Damned if you do, damned if you don't

Most people in this country are stuck at the toddler stage. They don't want "the government" telling them what to do, but they want it to rescue them when they need it.

Humans are so boring in their predictable contradictions. Some people are complaining because "the government" allowed building in the area in Washington state that was known to be unstable. But it is a certainty that if "the government" had restricted building there, the very same people would be complaining bitterly about attacks on their freedom, the "nanny state", etc. Many/most people can express such contradictory attitudes withing a couple of minutes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/29/us/governments-find-it-hard-to-restrict-building-in-risky-areas.html?partner=MYWAY&ei=5065&_r=0

Governments Find It Hard to Restrict Building in Risky Areas

By JOHN SCHWARTZMARCH 28, 2014

After disasters like the Oso landslide in Washington State, a common question is why people are allowed to live in such dangerous places. On the website of Scientific American, for example, the blogger Dana Hunter wrote, “It infuriates me when officials know an area is unsafe, and allow people to build there anyway.”

But things are rarely simple when government power meets property rights. The government has broad authority to regulate safety in decisions about where and how to build, but it can count on trouble when it tries to restrict the right to build. “Often, it ends up in court,” said Lynn Highland, a geographer with the United States Geological Survey’s landslide program in Golden, Colo.

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The government constantly struggles with the issue. After Hurricane Sandy, Gov. Chris Christie backed programs to help New Jersey’s coastal residents stay in their homes, while next door in New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo favored programs that would provide incentives for those along the shore to move. Congressional efforts to reduce incentives to rebuild in areas that flood repeatedly have been significantly weakened with a bill passed this month that delays cost increases for flood insurance.

After Hurricane Katrina, planners came up with sweeping proposals to rebuild a safer, stronger New Orleans, consolidating its smaller population into neighborhoods on higher ground, and transforming low-lying areas into parkland and drainage.

“I took a lot of fire on that,” said Joseph Canizaro, who headed the Bring New Orleans Back Commission. “We were trying to save lives,” he added, but people did not want to be told where to live and what to do with their homes. Edward Blakely, who led the New Orleans recovery effort, said that when he discussed some of the proposals, “people either laughed at me or were very upset.”

New Orleans is not unique, said Dr. Blakely, a professor at the United States Studies Center at the University of Sydney. “We have really overbuilt on really dangerous ground all over the country.”

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Restricting the right to build is hard, said J. David Rogers, a professor of geological engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla. “That’s Big Brother.”

Builders and developers rarely want to hear bad news, said Dr. Rogers, who has served as a consultant evaluating stability risks. Soil and slopes can often be shored up, he said, but “when you tell them what it’s really going to cost to stabilize, they go ballistic on you.” He said, “I was the most fired consultant in the western United States.”

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He said that little had been done to prepare the East Coast for storms like Hurricane Sandy, and that coastal residents rationalize away problems like hurricanes and rising sea levels, telling themselves “I’ll sell the place before that” or “The scientists don’t know what they’re talking about” or “My neighbor will get hit, but not me.”

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Another prominent libertarian legal thinker, Richard A. Epstein of the University of Chicago Law School, said that the case of Oso should be simple, however, because of its history of landslides. “The case is a no-brainer in favor of extensive government regulation in order to protect against imminent perils to life and health,” he said. “I’m a property guy, but I’m not a madman.”

The attraction of risky places can be strong; they can be as beautiful as they are deadly. Nicholas Pinter, a professor of geology at Southern Illinois University, said that he took his students to see the site of the former town of Valmeyer. As they drove along the rich floodplain, he recalled, “all my students could think of was that this would be a really good place to live.”