Illustration by Sarah Angèle Wilson
This article appears in the August 2022 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
The optimism that greeted the pandemic’s temporary decrease in global emissions has now all but evaporated. Planet Earth is on a trajectory to breach the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degrees Celsius warming frontier at some time in the next five years. Beyond that marker, human and animal life will be in greater peril. The historic rains now flooding the northern reaches of Yellowstone National Park, an early wildfire season, and a projected above-average hurricane season all point to the urgent need to drop climate incrementalism for strategies that recast urban and rural built environments in an overheating world.
Radical new perspectives on the climate crisis promise to realign expectations about where humans can live and how they can confront a dizzying array of increasingly severe events: sunny-day flooding, hurricanes, bizarre rain- and snowstorms, and wildfires. Managed retreat—that is, responding to such cataclysms by entire neighborhoods or small towns picking up and moving, by downshifting development in once-desirable areas, by letting other areas return to nature—is clearly a controversial idea today. But within the next decade, state and local governments will have pointed residents and developers in the direction of survival.
Far from the cacophony of international climate conclaves, some cities and towns are gingerly adapting to the extremes of heat and cold, fire and water. These places are adopting strategies to manage development and recast collective mindsets about what it means to abandon places and lifestyles developed and inculcated over decades. Ceding neighborhoods (or more) to nature—a course still largely viewed as extreme—will become a regular feature of planning regimes within a decade.
Managed retreat has simple, if hard-to-accept, goals. One of them is ending haphazard development in areas repeatedly hit by storms. Removing one million homes from the nation’s floodplains could save the country $1 trillion (even though the estimated cost of compensating the homeowners is nearly $200 billion). Residential areas and business districts on gorgeous coastlines or in the middle of forests are often some of the most dangerous and expensive places to build.
Such beauty spots provide property tax revenues and tourism dollars, which is one reason why municipalities are unwilling to summon the political willpower to say no to well-connected developers, or to settled, inflexible residents who also vote. No one in harm’s way wants to move, since tragedies happen to other people—until their own home floods.
For decades, developers have called the shots in built environments, rebuilding in floodplains or in the seam between inhabited areas and forests because they can. But constant rebuilding in threatened places is as ill-advised for developers as it is for people who succumb to snatching up a dream house on an eroding barrier beach.
Such developments will end up imposing a tremendous cost on Americans. Managed buyouts will accelerate, and different levels of government will wrangle over which of them should pay. Federal buyout programs are underfunded, notoriously difficult to apply for, and time-consuming to access. A $3.5 billion increase in FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, for example, is disbursed by a formula tied to previous COVID-19 assistance. With the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Army Corps of Engineers also overseeing buyout programs, much deeper coordination (as a Pew Charitable Trusts report proposed) or a wholesale spinout into an independent bureau is the best path forward.
Managed buyouts will accelerate, and different levels of government will wrangle over which of them should pay.
As the federal government reassesses its fiscal and oversight roles, states and localities will foot more of the bills. New Jersey has established Blue Acres, a statewide program to handle damaged and flood-prone properties that focuses, in part, on buying up properties at market rates to return the sites to the wild, recreational, or open space. This spring, the state announced a $50 million investment (backed by federal Tropical Storm Ida dollars) into the program for communities affected by Ida.
To preserve their fiscal bottom lines, municipal officials now beg, plead, and cajole whole neighborhoods (particularly high-end, property-tax-bearing ones) out of floodplains and other high-risk areas. In particularly hard-hit locales, governments may not have to twist many arms: As storms grow in both frequency and intensity, more people will likely be willing to accept buyouts—as most Staten Island residents did in the Oakwood neighborhood after Hurricane Sandy.
The buyout picture is likely to remain especially fraught for many African American communities where homes were undervalued by design, according to A.R. Siders of the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center. In a number of those communities, properties were purposely situated in flood-prone areas that never enjoyed basic residential services and were redlined to keep property values down. Factor addressing inequities into the buyout calculus.
In Charleston, South Carolina, Dale Morris, the city’s chief resilience officer, believes that Americans need to reassess their relationship with water. The frequent recurrence of what Morris calls “storms of impact” that are more intense and longer-lasting has begun to influence the city’s decision-making in ways that even a historic storm like Hurricane Hugo in 1989 did not. Now home to 150,000 people, Charleston suffered extraordinary levels of inundation for several years beginning in 2015, a period that included Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and Tropical Storm Irma in 2017.
Today, Charlestonians have a new appreciation of how rain, wind, and bodies of water interact. “People began asking questions like ‘What do we do about this new development that I think is causing flooding downstream? What do we do about larger land use policy, so we don’t make the mistakes that we made 50 years ago because things have changed?’” says Morris, who worked as a senior economist for the Netherlands Embassy for more than two decades and coordinator for Charleston’s Dutch Dialogues, an initiative sponsored in part by the Netherlands that helps local communities assess flooding issues.
With neighborhoods that regularly flood spread across a landmass that features a peninsula and the outflows of three rivers into the Atlantic Ocean, Charleston has taken an aggressive stance on managed retreat. The city has secured FEMA grant money for one neighborhood that already had nearly 50 homes purchased and demolished, and is regulating development in low-lying areas that in the past would be filled for development, such as the 100-acre Johns Island tract of land that would have sited 240 homes. Some city councilors were ready to ban fill outright, Morris says, but the city opted instead to regulate fill through stormwater regulations, so that it can be used “judiciously.”
These advances catapulted Charleston into the vanguard of proactive communities—for a reason. “Charleston has been so active because the risk is there, and they feel it,” says Morris.
In the West, the managed-retreat conversation centers on the conundrum of preserving the spaces between human developments and wilderness (known as the “wildland-urban interface”) with buffer zones to protect communities from wildfires. The Northern California town of Windsor was threatened by the 2019 Kincade Fire, the largest that season, which burned nearly 80,000 acres over 13 days. The fire roared up to the borders of the evacuated town of 27,000, but the firefighting crews managed to save every home.
Near misses, however, do not abate the intense housing development pressures faced by California communities. Windsor has established a growth control ordinance that takes into account that the town has regional housing needs to consider: It steers new development to urbanized areas, essentially avoiding high-risk fire areas and transferring these projects to lower-risk tracts. Moreover, Windsor’s municipal code underlines the need to “preserve open space land for the continuation of commercial agricultural and productive uses, the protection and use of natural resources, the enjoyment of scenic beauty and recreation, and protection from natural hazards [emphasis added].”
After the 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California, several heavily damaged towns, including Paradise, decided to rebuild. To that end, the Oregon-based Conservation Biology Institute, The Nature Conservancy, and the Paradise Recreation and Park District jointly studied how wildland risk-reduction buffers could also be used as recreation facilities, parkland, or for other outdoor activities, with related revenue-generating opportunities.
These buffer zones, “which we typically think of as where the built environment comes up against wildland areas and [spaces] managed as natural areas, are also the quintessential representation of the urban-rural divide in American politics” says Jonah Susskind, a research associate at MIT’s Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. But such zones may be able to draw support from both sides of a divide between the climate crisis believers and its skeptics.
Parks and recreation departments are among the few local institutions that have community-wide support, from birding enthusiasts to RV aficionados. That kind of support, Susskind says, could help build consensus on the bigger themes of managing development—and ultimately, planetary survival. “There’s trust in the natural world and interest in preserving the natural world,” he adds. “Both sides get it.”
