A recent commentary in The Herald notes that the number of properties receiving repeated payouts from FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program has quadrupled in the last 20 years (“Nation’s flood insurance system is badly broken,” The Herald, OCt. 10).
Some of these are rich people who insist on building second homes in high-risk areas, but a lot of them are people who have no choice because the flood insurance will only pay to rebuild, not to relocate, and these people cannot afford to abandon their homes to move somewhere more safe. It therefore seems to me that a reasonable action to take to help shore up the flood insurance program would be to change the rules such that if a homeowner submits claims for a set number of floods over a set number of years (for example, two floods over seven years), the program would pay for the homeowner to either move or rebuild, and that parcel of land would then become ineligible for flood insurance going forward even if the homeowner chooses to stay or someone else buys the property.
That would put a reasonable cap on the amount of money the program would have to pay for these flood-prone properties and make it clear to the owners of them the risks they are taking by insisting on building in unsafe areas. Rich people can still build their beachfront homes if they are fine with the risk, and more financially modest people will be able to start over somewhere else without losing out on the equity that they had built up in their damaged homes.
Cindy Molitor
Lynnwood
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