Floating-house ban should stay in place
“When Tennessee Valley Authority reservoirs were built on private property, taken through eminent domain “for the public good,” those reservoirs became public property. In 2005-2006, 98 percent of the public told TVA through its public review process that they opposed privatization of public TVA lakeshore property for residential housing, and TVA banned further lakeshore sales for housing.
Now privatization is occurring on the surfaces of the lakes. Despite TVA bans on floating houses on TVA lakes since 1971, the numbers have increased to more than 1,800 as TVA failed to enforce its own policy. Floating houses are houses on flotation devices on the surfaces of the reservoirs that are owned by less than 1/100th of 1 percent of citizens in the TVA region. “
Letter to the Editor. Knoxville News Sentinel 7 October 2016,