Yep. “Well guys, stop developing in the high hazard areas and begin planning to move out”
Reaction from the business/political Establishment: “WHY ARE YOU AGAINST GROWTH?!?!?”
Reaction from those outside the Establishment: “This is just another ploy to further control and dispossess us!”
My own experience in PR recovery is yes, people want it to stop happenning again, but they want to keep their “sunk” investment or not lose the only community they’ve known all their lives. They just want a way to stop the flood from happening, and their houses fixed.
The Corps of Engineers will quite frankly answer to this, yep, we could do it… but it will cost ya and take years and disrupt existing housing and business and infrastructure , and you’re gonna have to stop developing at various places near or around the body of water involved forever for the protective measures to work. To which there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth and the Corps know at some point there will be some Members of Congress saying to the Chief: “your mission orders are to tame the waters: tame them”. They’ll sigh and carry out their orders as best they can, in the knowledge that the inevitable will be, well, inevitable.
(Hell, before Maria hit the Corps had something like 41 pending projects in PR some from as far back as the 80s, worth 3 and a half billion at the time the proposals were made, waiting by dribs and drabs for, like, study phase or design phase of one or two to be appropriated every other year and then park them in the queue again for the next phase. After Maria they went up and said: look, every few years you have had to spend money on flood recovery that by now would have covered us to have built some of these. So in the last 5 years almost 3 billion were approved for like a dozen of the biggest projects and a number of small ones. But of course, turns out that now in 2022 you actually need 5 and a half billion to actually do them…)
As Crane points out, FEMA funding is not, was never, intended as a bailout, it and CDBG-DR for communities are very clearly defined as supplemental, to provide for “unmet needs” i.e. those not covered by insurance or through other regular programs. They never had a mandate to make individual home or business owners “whole” again in-place at full federal expense, but to assist local authorities in managing the emergency and providing disaster relief to their residents – if the lawmakers had wanted them to become true Make Lives Whole or Build Back Better programs for individual families and businesses, they have had decades under both parties to make them so.
In PR’s case we have had an issue that bunch of insurors went into OMG We’re Getting Wiped Out mode after 2017 so there’s people who had to fight them for years and then settle for whatever they got – which meant that in the meanwhile many people had to spend the FEMA money not knowing if it may be clawed back. Apparently similar cases happened in Louisiana since one of their Reps has a bill out in Congress to protect people from being on the hook for such disbursements if they were used for the intended purpose.