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.”
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