MANAGED RETREATClimate Change Has Forced America’s Oldest Black Town to Higher Ground
Princeville, North Carolina, is relocating with help from a new federal grant. Hurricane Matthew, which submerged the town under more than 10 feet of water, was the final straw. The town has just received millions of dollars in new funding from FEMA to build a new site on higher ground.
Princeville, North Carolina, the oldest community in the United States founded by formerly enslaved people, has been trapped in a cycle of disaster and disinvestment for decades. The town of around 1,200 people sits on a plain below the banks of the Tar River, and it has flooded more than a dozen times in the last century. The two most recent hurricane-driven floods, in 1999 and 2016, have been the most devastating in the town’s history.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew, which submerged the town under more than 10 feet of water eight years ago, Princeville’s residents debated three distinct options: staying put on the town’s historic land, taking government buyouts to relocate individual families elsewhere, or moving the town itself to higher ground. But internal disagreements and a lack of funding made it difficult for the town to move forward with any of those choices in a comprehensive way. As a result, the damaged town hollowed out as residents and businesses left one by one, becoming yet another example of how slow and painful disaster recovery can be for rural and low-income communities.
Now, almost a decade after Hurricane Matthew’s devastation, Princeville’s fate is becoming clear — for better and for worse. The town has just received millions of dollars in new funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to build a new site on higher ground, offering hope for a large-scale relocation. At the same time, a long-awaited levee project that promised to protect the town’s historic footprint has stalled out, making relocation harder to avoid as another climate-fueled hurricane season begins.
The idea to relocate the town first emerged after Hurricane Matthew, when the state of North Carolina helped Princeville buy 53 acres of nearby vacant land. The state also kicked in money to help town leaders plan a mixed-use neighborhood with new apartments and businesses, and it later bought another larger parcel adjacent to the 53-acre tract. Earlier this month, FEMA officials announced that they will send almost $11 million to Princeville to build out the stormwater infrastructure for the new town. Construction could begin before the end of the year.
