We begin today’s roundup with The New York Times and its editorial on the nation’s flood insurance program
In recent years, the staggering costs of storms like Katrina and Sandy have left the program, which has about five million policies, with a nearly $25 billion debt to the federal government. [...]
Congress could direct FEMA to help cities buy out homes that have flooded repeatedly. The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that the government has spent about $5.5 billion since 1978 to rebuild 30,000 homes that have flooded as many as five times in a two- or three-year period. The group estimates that buying many of these homes would cost less than the government spends in rebuilding them over and over. FEMA does finance buyouts but it spends vastly more to rebuild properties.
The program could also offer policyholders more money to raise their homes above flood elevations. It now offers up to $30,000 for such improvements, but experts say costs can be two or three times more than that.
Also in The New York Times, Rebecca Elliott calls for a green “new deal” in the wake of Hurricane Harvey:
Even for the lucky 15 percent of homeowners in Houston and surrounding Harris County, who have a federal flood policy in place, collecting claims will most likely be a protracted and contentious process. (Hurricane Katrina and Sandy victims have stories to tell about fraudulent or erroneous claims adjustments, delayed payments and their homes being unlivable for years.) Many of the other 85 percent were not required to have a flood policy because they were not officially at “high risk” on the region’s flood maps — maps that President Trump no longer wants the government to pay for. [...]
As the legal scholar Michele Dauber has shown, President Franklin D. Roosevelt understood the relationship between “ruined landscapes and ruined lives.” Roosevelt likened the Great Depression to the devastation of the Dust Bowl, tornadoes in Georgia, and floods on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers to build his case for the huge public investments and assistance programs that transformed the fates of Americans who were also starting over.
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2eKTCe5
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