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Old Posted Sep 20, 2019, 11:26 PM
lio45 lio45 is offline
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Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: Quebec
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Quote:
Originally Posted by AviationGuy View Post
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.
Sincere question: why not buy a multistory McMansion for land value and turn the street level story into a flood buffer...? Instead of a 4,000 sqft house, you'd have a flood-proof 2,000 sqft house. For barely more than the price of an empty lot.