NJ's Answer To Flooding: It Has Bought Out and Demolished 1,200 Properties (arstechnica.com) 63
New Jersey has found its answer to the relentless flooding that has plagued the state's coastal and inland communities for decades: buy the homes, demolish them and turn the land back into open space permanently. The state's Blue Acres program has acquired some 1,200 properties since 1995, spending more than $234 million in federal and state funds to pay fair market value to homeowners exhausted by repeated floods from tropical storms, nor'easters, and heavy rain.
A Georgetown Climate Center report this month called the program a national model, crediting its success to faster processing than federal buyout programs, stable state funding and case managers who guide each homeowner through the process. The demolished homes become grass lots that absorb rainwater far better than concrete and asphalt.
Manville, a borough of 11,000 at the confluence of two rivers about 25 miles southwest of Newark, has sold 120 homes to the state for roughly $22 million between 2015 and 2024. Another 53 buyouts are underway there. The need for such programs is only growing. Sea levels along the New Jersey coast rose about 1.5 feet over the past century -- more than double the global rate -- and a Rutgers study predicts a further increase of 2.2 to 3.8 feet by 2100.
A November report from the Natural Resources Defense Council noted that billions in previously approved FEMA resilience grants have already been cancelled, making state-run initiatives like Blue Acres increasingly essential.
A Georgetown Climate Center report this month called the program a national model, crediting its success to faster processing than federal buyout programs, stable state funding and case managers who guide each homeowner through the process. The demolished homes become grass lots that absorb rainwater far better than concrete and asphalt.
Manville, a borough of 11,000 at the confluence of two rivers about 25 miles southwest of Newark, has sold 120 homes to the state for roughly $22 million between 2015 and 2024. Another 53 buyouts are underway there. The need for such programs is only growing. Sea levels along the New Jersey coast rose about 1.5 feet over the past century -- more than double the global rate -- and a Rutgers study predicts a further increase of 2.2 to 3.8 feet by 2100.
A November report from the Natural Resources Defense Council noted that billions in previously approved FEMA resilience grants have already been cancelled, making state-run initiatives like Blue Acres increasingly essential.
Meanwhile (Score:4, Interesting)
Those of us who were smart enough to *not* buy a house that was built a few inches above sea level get to foot the bill.
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You sound like the people in my /r/southjersey subreddit lol. My hometown is one of the most at risk towns of sinking into the water in the state. It's already an island (in southwest nj no less) and most of the land is preserved already. The buying up of the land and marshes really helps protect the land, animals, and people. Boohoo, taxes. Without paying them, you'd be living in a cesspool like Mississippi.
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Those taxes should have been used to enforce building codes that say you don't build houses in a flood zone.
"But we didn't know sea levels were going to rise!!!"
Bullshit. Al Gore warned you about this 25 years ago. Edward Teller warned you about this almost 70 years ago.
Re: Meanwhile (Score:5, Interesting)
Barring that, I have a federal solution. When you get federal flood relief you shouldn't be allowed to use it on any property that has ever flooded.
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I live in Gilbert, Arizona, I must have flood insurance because there is a 100 year risk that the drainage systems will fail to deal with 100 year exceptional rainfall(s), and my home foundation is 6 inches too low to escape that.
So, if perchance this happens, and the water is not drained away quickly enough, and my home is flooded, i should be prevented from rebuilding...?
This would similarly remove around 80 homes in the general vicinity. And overall in Gilbert Arizona (ARIZONA, folks) about 1500 homes. D
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So, if perchance this happens, and the water is not drained away quickly enough, and my home is flooded, i should be prevented from rebuilding...?
No. That's not even close to what I said. You can rebuild if you want to. You just don't get to do it with other people's money. No one should help you rebuild in a place that's just going to flood again.
Coastal flooding losses, already, results in ruinous flood insurance premiums to rebuild, and sometimes no insurance coverage at all.
Don't buy in a flood zone. Don't build in a flood zone. Then you won't be affected.
I may also point out that if I were to find my home flooded and severely damaged, it would not be relief so much as insurance benefits paid.. Because I am paying for it, and have for almost 10 years.
Good. If I am paying for it, which is what federal flood relief is, then I say you don't get to build in a flood zone again. If you are paying for it, you can rebuild where you want, even if it's stupid.
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"You just don't get to do it with other people's money."
So I pay my insurance premiums and it's 'other people's money'? All this time I thought hazard insurance on my home, be it private or FEMA, was my paying in so that, if a loss occurred, the insurer had the funds to pay the benefit...
"Don't buy in a flood zone. Don't build in a flood zone. Then you won't be affected."
I didn't. FEMA has decided, relatively recently, that there is a flood risk. The town and state actually disagree, but FEMA wins that argu
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So I pay my insurance premiums and it's 'other people's money'? All this time I thought hazard insurance on my home, be it private or FEMA, was my paying in so that, if a loss occurred, the insurer had the funds to pay the benefit...
The problem with FEMA funds is that we ALL pay into those, not just other people who have chosen to live in flood zones. Despite this I am, once again, not against federal flood relief. If a person (including but not limited to you) wound up living someplace which floods, they still need a place to live if that happens... but we need to not repeat our mistakes — and that is specifically what you are advocating for.
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Well, if my home is in fact flooded, I'm paying my premiums.
Hurricane flooding is so often seen in areas where the repetitive risk is well recognized. You are, I suspect, focused on those risks, and we agree that building on the coast between Key West and, say, Virginia Beach, riskier than doing so inland.
But hurricane flooding is not limited to those well recognized flood plains. FEMA also provides relief for other hazards, mere rainfall for instance, as is my root risk.
So much of West Virginia that was f
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Add in fire hazard, and would the Palisades area in California also , if FEMA provided relief, be designated a no-build zone?
Though I do not expect you to be familiar with the fact, I have spoken repeatedly here about the need for California to disallow flammable exteriors. In particular, allowing the construction of flammable roofs is batshit insane. Forest fires can broadcast burning material for miles from the point of ignition, especially when the woods are dotted with rural homes with propane tanks. These have safety features which are supposed to make them burn externally instead of internally, but when a fire is moving rap
Re: Meanwhile (Score:2)
I genuinely do not know, did a lot of the homes in the Palisades area have flammable roofs? Given the nature of that particular Firestorm, and the one that impacted Malibu, it's unlikely that any fire prevention or effort to try to put anything out was going to work, but in the aftermath all I've heard from a distance is it. The state of California has expressed an interest in rebuilding it all with a different type of housing, but you can't get a permit to rebuild anything so far. Is that accurate?
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The state of California has expressed an interest in rebuilding it all with a different type of housing, but you can't get a permit to rebuild anything so far. Is that accurate?
I don't know too much about that particular situation in Malibu, I'm a NoCal guy. Most homes in general have flammable roofs, they are made with wood covered in various asphalt, paper, and plastic products. Perhaps Malibu had more tile or metal roofs, but they certainly would have had plenty of flammable ones in between them still. I don't think it would have made a big difference there though, since fire was moving from structure to structure. I was thinking about that more from a NoCal standpoint, where w
Re: Meanwhile (Score:2)
Wood framing is ubiquitous even in NoCal. Asphalt shingles likewise. Building with trees so close presents the primary threat. Clearance is necessary... I say this being a Maine native, and while forest fires in even lightly populated areas aren't common in Maine, California has pursued uniquely dangerous forestry practices for a long time. And the attraction of building in the woods I understand. It's just hazardous, especially when adjacent forests are managed so poorly. But cedar roofing certainly presen
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What you mean to say is that you have an engineering problem you refuse to fix. I'm sure flood insurance isn't all that expensive, but you could get rid of it if you wanted to.
If you're on a pier & bean foundation, have the house raised a foot; the tech to do that is well known (though a bit expensive). Then add an extra step for your porches.
If you're on a slab foundation, have a solid wall a foot taller than your foundation poured around your house, to be a barrier like your foundation is supposed to
Re: Meanwhile (Score:2)
If you had read my comments more carefully, you would know I live in Gilbert, Arizona. I do not live on oceanfront, I do not have pure foundation, I am on a slab. I am 6 in below the 100-year flood plain risk as assessed by FEMA. Gilbert is in the desert, what we think of is the valley but is truly a basin. The flooding would be caused by a failure or inadequate drainage and an exceptional monsoon/ thunderstorm, probably several in rapid succession., they have standards, they've done their engineering. Not
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Yes, I did read your first comment carefully enough to understood you lived in a desert environment where the problem is caused by bad drainage and rainwater. I've visited AZ, it's nice in its own way. That FEMA changed its standards so you're now hit by this sucks ... you have my sympathy. Nevertheless, your problem should be fixable so you don't to have that extra flood insurance. (BTW, thanks for the info that it's so expensive, that was news to me.) I pointed out a fix for a slab in my first comment; I
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A retaining wall/dam around my slab would prevent access to the garages, and is not a practical solution. It is an attached garage. And it would need to be 360 degrees, and the back part of the lot would make for interesting problems.
I'm going to offend you here. You've seen one post about a retaining wall/dam and thought it would work. And, it retains all rainfall inside, unless I were to add gated drains, which could fail. Not to mention, while my property is 6 inches below flood level as assessed, how ta
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Fair enough, at least you've considered options.
I do live on "expansive soil" or as the soil survey called it "active clay". The engineering fix for that is geo-piers. I have 54 of them going about 16' down under my entire house (extra jut-outs require extra piers). It added to the cost but is the real solution as the house rides on them while the clay swells/contracts depending on how wet/dry it gets. During the summer, in parts of my yard I get cracks so deep I can put a 4' piece of rebar into the crack w
Re: Meanwhile (Score:2)
And that would be the difference between an insurance payout and disaster relief. Flood insurance I would be receiving an insurance payout. I'm paying the premiums. I don't know what my hazard insurance would pay, generally they won't avoid everything when it comes to flood damage. But it wouldn't be public money, I'm paying premiums.
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But fuck- the history of warnings of anthropogenic CO2 caused climate change are almost 200 fucking years old, now.
I love bailing out morons.
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Did I say he was a scientist?
Did he say that he is a scientist?
Are any of the clowns currently dictating of climate policy in this country scientists?
No, you fucking moron.
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The problem isn't home owners building in places that might flood, it is developers building in places that stop floods in the first place.
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This is actually the BETTER option.
The other option is for them to get on the Federal last resort flood insurance program and have the Federal Government pay to rebuild the houses - multiple times as they flood multiple times.
Frankly, this should be a legal requirement - any last resort flood insurance program should have the right to buy the property outright at a fair price instead of accepting insurance on the place OR after a flood does more than 40% damage to the property.
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FEMA flood insurance isn't last resort. It is virtually the only option.
Ask your insurance agent.
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Blame the original developers. It's not the current owners who decide where a house is located.
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It's not the current owners who decide where a house is located.
It is the current owners that decided to buy property that is guaranteed to flood. Even in tornado country, the property is very unlikely to be destroyed in a tornado. But flood plains are guaranteed to flood.
Re: Meanwhile (Score:2)
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That would be fine if people had a completely free choice of where to live, and promises made by the state about flood defences and future developments were guaranteed.
I'm not familiar with the history here, but I'm the UK there are many examples of properties that were thought to be safe, but which subsequently flooded due to charges, natural and man made. These are homes built hundreds of kilometres inland.
Great things from small beginnings. (Score:4, Funny)
Demolished 1200 properties in New Jersey.
Well, it's a start.
Federal and local home buyouts sinde 1980s (Score:2)
The government has been buying out homes in areas the repeatedly flood for 40 years. Soldier's Grove, Wisconsin - https://www.fema.gov/es/node/4... [fema.gov]
- Beginning in 1907, repetitive flooding annoyed residents until 1935 when the first disastrous flood engulfed homes and businesses up and down the valley with sludge and mud. Congress directed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to study flood options.
- study wasn’t completed until 1962 when the Corps recommended a dam be built 36 miles upstream in addition
Wise move (Score:1)
Government buy-outs of chronically flooding neighborhoods are nothing [eli.org] new [eli.org].
Re: (Score:2)
Go midpoint (Score:2)
Personally, so they have incentive to actually move, I'd go with replacement. IE if you have a 1500 sqft 3 bed 2 bath place, they pay the median for a habitable 1500 sqft 3 bed 2 bath. Without any modifiers for 'waterfront' or such.
Concentrate on the cheaper properties first, the multimillionaire mansions can fend for themselves.
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Remember, the surface-land-only portion* of the value of "oceanfront property" depends on whether you are allowed to build on it and under what conditions. If the conditions include "practically un-insure-able against floods, storm damage, changes in sea level, changes in the tidal boundaries [which might change public-access rights], etc." then the amount someone is willing to pay for it is less than if you can get insurance at a reasonable price against those types of hazards.
Oceanfront property on barri
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There's an argument to be made that they're taking advantage of taxpayers, by buying a known lemon that's expected to be taken care of by the government. (But this doesn't actually work out mathematically since if the seller and other buyers expect it to be taken care of by the government, it will be priced similarly to a non-lemon.) Probably, actual selling price should be taken into account since you shouldn't reward people for cleverly finding a low price that depends on perpetual government largess.
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Remember, the proposal here is not to 'take care of'. It is to eminent domain, condemn, and tear down the houses and other buildings.
Therefore, it is not perpetual government largesse, which would be closer to the federal government subsidized flood insurance program, which when I researched it often forced flood victims to rebuild in the exact same spot as before, without so much as lifting the replacement something like a foot above the last flood level.
The issue here night be if, say, I got wind of the
Re: (Score:2)
Keep in mind a perpetual payment stream is worth the same as some lump sum. A perpetual payment stream does not have infinite value because future payments are discounted (having less value now), and the area under the curve is finite. It's a geometric series.
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From some personal knowledge, land at significant risk of flooding is not very valuable at all. The buyer will price insurance, and realize it costs more than the land is worth.
Dry land, yes, more valuable often than the structures on it. Wet land, not so much. Flood plain, too often negative value.
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Right, so if you have to bear your own risk, living there has negative net utility. But people do it, and assume FEMA will bail them out. That's a moral hazard, with the government (taxpayers) providing the hedging. Though I have no personal knowledge of this. Is that accurate? And who gets the profit, the buyer or the seller? (Is it priced like land and a house or like a disaster zone? I assume it's intermediate, which equates to both parties getting some undeserved profit--the seller now, the buyer later
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and you have to dig into each one to see how much was spent and where it came from like:
Pequannock received $10 million from FEMA, including a grant to
purchase for Severe Repetitive Loss properties. The $10 million provided the bulk of the funding
for the buyouts, which were used to purchase 55 homes.
it solves a problem... in a rather expensive way.. but it's better than what FEMA (and HUD) normally does
In FEMA’s case, we find that just 14 percent of the 81 billion dollars in total disaster grant funding spent since 2005 have gone to programs that aim to advance resilience to climate related disasters—smart building and rebuilding. Outside that tiny fraction, most of FEMA spending has gone into activities, such as rebuilding, that have the unintended effect of encouraging risky siting decisions and other behaviors that may discourage those best prepared to address these risks from being fully responsible for adverse outcomes.
( https://www.brookings.edu/arti... [brookings.edu] )
(and i'm somewhat ok with the flood insurance program... even though that too is subsidized... but at least provides some strong market signal of the risk. but the rebuilding grants (e.g from HUD) for people who don't even pay in... less of a fan. )
Being from the marshes of South Jersey (Score:2)
The more land we preserve along the waterways, the better. NJ is an OLD state, which was founded by people going up the waterways and working their way inward. Over time, we have learned that we need to give the rivers, marshes, and estuaries space to do their thang. If it means paying a little more in taxes, so be it. Money is not more important than the well-being of the planet.
So rich get a tax payer bailout? (Score:1)
This is a scheme that bails out the rich at the cost of the taxpayer.
Sold as social justice.
DEI crowd isn't even pretending to hate the rich any more, is it? They joined them, and they like it.
Re: (Score:2)
Only if you count middle class retirees and such as rich. There are probably a few rich people, but not 1200.
Modest neighborhoods (Score:1)
This 2017 article [houstonchronicle.com] talks about a local government paying $20M for 200 homes. $100K was a very modest-priced home at the time.
GOP corporate mentality (Score:2)
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With the housing crisis in the US, NJ's answer is to take it away?
So if the area were already flood drainage relief (both flooding too much for a house and aiding drainage), you would advocate building houses there? You can't have it both ways. Either it's better to be houses or it's better to be flood drainage.
Finally! (Score:2)
It is about time this state does something I agree with. Houses built in area prone to flooding, houses that become prone to flooding because of oveconstruction, this is a real mess here.
Houston should take notes (Score:2)
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1) sell property in flood plain
2) collect development fees and taxes
3) allow state/feds to buy the properties back
4) profit!
Manville (Score:2)
Manville, NJ, used to be the big manufacturing center for Johns-Manville, which made asbestos products. It was always a blue collar town, and was hit hard by the asbestos disasters around 1980, both by loss of jobs and loss of lungs. But, in the 60s they always clobbered my high school in football.
Developer giveaway (Score:2)
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As long as they put it on tall enough stilts and cover their own insurance, sure. :)