Lessons for Managed Retreat from FEMA Property Buyouts and Post-buyout Relocations
Abstract
As the climate continues to change, retreat as an adaptation option will become increasingly important and inevitable in some locations. To date, one of the longest-running and largest examples of managed retreat globally has been buyouts of flood-prone properties funded by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). In such buyouts, the homeowner voluntarily sells their home to the government, and the land is restored to open space. Here, we present a crosscutting, programmatic analysis of the relocation destinations for participating homeowners through a novel combination of address-level data of 34,000 buyout properties and a real estate dataset of property deed transactions. We focus on two relocation outcomes: socioeconomics and demographics of the neighborhood, and flood risk of the post-buyout property. E.g., for the property owners we could track post-buyout, the relocation address is more likely to be outside of a FEMA-designated flood zone than the buyout property. We have also found that at least 5,000 property buyouts are of manufactured homes (i.e., mobile homes) and multi-family housing. For these homeowners, we could rarely find post-buyout real estate purchases, highlighting potential equity concerns. Such nuanced evaluations are important for evaluating the effectiveness of this public program, and point to ways historical experiences can provide lessons for future deployment at greater scale.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMIN51G0718K
- Keywords:
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- 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1926 Geospatial;
- INFORMATICS;
- 4328 Risk;
- NATURAL HAZARDS;
- 4343 Preparedness and planning;
- NATURAL HAZARDS