>I grew up in Missouri 20 miles from the Mississippi River, every spring there were calls for volunteers to come help sandbag all the downtown areas of cities that are just stupidly close to the river.

I wouldn't be paying a dime of flood damages to any place which exists for more than 100 years and still has not built levees (and not concrete - soil, with trees planted in it) to withstand 100-year flood level.

And if I had to build in a place which can be flooded, I'd rise the foundations high enough. May use the ground floor as a garage or whatever, and would build it of concrete. Dang - back home we were a flood plain (and no surprises there, the rivers don't just pop up, they're there since forever), but the whole area was secured with levees in the socialist times, and there wasn't a single major flood last three decades. This spring there was a lot of rain, and a huge wave came down the major rivers, but no big thing - few villages were partially flooded, and some low lying areas of Belgrade, where water came through the sewers.

Actually there was one major flood last year, but the water didn't come from the river. It came across the border, from Romania, because the capitalism nouveau deforested good chunks of the Carpati mountain range, and the snow melted too fast, and their levees close to the border weren't good enough for that much water.

>I've seen plenty of CA homes built on the sides of hills that aren't still in the location where they were originally built. Yeah, they had a good view while it lasted, but why should my taxes or insurance rates be affected to bail out those people when a heavy rain hits?

Happens a lot in parts of central Serbia. There's a joke ad, "house for sale, low mileage".