Reshaping Communities: The Local Politics of Managed Buyouts

• In Event: Representation, Inequality and Geography in Environmental and Climate Governance

Abstract

As the impacts of climate change begin to be felt across the United States, local politicians are confronted with the question of how to adapt. The task of adaptation is fundamentally local in scale. Effective response to climate change risks can minimize disruptions and harm caused by natural disasters and infrastructure failure, and it may provide economic advantage to a locality in the long term. Yet adaptation strategies entail different distributions of costs and benefits, which will influence the political calculation around their adoption.

Perhaps most controversial among adaptation strategies is managed retreat—the relocation of people and properties out of high-risk areas, especially throughout buyout programs. Even more than for other local adaptation policies, the impacts of buyout programs are highly spatially dependent. Affected property owners will tend to be clustered near one another, and because of widespread patterns of residential segregation—patterns that have been influenced by the amenities and disamenities of living near water—they will typically share socioeconomic attributes that differ from the broader community. They may be wealthier than the typical community resident or, more commonly, poorer. Indeed, buyout programs that target low-income residents in high-risk areas have evoked comparisons to mid-twentieth century urban renewal projects that displaced neighborhoods and aggravated racial tensions. In either case, and whether or not affected residents support compensated relocation, managed buyouts can reshape the physical and socioeconomic composition of an existing community.

This paper investigates how existing patterns of racial and economic diversity and segregation contribute to local implementation of managed buyout programs. Matching communities based on flood impacts and other physical characteristics, I examine differences in uptake of the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, a voluntary program for buyout of designated properties at pre-disaster fair market value operated under the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Prior work has examined implementation of buyout programs in particular communities, focusing especially on decision making by individual homeowners, but we know little about the political drivers of managed buyouts as a policy choice. The paper tests hypotheses about the interplay between community composition and electoral institutions in contributing to climate adaptation practice that has the potential to reshape communities.

Author

• Megan Mullin, Duke University