PERSPECTIVE: Managed RetreatU.S. Flood Strategy Shifts to ‘Unavoidable’ Relocation of Entire Neighborhoods
For years, even as seas rose and flooding worsened nationwide, policymakers stuck to the belief that relocating entire communities away from vulnerable areas was simply too extreme to consider — an attack on Americans’ love of home and private property as well as a costly use of taxpayer dollars. Christopher Flavelle writes that now, however, that is rapidly changing amid acceptance that rebuilding over and over after successive floods makes little sense. Using tax dollars to move whole communities out of flood zones is swiftly becoming policy, marking a new and more disruptive phase of climate change.
Hurricane Laura and Tropical Storm Marco may be extraordinary, but Christopher Flavelle writes in the New York Times that the storms are just two of nine to strike Texas and Louisiana since 2017 alone, helping to drive a major federal change in how the nation handles floods.
He writes:
For years, even as seas rose and flooding worsened nationwide, policymakers stuck to the belief that relocating entire communities away from vulnerable areas was simply too extreme to consider — an attack on Americans’ love of home and private property as well as a costly use of taxpayer dollars. Now, however, that is rapidly changing amid acceptance that rebuilding over and over after successive floods makes little sense.
The shift threatens to uproot people not only on the coasts but in flood-prone areas nationwide, while making the consequences of climate change even more painful for cities and towns already squeezed financially.
This month, the Federal Emergency Management Agency detailed a new program, worth an initial $500 million, with billions more to come, designed to pay for large-scale relocation nationwide. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has started a similar $16 billion program. That followed a decision by the Army Corps of Engineers to start telling local officials that they must agree to force people out of their homes or forfeit federal money for flood-protection projects.
Flavelle notes that the federal government has long paid to buy and demolish individual flood-damaged homes, but that what is different now is the move toward buyouts on a much larger scale — relocating greater numbers of people, and even whole neighborhoods, and ideally doing it even before a storm or flood strikes.
Officials’ – and residents’ — increasing acceptance of relocation, which is sometimes called managed retreat, “represents a broad political and psychological shift for the United States,” Flavelle writes, “Even the word ‘retreat,’ with its connotations of defeat, sits uncomfortably with American ideals of self-reliance and expansion.”
But that view
has been blunted by years of brutal hurricanes, floods and other disasters, as well as the scientific reality that rising waters ultimately will claim waterfront land. In the latest National Climate Assessment, issued in 2018, 13 federal science agencies called the need to retreat from parts of the coast “unavoidable” in “all but the very lowest sea level rise projections.”
