Managed retreat through voluntary buyouts of flood-prone properties

Abstract

Retreat from some areas will become unavoidable under intensifying climate change. Existing deployments of managed retreat are at small scale compared to potential future needs, leaving open questions about where, when, and how retreat under climate change will occur. Here, we analyze more than 40,000 voluntary buyouts of flood-prone properties in the United States, in which homeowners sell properties to the government and the land is restored to open space. In contrast to model-based evaluation of potential future retreat, local governments in counties with higher population and income are more likely to administer buyouts. The bought-out properties themselves, however, are concentrated in areas of greater social vulnerability within these counties, pointing to the importance of assessing the equity of buyout implementation and outcomes. These patterns demonstrate the challenges associated with locally driven implementation of managed retreat and the potential benefits of experimentation with different approaches to retreat.

Racial Inequities in the Federal Buyout of Flood-Prone Homes: A Nationwide Assessment of Environmental Adaptation

“…But when housing is the ultimate target, such bias can be difficult to suppress, especially in urban areas. This is true not only because cities have more people and money than other places, giving them greater government capacity to pursue federally backed buyouts (see Mach et al 2019). It is also because cities have neighborhoods forged through long histories of racial segregation that live on to create unequal access to opportunities in good times and bad, as well as in ways that can accumulate across multiple of steps of housing transactions, even when the buyer is a government agency.…”

Managed Retreat in the United States

“…Practitioners have proposed reforms, and some localities are experimenting with change, but these efforts have not yet been evaluated or applied at scale. Practice Over 1,000 US communities have engaged in managed retreat, 11 but there is little evidence that more recent efforts are learning from past experience. 76 Lack of learning is not for want of material.…”

“…Has managed retreat been fair? Academic and media reports have raised concerns that managed retreat in the US disproportionately affects low-income and minority communities, 11,17,88 enables white flight, 87 or disproportionately benefits white communities. 89 Data on the race and wealth of homeowners involved in managed retreat is not publicly available, so determining whether (much less why) buyouts have a disproportionate effect is complicated.…”

“…2,7 Managed retreat has occurred but at a relatively small scale. Since 1989, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has funded managed retreat in over 1,100 counties across 49 states, acquiring more than 40,000 properties (see Figure 1) [8][9][10][11] -a small fraction of the estimated 49 million housing units in shoreline counties. 12 Knowing that retreat can occur, even at small scales, in such a hostile environment as the US may provide insights into how seemingly insurmountable barriers can be overcome in other contexts and at larger scales.…”

“…Managed retreat in the US, both research and practice, has been primarily a response to riverine and coastal floods and storms and has focused on residential relocation. 2,3,10,11,17 In reflecting the state of the field, this perspective will therefore also focus on residential retreat from coastal floods and floodrelated hazards. This does not imply that managed retreat should be limited to these contexts.…”