this is the right approach, although i will tell you what the right answer is: they need to accept a need for greater water management, one way or the other.

so, maybe you abandon a few areas to the river, but that's a first step and not a last one - you still need to accept that there is going to be more water in the river more often, and find a way to engineer an answer to it.

in windsor, we need to install a modern sewer system and the council is just dragging it's heels on the reality of it. ottawa is going to need better infrastructure to control the river, and it knows how to do it, it has a complex series of locks as it is, it just needs to do the proper surveying of the region in order to figure out where to build what.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/jim-watson-doug-ford-letter-2017-209-floods-1.5154457