The perverse incentives of the National Flood Insurance Program

How FEMA and the NFIP give builders and buyers financial encouragement to build on land best left alone

Houston, inundated by floods.
(Image credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Much of Houston should not exist.

I say that not out of any malice for the Magnolia City, but as a simple statement of geographic fact. The east Texas boomtown — the fourth-largest city in the U.S., now in the midst of a horrific pummeling by Hurricane Harvey — is the product of decades of rapid-fire development in which home after home was built on flat, low-lying land with a propensity for flooding. Drainage is central to Houston's problems, for urban sprawl has engulfed and encased prairie land once far from the city center, replacing deep-rooted, absorbent native grasses on natural floodplains with impermeable paved surfaces. When water arrives — and arrive it will, as environmental changes now have once-in-a-lifetime storms like Hurricane Harvey hitting Houston several times a decade — it must go somewhere. When it cannot drain down, it will go up: up into your yard, your car, your living room, your books, your heirlooms, your life.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.