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Increases in extreme weather events have caused extensive flooding across the United States. In response, federal, state, and local governments have broadened their flood mitigation strategies to include acquisition and demolition of flood-damaged homes (“buyouts”). Little work has documented or analyzed the range of strategies for funding buyouts. Federal programs provide the bulk of funding, but these programs are often slow. Also, state and local governments struggle to meet cost-match requirements. We present and analyze a nationwide census of buyout funding programs (n = 34), which draw on five primary funding mechanisms. We find that state and local governments are using a range of traditional and innovative financial mechanisms, including municipal/green bonds, revolving loan funds, local option sales taxes, and stormwater utility fees, as viable tools for funding buyouts. These tools may promote more autonomy from federal government mitigation programs, and ultimately, faster buyout processes.
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Promoting Spatial Coordination in Flood Buyouts in the United States: Four Strategies and Four Challenges from the Economics of Land Preservation Literature
Managed retreat in the form of voluntary flood-buyout programs provides homeowners with an alternative to repairing and rebuilding residences that have sustained severe flood damage. Buyout programs are most economically efficient when groups of neighboring properties are acquired because they can then create unfragmented flood control areas and reduce the cost of providing local services. However, buyout programs in the United States often fail to acquire such efficient, unfragmented spaces, for various reasons, including long administrative timelines, the way in which buyout offers are made, desires for community cohesion, and attachments to place. Buyout programs have relied primarily on posted price mechanisms involving offers that are accepted or rejected by homeowners with little or no negotiation. In this paper, we describe four alternative strategies that have been used successfully in land-preservation agricultural– environmental contexts to increase acceptance rates and decrease fragmentation: agglomeration bonuses, reverse auctions, target constraints, and hybrid approaches.We discuss challenges that may arise during their implementation in the buyout context—transaction costs, equity and distributional impacts, unintended consequences, and social pressure—and recommend further research into the efficiency and equity of applying these strategies to residential buyout programs with the explicit goal of promoting spatial coordination.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1757353
- PAR ID:
- 10513843
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASCE
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Natural Hazards Review
- Volume:
- 24
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1527-6988
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract Actions to reduce flood risk often appear to run counter to other societal goals, and resolving these conflicts is important as flood adaptations increasingly transform settlements and societies. Here, we evaluate the tensions between flood risk reduction and other priorities in the context of voluntary buyouts of flood-prone properties in the United States—a controversial flood response to restore land to open space, but with trade-offs. We apply a nation-wide systematic review (133 literature references, 1983–2023) to assess goals stated for buyouts and combine it with a comprehensive media analysis (281 media articles, 1993–2023) to compare those goals to the experiences and results perceived by buyout implementers, residents, and other practitioner groups. Across the systematic-review literature, flood risk reduction dominates goals expressed for buyouts (62.6% of documented goals), and local government predominates in this goal setting (61.7% of documented goals). However, involved and affected actors—especially residents—perceive outcomes beyond flood risk reduction, most notably in the experiences of buyout implementation itself (35.5% of documented resident perceptions) and in results impacting social and economic priorities (49.5%). Despite the difficulties of buyouts, the systematic-review literature largely reflects positive perceived outcomes (79.4% of outcome sentiments, weighing each buyout location equally), but nonprofit organizations and residents perceive largely negative outcomes. Media coverage related to buyouts is more negative than positive but with improved sentiments through time. Our findings point to the importance of designing, implementing, and evaluating flood adaptations not just as flood control measures given their consequences for other societal objectives. The uneven documentation on buyouts also implies opportunities to learn from contexts where buyouts have been integrated into everyday life with little fanfare, through mechanisms either novel or perhaps routine, yielding insights into making ambitious climate adaptations a common, more ordinary, and increasingly imperative occurrence.more » « less
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Abstract The government-funded retreat of homeowners from flood-prone housing is a globally ascendant policy of climate adaptation. Yet, we still know relatively little about some fairly basic questions involving its participants: e.g. How much risk do homeowners tolerate before retreating? Where do they move? Does that move reduce their future flood risk? And, to what extent do answers to these questions vary by the type of racial and ethnic communities in which they live? To answer these questions, we combine novel address-to-address residential history data with future flood risk estimates and indices of local context to better understand how retreat is unfolding across the United States. Results indicate that, when voluntarily undertaken, retreat is a highly local process that yields notable reductions in household flood risk. These movements, however, are racially segmented, with homeowners in majority-White communities being more likely to stay in the face of higher risk and less likely to relocate to nearby areas that are not also majority-White.more » « less
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Abstract Flood risks are rising across the United States, putting the economic and social values of growing numbers of homes at risk. In response, the federal government is funding the purchase and demolition of housing in areas of greatest jeopardy, tacitly promoting residential resettlement as a strategy of climate adaptation, especially in cities. Despite these developments little is known about where people move when they engage in such resettlement or how answers to that question vary by the racial and economic status of their flood-prone neighborhoods. The present study begins to fill that gap. We introduce a new typology for classifying environmental resettlement along two socio-spatial dimensions of community attachment: (a) distance moved from one’s flood-prone home; and (b) average distance resettled from similarly relocated neighbors. Next, we analyze data from 1,572 homeowners who accepted government-funded buyouts across 39 neighborhood areas in Harris County, Texas – Houston’s urban core. Results indicate that homeowners from more privileged neighborhoods resettle closer to their flood-prone homes and to one another, thus helping to preserve the social and economic value of their homes; homeowners from less privileged areas end up farther away from both. Implications for understanding social inequities in government-funded urban climate adaptation are discussed.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1061/NHREFO.NHENG-1564
