piscator wrote:Sounds like the Allstate bureaucracy screwed you around for years. You wrote checks to Allstate, why do you keep harping on FEMA? This is you, the bank, and Allstate. What does FEMA have to do with any of this?
FEMA fucked up the FIRM rating on the house. They make the stinking maps, not the bank or the insurance company.
But despite providing all the necessary evidence and documentation to make a determination FEMA just ignored everything and demanded an expensive survey.
Who? I thought you had flood insurance with Allstate? Why are you even talking to FEMA? As long as you are calling the Government, why not call the Social Security Administration or Medicare or the CIA?
Oh, I see. You had a supplementary flood damage policy through Allstate, and Allstate knew that the first $500,000 of a flood damage claim is paid by NFIP (FEMA), then Allstate's coverage kicks in. So Allstate was waiting on FEMA to send in a notice saying you were insured by NFIP.
In that case, all you needed was a $600 LOMA, or a $200 Elevation Certificate from a registered land surveyor. That's the FEMA protocol. They do it every day. You don't have to wrangle for 5 years. It takes maybe 2 weeks after your surveyor certifies your dwelling is not in the flood zone.
The dweebs at Allstate didn't know that? There's the problem. It was Allstate that dropped the ball and left you unprotected for years. If they're in the supplementary flood insurance business, they should know that.
That may be true, but except for the fact that FEMA fucked up the rating because it didn't care to look at where the house actually was, none of this would have been necessary.
The bank, due to its underwriting rules, could not waive the flood insurance fee unless FEMA officially removed the structure from the list of "flood prone" addresses. As I said, eventually Allstate and the bank got together to come out and actually look at the house, which is quite obviously 40 feet above the flood plain, and the bank agreed to ignore the underwriting regulations in this case and waive the flood insurance requirement.
Sounds like Allstate's taking you to the cleaners on flood insurance then. If you don't need flood coverage, they're just taking your $$ for something they know they're never going to have a claim on. Better for you to spend that premium $$ on an Ark than flood insurance for a <1 in 500 chance of a flood reaching your dwelling. Laches...and malfeasance. Hmmmm....
Allstate and the bank just followed the Fed's rules and the FEMA rating. Yes, I'd like to think that Allstate would have figured it out, but the fact is that my elderly mother just paid the bills based on what the bank and Allstate said she had to do, and they made their decision based on the FEMA FIRM map, which was patently incorrect. FEMA screwed it up from the get-go and nobody noticed it until I did after my mother died and I took over that end of the financial matters. Allstate and the bank's defense against laches or malfeasance is that they simply relied on the FEMA FIRM map which placed the address in the flood plain and so they had no choice or reason to believe the FEMA map was in error, and my 70 year old mother didn't question their decision or the FEMA map. The root error was caused by FEMA's incompetence.
But as far as FEMA is concerned, the house is still in the floodplain, due to the rectangular coordinate system used by the county to allocate street addresses. That's what I meant, not location by section lines...although that is in fact the basis of the street address grid.
As far as FEMA is concerned, a risk either above the BFE, or below it. The only way they know anything about a particular parcel is by its elevation. The only way they know that is from a survey by a licensed surveyor. A surveyor is the only one on the planet qualified to determine a home's elevation. A judge can't overrule a surveyor in this case, and neither can FEMA.
FIRM maps are not created by private surveyors, they are created by FEMA and government cartographers and engineers and they do it based on government-produced base maps from the USGS combined with aerial overflight data which shows changes to the floodway over time. They do NOT go out and resurvey every flood plain every 10 years, it's all done on a GIS database that relies on USGS topographical mapping. Then they determine the flood plain boundaries based on that data. Then they overlay the county addressing GIS (or the TIGER database, I'm not sure which) and automatically generate the list of addresses in the flood plain which is kept in a federal database. To determine whether flood insurance is required or not, the bank determines if a) the loan is federally insured; b) the address lies in the floodplain according to the federal FEMA database; and c) if their bank policies require flood insurance for FEMA-listed properties for non-federally-insured loans.
It's all done by entering the street address listed in the county GIS addressing system assigned to that house into the FEMA on-line database, which spits out a yes/no answer to the bank, which then says to my elderly mother, "sorry but you need to buy flood insurance to open this line of credit." Yes, the nickle should have dropped on someone, but neither Allstate nor the bank actually sent anyone out with that in mind, and the appraisers who did come out simply repeated the FEMA address information without looking at the location of the house and asking "how is a house 40 feet above the creek in the floodway?"
It wasn't until I found out that we were paying for flood insurance on the house that I began asking questions, and that took place after she died and I took over the financial work, which she left in the hands of her long-time accountant, who should have seen the problem because he HAD been to the house many times, but he died in a tragic rafting accident in Costa Rica shortly after she died, which threw everything into disarray because I had to find a new accountant to deal with the estate and ranch sale. He never went to the property so he didn't know. It was only when Allstate sent me a bill for flood insurance that I figured it out.
It was a comedy of errors, but a predictable one, but it was absolutely and entirely caused by FEMA, which didn't do a good job in the first determination and then refused to look at conclusive, USGS and county-surveyor created data that proved conclusively that the house lies OUTSIDE the flood boundary. It has nothing to do with the surveyed elevation, all you have to do is look at a USGS quad, on which the house is shown, overlay the FIRM flood boundary onto that map and see that the house is and has always been outside of the boundary. The problem was caused by FEMA making assumptions about the physical location of the structure based on its county GIS street address.
Just what do you think a surveyor should charge for his time and expertise? Shouldn't that be his decision?
Of course it should. But I should not be required by the federal government to pay for a completely unnecessary survey AT ALL, because it was THEIR initial error that caused the problem, which I easily proved using exactly the same base map that FEMA bases it's FIRM maps upon. All they had to do was look at the structure layer on the 7.5 min quad, which shows the actual location of the house, and then overlay the floodplain boundary, which makes it perfectly obvious that there's an error.
Why should I have to pay a dime to correct an obvious FEMA blunder that I proved to them with their own documents?
Then why was to bank requiring socialized flood insurance from FEMA? All FEMA needed was an Elev. Cert. or LOMA, and flood insurance was a done deal. They can't deny you unless there were a minimum of 2 previous NFI claims on the same dwelling.
Because everybody relied on the accuracy of the FIRM map and database, that's why.
Why are we talking about you and FEMA to start with? Isn't this between you, the bank, and Allstate?
Sounds like that was worth the cost of a surveyor's certificate. So how is a $3000 survey unreasonable again? Sounds like a capital investment more than a measly survey.
Because I'm not responsible for the FEMA blunder, FEMA is, but FEMA flatly refused to even review the evidence and documents submitted. The FEMA office drone just kept repeating the same thing whenever anyone, which included me, my accountant, the bank president and my Allstate agent called her asking for FEMA's error to be reviewed and corrected at FEMA's expense.
They have to clean up the cholera and feed displaced people when it floods.
No they don't. They CHOOSE to do so because federalizing flood response aggregates power to the federal government. It's part of the Progressive program to remove power and authority from the states and centralize it in Washington.
Congress also says they must "Promote the general welfare" through flood insurance. All part of "Civil Defense". Everyone sticks their hands out to the government whenever there's a disaster anyway.
That's because the Progressives have set it up that way by first extracting taxes from the public, skimming off at least 20 to 30 percent right off the top and then sending the rest back as disaster aid collected from states where no disaster has occurred in order to pay for repeat disasters that happen in seven of the 50 states most prone to massive flood damage.
Congress sets up such programs as a part of the overall Progressive agenda, and even non-Progressives get in on it because it gets them votes. It has nothing whatever to do with the "general welfare." FEMA does not even need to exist for Congress to "provide for the general welfare," all Congress has to do is appropriate block grants to the individual states, who have the actual constitutional authority and duty of dealing with disaster relief in their individual states. FEMA was created to usurp state power and authority and centralize control of disaster response in order to advance the Progressive Executive state. FEMA's ONLY function should be to maintain and disperse as necessary those disaster supplies which would be needed to respond to a major disaster, like a flood, or a plague, or a nuclear incident, or a biological attack. It should be only a quartermaster and nothing else. It should have no regulatory authority at all, and should be limited to transporting supplies as requested by the governors of the several states at their request and with the approval of Congress.
There is no legitimate constitutional basis for FEMA to be a regulatory agency of any kind.
It's not a scam. It's a civil defense and public health question.
So where is the constitutional mandate empowering the federal government to take authority as the executive regulatory authority for civil defense or public health? Last time I checked there was no constitutional provision authorizing the President or Congress to establish a central federal civil defense or public health department in the first place. Congress' authority is limited to "promoting the general welfare" which does NOT mean "provide for the general welfare." The entire purpose of the separation of powers doctrine and the sovereignty of the states is to prevent exactly what FEMA represents; the federalization of usurped state sovereign authority to PROVIDE for the general welfare.
And when Ecuador and Angola send aid to the US after a big storm or earthquake, there should be a mechanism to distribute it, else a local warlord will take it for himself.
When's the last time we got aid from anyone for a natural disaster, and how much was it? And sure, Congress has the authority to take and distribute those donations
directly to the individual states involved without skimming 30 percent off the top to run one of the most inefficient and bloated bureaucracies in human history.
Oh, I forgot. The US isn't Somalia. Local warlords don't run things, and the US government has an insurance system to help mitigate flood losses.
Why? Why is it MY problem to pay for storm-surge damage in South Carolina? Shouldn't South Carolinians pay for that and let me pay for plowing snow?
Sorry about that. More people like the IS of flood insurance than the OUGHT of theoretical Libertarianism.
That's only because they have been deluded into believing that the flood insurance scam is a benefit to the majority. It's not, it's only a benefit to those areas which are destroyed by flooding time and again that don't want to simply not build in flood zones for their own personal economic gain.
And you thought $3k for a survey was expensive? Well, without people paying property taxes, there wouldn't be enough government in Louisiana to provide flood insurance, so insurers might form pools and charge whatever they want.
Yes, they certainly might. So what?
Then they'd go bust about 36 hours before the next Katrina makes landfall, because it's more profitable to do that instead of pay claims.
That's an initiation of fraud. If the company takes money to pay claims, then it has to put aside enough money to pay the claims before extracting any profit. It's precisely that failure that caused the housing meltdown. The banks didn't have enough capital reserves to cover the calls on the "derivatives" when housing prices crashed. Fraud, pure and simple. Every single one of those banks and investment companies involved should have been bankrupted and their assets distributed to the victims...not the other banks who bought pooled mortgages...but the actual homeowners. And everybody involved in the "mortgage-based securities" fraud should go to prison.
See, there's not much of a court or law enforcement or insurance regulatory system without property taxes either... So, Haha, you're now a self-insurer and the bank's foreclosing because you don't have the resources to protect their risk! You should have known better than to buy property in La. or Fla, or coastal Mass. or any of those other places you can't get a loan to buy property in because there's only a sketchy insurance pool and not enough taxes to provide enforcement - it's way expensive in the long run.
Precisely correct. If the free market for flood insurance in a particular area says that it's not profitable to offer insurance, then no insurance will be offered and the risk is placed squarely where it should be for those who choose to invest THEIR money in building in a flood-prone area. The banks can and should refuse to loan money for such construction because its too risky for the bank if it's too risky for the insurance company.
The upshot is, and should be, that you can't use OPM to build in a flood-prone area. You can use YOUR money to do so, with the understanding that nobody's going to bail you out if you get flooded out.
The public benefit of this Libertarian structure is that people are disincentivized to build in flood-prone areas, and those who choose to do so do so entirely at their own risk and are not allowed to shift the burden of their poor or greedy decision making off onto the general public.
That's exactly how it should be. "Sorry sir, but that's not a problem that the government is authorized to help you with, you're on your own." That phrase should be used by government officials at every level from the bottom up 99.99 percent of the time.
Under your plan, there's be a much smaller pool of policyholders socializing the risk and bailing out people who build and rebuild in flood zones. So it would be much, much more expensive.
Indeed. Hopefully PROHIBITIVELY expensive. That's the whole point of Libertarian free-market economics and social planning.
Not if they weigh the (expensive) alternatives.
This falsely presumes that the owner of a structure in a flood-prone area has some right to low-priced indemnification against his own stupidity at the expense of the rest of us. It's just another example of harmful government meddling in the free market for flood insurance that costs taxpayers trillions for no good reason whatsoever.
Well, if it weren't the government doing it, it would be insurance companies doing it to protect their $$. That's what insurance companies do: collectivize risk to mitigate it and allow people's $$ to be protected. They also fold when things don't go their way.
And that's exactly how it's SUPPOSED to work. You ask for a mortgage to build on the Outer Banks and the bank says, "Go fuck yourself you moron, that's a hurricane total-destruction zone and we're not throwing our money into the Atlantic."
And so, the only people who could own real property in Houston or New Orleans or Miami are people who don't need a mortgage.
Hopefully NOBODY will be rich enough or stupid enough to build in New Orleans, but if they are, it's THEIR dime, not ours. Who cares if anybody else lives there? If the only way they can live there is to leech off the rest of us to indemnify them against the obvious and ongoing threat of destruction by flooding, then they shouldn't fucking live there at all!
Hello class system! You're either one of the "Haves", or you're kissing that ass to curry favor...
But it wouldn't be long before they form syndicates to reduce risk for themselves. Welcome to 17th Century London!
I got no problem with two classes; those who can afford to take on the financial risk of repeated destruction by flooding in known flood hazard areas who voluntarily choose to do so without public assistance, and everybody else. There's no constitutional right to live in New Orleans or Miami if you do so only by forcibly extracting the labor and property of others to facilitate that residency. You want to live in Boca, fine, but don't expect ME to bail you out if you get blown into the ocean by a hurricane. That's all on you.
IOW, we've already tried that. It creates a self-perpetuating system of inherited wealth that puts $$ to sleep and destroys currency systems. Vickers wrote a lot about it. Maybe you've seen Good Will hunting?
Socialist horseshit. Why should the economic realities of flooding be any different from the economic realities of everything else. If you can't afford the financial risk of the destruction of your real property in a hurricane in Boca, then fucking don't live in Boca. Nobody guaranteed you the right to live where you want
at the expense of other people.
The physics were different before the climate changed and brought more rainfall and hence, more flooding and a higher floodplain.
Sucks to be her. How is that my economic problem?
Yes, but usually one has a choice whether one wants to be in the particular risk pool. Why should I be in the same risk pool as people who live on the Carolina coast? I live 7000 MSL for a fucking good reason. No hurricane storm surge.
And you only pay $135/yr for flood insurance too. Someone who lives in a coastal storm surge zone will pay 100x more.
If it wasn't for FEMA's fuckup I would have been paying zero dollars and zero cents for the past umpteen years. Besides, the whole paradigm of insurance is that no one person pays in what it actually costs to compensate them for losses, which means that I'm paying for someone else's risky behavior against my will because of the federalization of the program. If people in Colorado didn't have to cover losses on the Eastern Seaboard literally every year, our flood insurance would be a tenth of what it is. We're forced into a risk pool that's entirely inappropriate for entirely political and Marxist reasons. (Sorry, I had to get that in at least once...
)
Insurance=risk mitigation via collectivization.
Yeah, but I don't want to be part of that collective thanks.
Simple. Don't get a mortgage. Do I have to explain everything?
Better yet, don't let the federal government insure private mortgages and don't give it the power to require that anyone buy flood insurance. Leave it up to the applicants, the banks, and the engineers.
That would render 40% of the country uninhabitable.
Nonsense. It would just make people far more creative in flood-proofing their property. I wanted at one time to build a house on the ranch smack-dab in the middle of the 100 year flood-plain and less that 100 feet from the high-hazard floodway. Before I even bothered to look at federal, state or county regs, I planned how to move fill from one area to another to raise the floor level at least six feet above the 500-year flood levels, thereby creating a nice little pond and doing the intelligent, responsible thing by engineering my home so I wouldn't need flood insurance. Absent FEMA, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the negotiation would have been between me and the bank and the engineers. We would have worked together to ensure that the investment of the bank was protected to their satisfaction through engineering and that I could afford the necessary engineering to make the house flood-proof. A free-market transaction with no government involvement AT ALL. If I can't afford the technical requirements of meeting the bank's security interest, then I don't get to borrow their money and I can either spend my own money to build, or I can not build if I can't afford it.
Nobody's guaranteed that they can build a house wherever they want. Therefore I might have to move my planned house from the floodway to the top of the cliff where it will be absolutely safe from flooding, which will satisfy the bank's need for asset protection, all without any federal flood plain maps, FEMA, the county or anybody else getting involved.
Oh wait, that's exactly what we did, and we still got fucked by FEMA.
I guess a few generations of soup lines would clean out the deadwood.
"Hey buddy, you can eat your lunch down there by the river if you want, but it's raining hard upstream and we expect a flash-flood at any moment so you're on your own." What's wrong with that? Stupidity should be it's own reward. Darwin demands it.
How 'bout they tell you to kiss their ass? They'd rather be where they are, and I don't want to fund moving the nation's capital to Highpoint, Ks.
How about they can kiss my ass and pay for their own assumption of risk and not shift the burden to me or anyone else?
Besides, the Red, and the Platte, and the Yellowstone all flood too. We'd have to pay to impound the shit out of them for drinking water anyway. I think your solution to move people off the N. American coasts would just be more expensive in the long run. How would the rest of us compensate them for their real property, and where would we raise cattle?
You ever been to Kansas? Or Oklahoma? Or Colorado. Or Wyoming. Or South Dakota, or any of the states west of the Mississippi that are mostly empty, unused space? There's no space problem in the US, none at all. It's just that some people like where they live and don't want to leave, and are so greedy and unethical that they expect everyone else to maintain them in their preferred place of abode, quite literally come hell or high water.
Fuck them.
Natural attrition should do the trick. Simply cancel the program, make it a free-market system and as people get flooded out they move somewhere more sane because nobody will loan them money to rebuild in the storm-surge zone, nor should they. Over time the flood-prone cities are emptied out and abandoned, as they should be. Anybody who wants to stay is welcome to do so, like Detroit, but they are on their own, like Detroit. If you don't like what it becomes, don't live there.
And nobody gets compensated for anything. We're not dispossessing them of their property at all. We're just saying that we refuse to indemnify them against a known frequently-occuring risk, and if they get flooded out, well, it's up to them whether they return or move somewhere safer, but they still own the land and can do with it as they please. They just can't ask the rest of us to finance their preferred lifestyle and place of abode.
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