[technofiend]

You can build in the same spot, but it seems some insurers require raising the property to do so. This was more common with beach houses which sometimes look like they're thirty+ feet in the air to me. But now it's happening in Houston suburbs as well. Driving around Myerland or near any of the bayous and you'll see little 50s ranches at ground level next to a modern two story house that's also sitting on an elevated lot.

What's truly absurd to me is thanks to (I hear) outsized influence from builders on city and county government and little to no zoning laws, we've seen development in reservoirs that were previously runoff areas! I mean I remember the flooding that happened after Alicia and driving by the flooded and closed Addicks Reservoir. Fast forward thirty years, and that same area was developed and subsequently flooded by Harvey.

Unfortunately only now the Army Corps of Engineers is saying they'll settle claims with homeowners in the area but only at the expense of granting the ACE a flooding easement, when the ACE should have had the power to block development and leave that land as a catchment in the first place.

Insurance of last resort is steadily increasing in price. So like property taxes, it will eventually price people out.

[nocoiner]

I somewhat suspect that the new minimum elevation requirements are overkill. Since the completion of the bayou drainage project, it seems to me that significant rain events are drained much more quickly and the water level in the bayou doesn’t rise as much.

In the three years leading up to Harvey, I believe there were three incidents where waters overflowed the bayou, but none of the storms since then have done that (and there have been some significant ones). But it is of course entirely possible that there just hadn’t been the right pattern of rainfall since Harvey that marked the prior instances of flooding.