it means you and I are buying land that we don’t own, via our federal tax dollars. That part of it remains unjust.
I agree almost entirely with Mike. This is great, considering we can’t (actually, won’t) say, “tough luck, don’t live in a floodzone”. (and yeah, that would be pretty prickish; can’t really advocate that)
Now, can we do the same with all these hurricane (FL) and wildfire (CO,CA) prone areas? *sigh*
In any case, very interesting Doug. I had no idea we had such a program.