Every year?
Not every year. It's a math problem. Insurance will cover it if they are free to set the premiums.
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.
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.
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.
