By Christopher Flavelle
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Since 1978, 120 homes in the town of 1,600 people have cost federal taxpayers $13.4 million in payouts, according to data the Natural Resources Defense Council obtained from the Federal Emergency Management Agency; 36 received more money than their total value. Five of those homes have gotten federal flood insurance payments ten times or more, including one that received money 15 times.
The result: homes that flood keep getting rebuilt with public money, only to flood again. That leaves people living in vulnerable areas who might rather receive money to move away -- and the flood insurance program, already more than $20 billion in debt, going deeper underwater.
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Encouraging people to keep rebuilding in vulnerable places reflects the design of the flood insurance program. Not only does it subsidize people’s premiums, it imposes no limit on the number of times a homeowner can make a claim. At the same time, federal programs designed to pay people to move out of flood-damaged homes often take years to result in offers, by which time many people have repaired their homes and moved back in.
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Belhaven demonstrates that trend as well as any place. For all the money the federal government has spent in the aftermath of previous flooding there, it has spent very little on reducing the threat from the next flood. Just one-third of the town’s severe repetitive loss properties have gotten money for what the government calls “mitigation” -- a category that includes flood-proofing or raising the home on stilts.
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