[DoreenMichele]

It tends to be something the market won't bear though. If people can't afford it, pricing it as high as you want tends to cause the market to collapse anyway, just from a different mechanism.

Some things simply don't work well when handled as a business model.

Fire departments that only show up for people paying their fire dues don't work at all. In practice, places that require you to pay for fire department help have the fire department show up anyway and they watch your house burn down while standing around to be on hand just in case it threatens to spread beyond the uncovered property.

Places where there is no police department and rich people all hire private security are also pretty dysfunctional socially.

Some things get provided as a public good by sane societies because other formats for addressing it simply don't work.

[infecto]

Some things simply don't work as a government model either. The logic in this entire thread is flawed. Just because someone decided to buy a home in a known flood zone or in a known high-risk fire zone, does not mean other individuals should have to compensate them for taking on that risk. Lets not dilute this with public services such a police or fire. This is about insuring homes that individuals bought, often/majority of the time with known data that it is at some risk. We cannot just eliminate risk for risk-takers.

[DoreenMichele]

I spent some years trying to find someplace on earth I could theoretically move that had no natural disasters. It doesn't exist.

It's a case of pick your poison: Which kind of natural disaster are you more comfortable with? Tornados? Fires? Hurricanes? Landslides?

Flooding is the most common natural disaster humans face. We tend to build our biggest cities at natural port sites.

We need water to drink, for hygiene and for crop production and we use waterways as cheap transit for goods. So we tend to build in flood zones.

We could probably do a better job of favoring architecture that played nice with that, such as having carports at ground level under the house and residential development above that. But the reality is humans can't escape our inconvenient need for water.

Housing is a public good. One criticism cited frequently on HN of the US housing situation is that it has created problems socially to treat homes as investment vehicles. It gets cited as a root cause of the national housing crisis.

I don't know how to have a meaningful discussion of any of this by following the arbitrary rules you list. It makes no sense to me.

[infecto]

What arbitrary rules? I am simply saying that it is impossible to underwrite for anyone, including the government, buildings that are built in known high risk zones.

Just because a city is near a port does not mean that exact spot of land is a flood zone. Just because you live in a fire prone region does not mean your house cannot be covered. There are a lot of ways to retrofit homes for fire prone areas including landscaping changes.

You’re entirely correct that there are threats to buildings everywhere. My point is that most state/government programs treat areas that are impossible to underwrite. I am suggesting that in those cases perhaps it’s more cost effective to not underwrite the risk. You could shape it different ways, from not underwriting it at all to underwriting the risk but on a loss, paying for the relocation not rebuild.

This has nothing to do with being a public good and more that zones that are known complete loss high risk zones should be mitigated. Yes nature exists everywhere but you can generally underwrite things when your entire pool is not experiencing a total loss.

Is suggesting a home built in a flood zone should not be rebuilt arbitrary? Is suggesting homeowners in high risk fire zones take the steps to alter their landscaping to reduce risk arbitrary? You are sharing all these feel good sentiments and I am simply saying it’s not feasible to underwrite these activities.

[DoreenMichele]

Woah, I don't have any idea why you are characterizing my remarks as "sharing all these feel good sentiments."

Society is supposed to help individuals thrive so society thrives. That's how a sane culture works.

Figuring out where to draw the line between benefits to individuals that help society thrive versus benefits to individuals that undermine society is what gets argued over if you want a functional world.

Dog-eat-dog, screw you, up yours, not my problem attitudes fundamentally end up coming back to bite people.

If that's where you are at currently: Sorry you got burned or whatever. But it's not a mental framing that fosters good business.

I'm done with this discussion.

[infecto]

I still don’t follow the logic but I would love to. If you have some specific ideas it would be great. Are you suggesting the government underwrites all risk no matter what? Are you suggesting to get rid of commercial insurance companies?

Perhaps the feel good statement comes off inflammatory but everything you said are nice ideas but lack how it actually get implemented. I am only suggesting that I am not sure having the government underwrite risk is a good idea, these funds are often underfunded and not underwriting the actual cost of loss correctly. It is funny because I don’t like the current constructs of health insurance in America but I think other forms of insurance work. On that side I think a form of a single payer system would work better, probably what you envision but not shared is like.

Again my point is simply that I think it can make sense for the government to underwrite if it requires moving those individuals out and not providing coverage to new homes that are in a flood zone. But I don’t think economically it works out going forward to just cover everything and anything.

[DoreenMichele]

But I don’t think economically it works out going forward to just cover everything and anything.

This is not a thing I ever suggested.

I have no idea why you are inferring that I did.