Losing Homes in “Climate Havens”

The Washington Post has some great reporting illustrating the steady, grinding effect of climate change on places that, even just a few years ago, most experts thought would be safe from the worst impacts. In this case, Northern Vermont, once named as the country’s top “climate haven.”

After a series of unprecedented, but in hindsight, completely predictable, floods, Vermonters in small towns, nestled in picturesque river valleys, are finding themselves uniquely vulnerable to increasing incidence of extreme rain events. Government funded buy-outs are one proposed solution – but the prices offered are often not enough for homeowners to buy or rebuild an equivalent home on safer ground.
In addition, as residents sell out and leave, small communities lose tax base, making it all the more difficult to fund a way forward.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration begins plans to phase out FEMA assistance, saying that states and localities need to be more self reliant.

Excerpt here, the link is a gift for non-subscribers.

Washington Post:

But what began as a voluntary program to help people recover has become a major burden for small towns and villages around the country struggling with declining populations, according to local officials and recovery experts.

As homes are razed and families leave, properties disappear from the tax rolls, squeezing local governments at the same time they face huge rebuilding costs. In Barre and a few other towns in Vermont, the buyouts created so much financial pressure that local leaders made the unpopular decision to reject some applicants.

Nicolas Storellicastro, the city manager in Barre, said the math was unmanageable. Approving all the requested buyouts would have erased about $280,000 in property tax revenue in a city with only 8,400 residents, a quarter of whom live in poverty.

Approval would have brought another problem: the city needed more land, not less, to solve an affordable housing crunch. In the end, Barre leaders signed off on 27 buyouts, rejecting 40 others.

“For us, it’s a real dilemma. We’re four square miles,” Storellicastro said, adding that much of the city sits in a floodplain or on steep terrain where it’s expensive to build. “We can’t stand to lose all this property.”

The same problems are facing communities far from the nation’s wealthy coasts, where repeated shocks from climate change are threatening small towns with bankruptcy.

“I have talked with folks from a number of different communities, often in smaller rural areas, who say we’re done, we want buyouts,” said Anna Weber, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council who specializes in flood risks. “They go to the town council and say we want buyouts and they’re met with opposition.”

The 2023 flooding in Vermont was severe enough that President Joe Biden approved a major-disaster declaration. Then, exactly one year later, another catastrophic flood struck, damaging some of the same towns and shattering residents’ nerves.

The state now is working on nearly 250 active buyout applications from these floods.

“That is more buyouts than we’ve processed in the last decade in Vermont,” said Doug Farnham, the state’s chief recovery officer. “A lot of our communities are arriving to a place where they’re feeling like this is unsustainable, we need to think our way out of this.”