Are Buyouts a Viable Tool for Climate Adaptation?

25 percent has to come from the state, county, or locality — one of the many barriers that inhibits communities from considering buyouts in the first place.

“A lot of the issues we come across are related to community buy-in,” said JaLeesa Tate, the state hazard mitigation officer for Maryland who is overseeing the Garden City Mobile Home buyout. “Especially in our low-resource communities, there are numerous concerns about how they can provide that non-federal share [of funding] for FEMA grants.”

The application process is also time-intensive, requiring local governments to have enough staff with the right mix of expertise. On average, it takes about 15 months for a property acquisition application to go from local to state to federal government, according to Eric Letvin, FEMA’s director of hazard mitigation and risk reduction policy. In some cases, the local government will spend years building partnerships within the community and participating in community-led planning processes before they submit their application to the state, as was the case with the Garden City Mobile Home park buyout. FEMA’s approval of the funds can then take up to another four months. “We would certainly love to see that number go down,” Letvin said. “Especially in the post-disaster environment [when] people’s homes are damaged, and they want out.”

Letvin estimates that, over the last 40 years, FEMA has spent $3.4 billion dollars on approximately 48,000 successful buyouts in the United States, a vanishingly small number when compared to the 14.6 million properties currently located in the 100-year flood zone. By 2050, that number is expected to climb to 16 million properties, according to research group First Street Foundation.

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FEMA-funded buyout programs have predominantly taken place in wealthier, urban counties — or, as A.R. Siders of the University of Delaware put it, the counties that are best positioned to “game the system.” Buyouts within these wealthier counties are then concentrated in neighborhoods with lower average incomes and greater social vulnerability.

Linda Shi, whose research at Cornell University focuses in part on the equity of buyouts, said there are a number of compounding reasons as to why these programs typically serve such a narrow subset of people. When deciding which properties to include in a buyout program, local governments often rely on cost-benefit analyses based on property values, she explained. Homes with lower property values that are in a greater state of disrepair are natural buyout candidates, as their removal reduces community