A landmark analysis of the federal government’s primary program for moving Americans out of flood-prone areas reveals a troubling pattern that undermines the nation’s long-term climate resilience strategy. While the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) buyout program successfully relocates recipients to safer ground, new mapping shows this is only a tiny fraction of the story. For every family that accepts a buyout, more than a dozen of their neighbors in the same hazardous zones move by selling or renting their properties on the private market, passing the flood risk on to new occupants and perpetuating a cycle of damage and rebuilding.
This large-scale risk transfer, uncovered by researchers at Rice University, suggests that despite billions spent on buyouts, communities as a whole are not becoming safer. The vast majority of moves out of floodplains—roughly 14 out of every 15 households—occur through conventional real estate transactions. This invisible migration leaves homes in place to be damaged in future disasters, raising questions about the effectiveness of current policies in creating genuinely resilient communities. The findings indicate that individual adaptation does not always translate to collective safety, as the housing stock in vulnerable areas remains occupied, ensuring future losses for families and continued costs for taxpayers.
A Tale of Two Migrations
The core of the issue lies in two distinct but parallel forms of relocation happening in flood zones. The first is the formal, government-supported buyout process. The new mapping tool, which tracks the movement of over 70,000 people, shows that families who participate in FEMA’s program overwhelmingly achieve its goal. They tend to move short distances, typically between 5 and 12 miles from their original homes, allowing them to maintain local social and economic ties. Critically, analyses using address-level flood risk data from the First Street Foundation confirm these moves land families in homes with a considerably lower risk of future flooding. This demonstrates the success of the program for its direct participants.
However, the second, much larger migration happens outside of this framework. The data reveals that the buyout program is only capturing a small percentage of residents leaving these high-risk areas. The majority of people move by selling their homes on the open market. While this allows the sellers to adapt to increasing climate risks, it fails to remove the dangerous properties from the market. Instead, the risk is simply transferred to new buyers or renters, who may not be fully aware of the hazards. This process leaves the community just as vulnerable as before, with the same properties likely to require disaster assistance in subsequent storms.
The National Buyout Landscape
For decades, FEMA’s property buyout program has been a primary tool for managed retreat in the United States. The agency has invested nearly $4 billion to purchase and demolish approximately 45,000 flood-prone homes since the program’s inception, with most activity occurring since 2001. The premise is simple and effective: a local or state government, with federal funding, purchases a property from a willing owner, demolishes the structure, and preserves the land as open space. This strategy not only prevents future losses on that specific property but can also improve stormwater management and restore natural floodplain functions, benefiting the surrounding area.
The program is highly cost-effective, with research showing it avoids an estimated $4 to $6 in future disaster recovery spending for every $1 invested. By permanently removing structures from harm’s way, buyouts are, in theory, the most complete form of flood mitigation, eliminating the possibility of future damage or loss of life associated with a specific property. Yet, the new data on relocation patterns shows that the program’s limited scale prevents it from achieving its full potential for community-wide risk reduction.
Mapping the Movement
The new insights are made possible by an innovative interactive mapping tool developed by Rice University researchers. For the first time, academics and policymakers can see a national picture of where people go after a buyout is implemented in their community. The tool combines official FEMA records with private consumer address data and sophisticated risk assessments to track the relocation pathways of both buyout participants and their neighbors who move via the market. It provides a comprehensive look at moves from over 650 neighborhoods across 42 states, offering unprecedented evidence of how climate adaptation is actually unfolding on the ground.
This granular view reveals that most people stay close to their original communities when they move, with a median relocation distance of just over two miles in some areas. This finding is crucial, as it counters fears that managed retreat programs would lead to the dissolution of communities, showing instead that residents can move to safer locations while maintaining vital local connections. The tool powerfully illustrates the hopeful pattern that people tend to land in safer homes, but it also starkly visualizes the much larger problem of at-risk homes being continuously re-occupied.
Systemic Challenges and Inequities
Several underlying factors hinder the buyout program’s effectiveness and contribute to the prevalence of private market risk transfers. The process is voluntary, requiring homeowners, local governments, and state agencies to all opt-in. This creates a complex and often lengthy administrative pipeline that presents a major obstacle to its use.
Program Delays
One of the most significant barriers is time. The majority of FEMA-financed buyout projects take more than five years to complete from the time of a flood to the final demolition. For homeowners who have just endured a traumatic disaster, this slow pace is often untenable. Many cannot afford to wait years for the government assistance to materialize and are forced to sell their damaged homes quickly, often to real estate speculators for a fraction of their pre-flood value. These speculators may then perform cosmetic repairs and sell the property to a new owner, perpetuating the cycle of risk.
Racial and Economic Disparities
Research has also uncovered significant racial disparities in how the program is implemented. Studies show that predominantly white neighborhoods at risk of flooding benefit disproportionately from FEMA’s voluntary buyout program. One analysis found that homeowners in majority-white areas often do not participate in buyouts unless the flood risk is extreme, whereas homeowners in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods are more likely to accept buyouts even when the risk is more moderate. After moving, more than 95 percent of buyout households from majority-white areas relocate to other majority-white areas, while those from minority neighborhoods are far more likely to move to areas with a different demographic composition.
Policy Implications for Resilient Communities
The new maps and data present a clear challenge for policymakers: the nation’s current approach to managed retreat is insufficient to meet the scale of growing climate risks. While buyouts are a proven tool for helping individual families, the program’s limited reach and slow speed mean it is being outpaced by private market forces that recycle, rather than retire, at-risk properties. To build truly resilient communities, federal and state governments may need to expand and streamline buyout programs, making them a more attractive and accessible option for homeowners than a quick sale on the open market.
Potential reforms could include providing faster funding immediately after a disaster or creating a pre-approval process for buyouts in known high-risk zones. Giving property owners more flexibility in the timing of a sale could also increase participation. Without significant changes that address the scale and speed of the problem, communities will continue to play a dangerous game of “climate roulette,” where flood risk is not eliminated but merely passed from one resident to the next.