I am not saying this to victim blame. The ones who deserve the blame here are property developers and city/county governments for continuing current practices.

At least half, if not the vast majority, of damage caused by hurricanes every year is completely avoidable. When I lived in Okinawa we got typhoons every year, sometimes really big ones, and the worst thing that would happen might be your car getting flipped over - but every building was solid concrete, the tall buildings downtown were tightly packed and protected each other, there was a lot of sea wall to break up storm surges, etc. I remember going bowling with the family pretty much every time a hurricane hit (unlike the troops who lived on base and were all ordered to stay in the barracks and forbidden from drinking lmao).

Before I got to live in Japan I lived in a trailer park on the east coast for a number of years, where I saw the exact opposite of this in practice. Every hurricane that hit would destroy a bunch of wooden houses and mobile homes (including my own once), but the rebuild would use the exact same cheap as hell materials and techniques, almost like the whole coast’s construction industry was colluding to protect the yearly demand for repairs.