Chapter II Improvements to Buyout Process and Land Use Planning
This chapter focuses on voluntary buyouts and acquisitions as strategies to protect lives, minimize financial exposure, and build long term community resilience to changing coastal flood hazards. Buyout and acquisition policies outlined here would benefit from an improved interagency approach to coastal flood hazards, using the latest science to determine communities’ risks.
Problem Definition
Communities with the greatest floodplain risk exposure will eventually need to relocate with federal assistance. As climate change effects manifest in more frequent and more extreme ways, the federal government must become more proactive. Federal agencies will have to provide leadership and resources for better land use planning while preparing for managed retreat and targeted relocation and remaining attentive to social vulnerability concerns. Relocation is done primarily through two tools: voluntary buyouts and acquisitions. Buyouts are purchases of land and property at pre-disaster values. Acquisitions are purchases at post-disaster values. A variety of federal, state, and local programs focus on relocation, but the majority of flood-related buyouts are conducted by FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMPG).37 State and local governments do not have the necessary financial resources for large-scale relocation, which is why the federal government has been and will continue to be the leading actor. FEMA has conducted 45,000 buyouts since 1989, with a slight decline in purchases over time.38 These numbers do not necessarily indicate a decreased appetite for buyouts. They are largely a result of the significant procedural and temporal obstacles faced by local governments and individuals that disincentivize buyouts.
Finding 1 The post-disaster buyout process is too slow.
A primary obstacle to post-disaster buyouts is process inefficiency. The median FEMA buyout takes more than five years to complete.39 Funding streams move so slowly that some districts 24
