While these are very cool, they’re not exactly accessible to the average citizen. These are close a million euros per house.

That said, living right next to water is indeed very common. My building in an urban renewal project is too, and we’re getting a pier to moor boats in a while.

For those asking: floods, rising water levels due to climate change etc, isn’t this dangerous? Yes, that is a concern. But probably for other reasons than you might think. Building in river beds is a big no no (unlike in some neighboring countries), and river beds have actually been expanded significantly in recent decades. Sea dikes and levees have acceptable failure risk of 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100,000 years (and yeah this can be tomorrow). At current sea levels and storm rates of course. The main new risks are flash flooding due to heavy rainfall (see 2021 European floods), and, in the longer term, sea water seeping underneath dikes and levees. We can probably handle another meter of sea water rise with current technology. After that, levees would have to be made so high that the pressure on the seabed is high enough to force water underneath. Rivers would also start flowing backwards at some point (this already happens at smaller scale during dry spells. It’s usually managed by having drainage pumps run in reverse). We’ll probably have to give up parts of the country in 22nd century. It is what it is.

Also interesting: where insurers are leaving Florida due to climate-changed induced risk, Dutch insurers are actually increasing flood coverage. Previously only floods due to rainwater would be covered by most insurances. With the government being responsible for floods caused by dike/levee failure. After the 2021 European floods it became obvious that that is not always a clear distinction. While we were far less affected than our neighboring countries, some creeks did turn into violent rivers, especially damaging the old town of Valkenburg. While technically no levees were breached (because it was a creek), and technically it was caused by rainwater, it did behave like a levee failure. Ultimately both insurers and the government paid part of the damages. But figuring out who to get money from was a mess for victims. Thus, the union of insurers is actually expanding coverage from 2025 onwards, so that levee failure is also (partly) covered by most home insurers. Hopefully that reduces insecurity for the next flash flooding event.