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by ericbarrett
2068 days ago
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Buying in a developed city in the U.S. has historically been a different set of concerns than buying rural. One could generally assume that the environment is managed by the city and state, so that floods would not reach your home and wildfires would be stopped at the city limits; insurance was for accidents and freak events (hailstorms, quakes, electrical fires). Due to both developmental sprawl and the decay of state and federal infrastructure, one can no longer assume a home is in such a controlled environment so, buyers (and insurers!) have some lessons to learn. A good example of the kind of change I’m talking about is development in 100-year flood plains in Houston[0]. 30 years ago, a naive home buyer would not have had to worry about it, because flood plains were off limits. What changed? Greedy developers? Ignorant planners? More population? Perhaps all of it. But now you have to be educated to make the right call. [0] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/... |
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Using Houston as an example, 50 to 100 years ago it was the norm to bring in fill dirt from other regions, flatten and grade a piece of land, and construct a gridded residential neighborhood with total disregard for natural drainage. Flooding was dealt with by artificially channelizing bayous and streams, which is why Houston's urban waterways look so unnatural. Many of these older neighborhoods along the gulf coast were unsustainable and are not being rebuilt after hurricanes.
Starting around 30 years ago, local, state and federal policymakers started to get a clue. Neighborhoods were more commonly build to accomodate the drainage patterns -- this is why developments from the 1990's, 2000's tend to have large retention ponds, (example: https://www.google.com/maps/@29.5517845,-95.4295706,3a,75y,2... )
while neighborhoods from the 1950's-60's do not.