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Which, in this case, has the bizarre twist of everyone knowing that the President isn't in control of much of anything, but the VP popping in and out of acting like she's in charge depending on whether it would be electorally helpful or not.
This continues to infuriate me. Even if someone thinks it's a public problem, I have no idea why it would be a federal problem. Florida has hurricanes. This is a known aspect of Florida. Florida has a GDP comparable to Spain's, they can price in their local natural disasters without coming to the Midwest demanding handouts. Floridians, in my experience, are often smug about what they view as excellent weather and the lack of income taxes, but also demand that the rest of the country subsidize them because they have dangerous weather.
A strange thought: should Gulf Coast states become RV states? Hurricane developing? Everyone drives North. Coast is clear? Everyone drives back.
I'm curious what the alternative is to building homes and watching them get wrecked.
Building codes (including Florida's) do contain guidance for designing houses that are resistant to hurricane-force winds. The Wood Frame Construction Manual, incorporated by reference into the code sections linked above, permits prescriptive design for wind speeds all the way up to 195 mi/h.
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Concrete. We have the technology to build homes which would take a Category 5 to wreck (and Category 5s are very rare even in Florida). RVs would be a very bad tradeoff. Besides the problem of living in an RV all the time, they're going to get wrecked in lesser storms which most current Florida homes easily survive. Plus, you'd never be able to evacuate in time; the roads would be jammed with RVs which would then get wrecked.
Another alternative would be "don't live there at all".
If the cost of rebuilding weren't subsidized, the market would (slowly) come to an equilibrium where either the places would be left without permanent structures or a good tradeoff between "build strong" and "build cheap but accept rebuilding" would be met.
This looks like trailer parks and commie blocks for the poor, and some combination of locally(possibly artificially) high elevation+reinforced construction+artificial barriers for the rich.
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