For nearly four decades, the federal government has funded a program that buys out homeowners who live in disaster-prone areas as a way of encouraging them to relocate to safer ground. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has spent over $6 billion on more than 53,000 properties nationwide through its Hazard Mitigation Grant Program. But the question has long been: To what extent does this approach work?
A study published today in Science Advances is the latest to offer an answer. Author Rachel Young, an environmental economist at the University of Minnesota, found that the buyout program has largely succeeded in its objective of relocating people and has mostly paid for itself by avoiding future damages. But it isn’t helping everyone equally.
“The program is extremely effective at helping people not only move but also move to lower-risk places,” said Young, whose paper makes clear that the “benefits are not evenly distributed.”
FEMA started doing buyouts in 1988 with the aim of encouraging people to move out of harm’s way. The idea was to avoid repeatedly paying federal disaster aid or insurance claims at the same location. ProPublica reported, for example, that in one extreme case, a single home in northeast Houston received 18 federal flood insurance payments totalling $1.8 million — roughly 15 times its market value.
Residents apply through their local or state government, which requests federal funding that typically covers 75 percent of the property’s cost. If approved, the government offers to buy the property at its pre-disaster market value, and the homeowner decides whether to accept.
Using a mix of private and public data, the paper found that program participants were about 20 percentage points more likely to relocate in the first five years than others who were similarly impacted. While that difference dropped a bit over time, it persisted for at least 15 years. The research also showed that participants tended to move to areas with higher incomes and higher rates of education and employment. Moreover, their debt levels fell, at least in the short term.
From the government’s perspective, it’s been a win, too. Young said that “as long as we’re targeting people and ensuring that they move to less risky properties,” the federal investment tends to pay for itself in fewer claims and lower disaster costs.
That said, the study found significant demographic differences. Participants from higher-income neighborhoods were more likely to relocate and move to areas with greater economic opportunity, while households from majority-Black or low-income neighborhoods moved less frequently and experienced smaller improvements.
“This work is super important,” Jim Elliott, a sociologist at Rice University who focuses on inequities in disasters and recovery, said of the study. A.R. Siders, director of the University of Delaware’s Climate Change Science and Policy Hub, agreed. “This is something people have shown at smaller scales,” she said. “It’s good to see it on the national level.”
Neither Elliot nor Siders were involved in the study, which they said confirms and adds to previous research on buyouts — a body of work that points to a program that works but needs improving, they added. Reducing wait times and paying greater attention to equity are key, Elliott said, noting that some of the disconnect rests in how the government and homeowners view the role of the buyout effort. “The government looks at it as a property acquisition program” and “a way to look out for other taxpayers,” he said. “But if you’re from a damaged home, you’re looking at this as disaster recovery.”
The buyout process can take years, leaving disaster victims in a precarious position as they await a decision. Even if a buyout is approved, Elliott said, using pre-disaster market values can amplify existing inequality: Homes in marginalized communities tend to be worth less from the start, which means their owners then have less money to relocate. In some cases, the government’s offer falls short of what another home costs, making it impossible to move somewhere safer.
These disparities show up in Young’s paper. The average buyout payment was $40,583 in areas with majority Black populations, compared to $93,977 in high-proportion white census tracts. And the estimated increase in relocation was approximately 18 percentage points in tracts with smaller Black populations, compared to 6 percentage points in majority-Black tracts.
The buyout program “should do better and be more equitable,” said Elliott. But he said the larger problem is the program isn’t reaching millions of people living in disaster-prone homes.
“This is important, but it’s not insufficient,” he said of the fix. “It’s buying us some time”
Young hopes that research like this can help policymakers improve, and potentially expand, buyouts as a climate adaptation tool, though President Donald Trump has repeatedly curbed FEMA’s spending. Elliott pointed to programs in Europe, New Zealand, and elsewhere that could offer lessons for the United States. Siders said this work also highlights the need to consider long-proposed changes to the FEMA program, such as using a home’s replacement cost rather than the market value to help marginalized groups relocate.
All three researchers agreed that more needs to be done to understand why these inequities occur and how to address them — work they say the government should be doing.
“The federal government doesn’t do anything to assess where people go after the program,” said Young. Elliott noted that work often falls to academics, who have limited access to the data needed to do it.
“It was sort of left to us to figure out what the implication of the policy is,” said Elliot. “That’s backwards.”