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Old Posted Sep 20, 2019, 4:55 PM
AviationGuy AviationGuy is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2011
Location: Cypress, TX
Posts: 5,315
Quote:
Originally Posted by Centropolis View Post
Flood insurance rates need to be adjusted to properly reflect risk. The National Flood Insurance Program needs to be revamped...subsidizing stripping drywall from the same ranch house annually in Harris County ain't cutting it.
A large number of homes flooded in the Houston metro are multistory mansions or mcmansions. Lots of single story, too, the kind you find all over the Midwest and south. If you drive through Meyerland, you see where people with the resources have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars raising their entire homes 4 to 6 feet. The others just sit there vacant. Meyerland was a beautiful, very affluent neighborhood before the big floods started after 2010. A neighborhood ruined by flooding.

This is affecting me personally as I get closer to moving back to the area, which is where I grew up (through high school). I spend a couple of hours each night on Zillow, and just about everywhere I want to live has had flooding problems. The ads on Zillow rarely mention whether a home has been flooded, but when you see a 4,000 ft2 custom home in a beautiful area with a posted price of $280,000, you know the story. Some of the photos, though, show gutted homes selling at rock bottom prices (essentially the land value, which isn't much either).

I'm not going to settle in a neighborhood that has been flooded. I don't want to have to buy expensive flood insurance. So this is a challenge. But this is where my family is, and I need to be closer now that I'm retired.