Flood-prone cities in the global South are increasingly the target of infrastructure projects aimed at building climate ‘resilience’. At the same time, residents of these cities take adaptation to flooding into their own hands. In this article we examine the interrelationship between household-scale and urban-scale flood mitigation projects in Cần Thơ, Vietnam. We use spatial-ethnographic methods that examine multiscalar flood processes to show how this flood risk plays out through micro-topographic variations across the city to create a condition of stratified adaptation. This case extends existing scholarship on the political ecology of climate adaptation by demonstrating how flood mitigation projects can exacerbate inequality not only due to the horizontal (space-claiming) impacts of infrastructure projects but also due to the vertical displacement of water through a shifting ground plane. Flood risk cascades, re-emerging in new places. As flood levels rise due to compounding factors of subsidence, development, and climate change, interventions at various scales displace water to sites with the lowest elevation, stratifying risks and benefits. This cyclical process displaces adaptation labor from the state to the household, in turn undermining the state’s techno-fixes as flows of water shift once again. The resulting ‘vicious cycle of water’ places the urban poor at increasing rather than decreasing flood risk.