‘We’re making our jobs harder.’ NC builds thousands of homes in flood-prone areas

Construction of new homes in flood-prone areas far outpaced the number of buyouts between 1996 and 2017, according to new research from UNC-Chapel Hill.

Published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Planning Association, the study found that over the 22-year period North Carolina communities built residences on more than 59,000 parcels in the 100-year floodplain, the area that the federal government has determined has a 1% chance of flooding in a given year. That includes 47,414 single-family homes.

During the same period, governments purchased more than 5,000 homes in an effort to limit damage from future floods.

“What we found shouldn’t at all mean that the buyouts and the elevations and the (Community Rating System) aren’t helpful. This isn’t offsetting the benefits of those things,” Miyuki Hino, the paper’s lead author and a UNC-Chapel Hill environmental social scientist, told The News & Observer.

“It’s just that while we do those things, we’re making our jobs harder at the same time.”

Climate change will increase flooding

The effects of climate change are going to increase the number of homes at risk of flooding in North Carolina, researchers said, increasing the importance of being careful about where and how new homes are built. Storm surge flooding is “virtually certain” to increase in the coming years, while heavier rains are “likely” to increase inland flooding, according to 2020’s N.C. Climate Science Report.

“If it’s a place that we’ve identified as a floodplain now, it certainly is going to be even more flood-prone in 20, 50, 100 years. So there’s still a lot that could be gained by acting to put in more development management policies at this point,” Hino said.

Researchers looked at more than 5 million parcels statewide, analyzing new construction and how zoning could impact future decisions in floodplains. They also looked at how characteristics of a community — such as its efforts to limit risk, where it is located or wealth — did or did not affect land use decisions.

The actual number of homes built in risky parts of the state is likely higher than the paper found, said Antonia Sebastian, a UNC-Chapel Hill flood resilience professor and coauthor of the paper. That’s because many of North Carolina’s federally designated floodplains were created more than a decade ago.

“These floodplains are moving targets and they will grow in the future,” Sebastian said.

Home buyouts have been used for decades

Buying homes out and converting the land where they stood into parks or similar open space has been used to limit flood risk for decades. It’s an effort that can be controversial, opening questions about scattering the residents of longstanding communities in order to allow floodwaters to follow their natural course.

North Carolina has offered programs to buy out homes in floodplains following 2016’s Hurricane Matthew and 2018’s Hurricane Florence. The Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, funded by FEMA, has purchased 317 properties damaged during Matthew and 115 damaged during Florence, according to an N.C. Department of Public Safety spokesman.

The N.C. Office of Recovery and Resiliency is also offering a buyout program via the Community Development Block Grant for mitigation. A spokeswoman said the $123.1 million program is poised to close on four homes, with an additional 174 applications.

While buyouts may have increased in recent years, Hino said, ongoing development in some communities likely means that the broader trend of new buildings outpacing buyouts will continue.

“I would be surprised if the ratios that we’re seeing overall have changed much because I haven’t seen any kind of large-scale shift in the development trends in the past few years,” Hino said.

75,000 acres zoned for residential development in floodplains

At least 75,000 acres in designated floodplains are zoned for the development of either single-family housing, multi-family housing or mixed-use development, although zoning data was not available for the whole state. That’s an area slightly larger than the City of Durham.

An additional 2,522 parcels in floodplains contain single-family homes but are zoned for more dense development.

To Hino, that land offers an opportunity to make up for the “missed opportunity” of managing development to limit flood risk.

“Across the state, even in communities that have been investing in other ways, we can do better and there’s room for improvement that’s going to help us in the future as flood risk gets worse,” Hino said.

This story was produced with financial support from 1Earth Fund, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work.