[raprosse]

100% aggree. Flooding is the single costliest natural disaster.

But it's non-trivial to scale these new techniques into the field. A major factor is the scale of interest. FEMA's FIRMaps are typically at a 10m resolution not 11km.

[thechao]

Low-income neighborhoods are good signal indicator for flooding high risk zones. There's a demographic angle, too.

[dubcanada]

Are you suggesting that flood prevention only happens in higher income neighbourhoods? Flood prevention tends to lie on the county engineers. Not so much private individuals to dictate. Doesn't matter how much money you have, you can't just dig up a road to put in proper flood prevention measures like drainage and grade.

[pimlottc]

The Army Corps of Engineers also does a lot of flood management work, and they use a cost/benefit analysis when deciding which projects to approve that takes into account the value of the real estate being protected. And even then, the local community has to put up a large share of the funding. So it definitely ends up favoring richer communities.

99 Percent Invisible did an episode about this recently:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/nbft-05-the-little-le...

[legel]

It was fascinating to see the counter-proposal to the Army Corps of Engineers for Miami's design of a downtown wall to deal with storm surges: https://dirt.asla.org/2022/09/12/uproar-causes-u-s-army-corp...

The counter proposal was indeed funded by the City of Miami, to point out how ridiculous it would be to have a 20 foot concrete wall around the city.

As a local resident, I loved seeing this sad 3D render in particular, which even has a graffiti on it nearly spelling "Berlin": https://i0.wp.com/dirt.asla.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/0...

In seriousness, it was really cool to see the counter proposal's "nature-based solution" which would design 39 acres of distributed barrier islands around the coastline, to block storm surge naturally.

[tgtweak]

Would be an interesting relationship to explore. I think you can look at it as both cause and effect. Effect in that flooding destroys wealth and often-flooded areas will not have longstanding infrastructure or buildings - hits to the local real estate that result from flooding can affect non-flooded buildings as well. The cause could be because property and income taxes in low-income regions may be insufficient to fund infrastructure or public works that prevent or mitigate flooding and flood damage.

[andai]

Extreme example, but I saw a video of a "homeless" family in Japan that lived on a flood plain. They lived there because it was the only free spot.