Building Social Equity into Floodplain Buyouts

Strong hurricanes have regularly disrupted life in coastal North Carolina. The riverfront city of New Bern, located in Eastern North Carolina, was devastated by several major hurricanes in recent years. Hurricane Florence was a powerful and relentless storm that was responsible for  $100 million  in property damages in New Bern in September of 2018. Florence came with destructive storm surge, high winds, and extreme flooding. Over 300 businesses and 4,000 homes were damaged or destroyed by Florence. With much of the town inundated, in some places with 10 feet of storm surge, over 800 people had to be rescued during and after the storm. 

Navigate around the map to see the extent of flooding during Hurricane Florence in New Bern and North Carolina's coastal plain.

A buyout is a hazard mitigation measure where a property owner is offered funding to relocate from a building that has been damaged or destroyed by flooding. Buyouts funded by US federal government programs provide eligible homeowners with the opportunity to sell their property at its pre-flood fair market value based on a set of eligibility criteria. Buyouts funded by the federal government are always voluntary; no one is forced to relinquish their property to the government.

There have been  over 40,000 buyouts  of properties conducted in the US since 1989, mostly funded using federal aid after disasters. The agencies that provide federal funds for buyouts are the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. 

New Bern has created a list of potential properties to acquire after Hurricane Florence so that the land can be converted to open space and will work with the  North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency  to begin the buyout process. 

Buyouts may increase community resiliency to flood impacts, but they may also have social inequity implications because of the way flood risk has historically been differentially spread across the landscape based on  race and class . Vulnerable communities have often been  relegated to less desirable land , whether in the floodplain or in proximity to nuisance land uses because of the long history of social inequality in residential land use. This increases their exposure to harmful flooding impacts.

Not only this, but marginalized communities have experienced  displacement    because of segregation, gentrification, urban development programs, and exclusionary practices sometimes codified in law, as in the case of redlining and mortgage discrimination.

 Social vulnerability  is the concept that characteristics such as socioeconomic status, household composition, disability, minority status, language ability, housing type, and access to transportation influence the adaptive capacity of a community to tolerate environmental hazards. People with disabilities, elderly people, mobile home residents, renters, people without access to a private car, female-headed households, and non-English speakers are more likely to have difficulties in preparing for a flood event and are more likely to experience greater hardship.

The factors that make up social vulnerability do not fully explain all of what makes a person more at risk or more resilient to a given disastrous event, but disasters can magnify existing inequalities so it is an important lens to understand the differential impacts of flooding. 

This map shows the social vulnerability composition of the neighborhoods of New Bern. The data comes from the  CDC Social Vulnerability Index . Red represents higher vulnerability, while light yellow represents low vulnerability. Click on one of the neighborhoods to view details on the characteristics of the area.

When buyouts are focused in socially vulnerable communities, there can be unforeseen inequitable consequences.  Siders  explains that the lack of transparency in the buyout process and the power that government officials hold creates a situation in which buyout program administrators:

“purposefully target communities for retreat, whether maliciously, as an attempt to remove portions of the community; pragmatically, targeting affordable housing in order to purchase the most homes with limited funding; or beneficially, as an attempt to aid those at greatest risk.”

 Case studies  of buyouts have shown that the focus on economic efficiency of federal funding sources may replicate the effects of displacement on communities of color and low-income communities. 

While buyouts are voluntary and property owners are compensated at the pre-flood fair market value of their homes, there are  many other burdens  participants must take on, like the monetary cost of relocating, loss of community identity, disruption of social relationships, and the years of waiting on bureaucratic procedures for the completion of the buyout.

To investigate the multifaceted issues created by buyout programs, I conducted a literature review of the nexus between flood risk, social equity, and buyouts. I created a prioritization process of potential buyout locations using multiple data layers on ecosystem services, storm surge, sea level rise, and flood extent in the city of New Bern, North Carolina. This study highlighted the need to incorporate social vulnerability into decision-making to help ensure underserved communities are neither underrepresented nor overrepresented in buyouts.

You can access my full Duke University master's project report, including analysis and final recommendations here:  https://hdl.handle.net/10161/22686