Floating Houses

As long as people build near rivers, we are going to have buildings damaged and/or destroyed by floods. Some places get flooded every year, the flood goes away and they clean up the mess and things go back to the way they were. In some places the US Corps of Engineers builds big earthworks (levees) to keep the rising flood waters from inundating the land and the buildings thereon. We seem to be seeing more and more examples of that not working.

Seems to me it might be simpler and cheaper to just build all your buildings on pontoons and skip the whole levee thing. River floods, pontoons float and lift the buildings out of the way. Flood goes away, pontoons settle back down to earth and other than the mud on the streets, everything goes back to normal.

It's not like we don't know how to float houses, people in places like Seattle and San Francisco have been building and living on houseboats for years. And some of these places look just like a house you would build on land.

I know, it's not the way it's been done in the past, and why would you need a houseboat? I mean it only floods once every year or two, or shoot, we've got a levee protecting us, we don't need to worry about no flood.