Wealthy Counties Benefited Most From a Flood Relief Program

People who live anywhere near the Missouri River must be pretty worn out by now. After near-record floods last spring that affected more than 14 million people, many residents thought the worst was over. But recent heavy rains have kept water levels high, making it nearly impossible for the US Army Corps of Engineers to repair the 350 miles of damaged levees from last spring.

As a result, Corps officials are releasing more water from the six dams it controls on the upper part of the Missouri River, hoping they can patch up the nation’s arterial drainage system before winter and snowmelt next spring. “The dams are still full, the rivers are above flood stage, and it’s already snowing in Montana,” Mike Crecelius, emergency management director of Fremont County, Iowa, told The Wall Street Journal.

If ever there was a time to consider selling your home and moving to higher ground, this would be it. But a new study of the government’s flood buyback program finds that it’s mostly wealthier counties around the country that are selling their homes for taxpayer dollars. Less well-off areas in Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi have had the highest levels of property damage from coastal and inland flooding in the US, but rank in the middle of home buyouts. At the same time, wealthier parts of coastal New England are making the greatest use of the FEMA money.

This means that as climate-driven floods and hurricanes continue to wreck homes and property, low-income residents will likely be squeezed even when the government tries to help. “There is a real potential for our responses in a changing climate to make the fat cats fatter, so to speak, and to be to the detriment of our marginalized frontline communities,” says Katharine Mach, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Miami and coauthor on the study published today in the journal Science Advances.

Mach and her colleagues combed through data from 43,000 FEMA buyouts since 1989 and correlated their location and size to local income and census data, as well as post-flooding damage estimates. The goal of the FEMA buyout program is to create something called managed retreat from places that face a high risk of natural disasters and that scientists say are increasing in intensity under a rapidly warming climate.

If some property owners who live near the ocean or in a river floodplain can be convinced to sell their homes, and the land is returned to open space, the entire community will benefit. The idea is to allow vacant properties to be restored and allow nature to form a green barrier against flooding.

It sounds like a great idea on paper, but not so easy in real life. In order to get the money, local officials have to assess and determine which homes would qualify. They have to come up with a 25 percent match for the total amount of buyout money. In theory, the more homes that FEMA buys and removes from the land, the better the “managed retreat.”

But the research team found FEMA is only buying a couple of homes in each community, rather than removing entire blocks or neighborhoods. Small buyouts are less economically efficient than larger ones and may result in patchy property removal. If only a few property owners sell their homes, the community’s overall flood risk doesn’t change much, according to the research team.

Federal rules require local government officials to apply for the program, put up a 25 percent match, and ask individual homeowners if they want to participate. Because smaller towns in these places often can’t afford local planning staff and outreach, they aren’t getting as many federal FEMA dollars against storms and floods as places like New York, Houston, and Charlotte, according to A. R. Siders, a social scientist at the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center and a coauthor on the paper.

“Their homeowners may need just as much or more help in relocating away from risk” as people living in big cities, Siders told reporters during a press call. “These towns are very likely not to be the places where we’re going to spend billions of dollars to build sea walls or to nourish beaches.”

The Houston area, which was inundated by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, topped the list with more than 2,000 FEMA buyouts, the team found. Midwestern states bordered by the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers used the program in the 1990s, according to the data, but those numbers have dropped.

The research team said they had trouble finding out where people moved after they sold their homes, and whether they were better off as a result of the program. They noted that half of the fields in the FEMA database were left blank. The missing data included information about whether the homes were single-family residences, rental units or mobile homes owned by someone else. FEMA officials also failed to provide how much money they offered homeowners, so the researchers say they couldn’t tell if people didn’t take the money because it wasn’t enough to start a new life somewhere else.

But the signs aren’t good. A study released last month by the Natural Resources Defense Council found that homeowners had to wait an average of five years after a disaster to get their flood buyback money from FEMA, leaving many unable to start over.

By the end of this century, the study’s authors said that somewhere between 4 and 13 million Americans will see their homes inundated by rising sea levels, and more than 200 million people worldwide will meet that fate. Residents in some communities will try to fight back with technological fixes like flood walls or beach barriers, while other folks will retreat.

“The question is where are there places that are absolutely going to need to consider retreat because they will not be able to afford or be supported sufficiently in processes of keeping the water out through flood gates, levees, pumps,” Mack said.

The team said the next question they want to answer is whether the people who retreat from flood-prone areas are better off with the FEMA program, or if some of them just moving on their own.