Waterlogged in Southeastern Virginia

For the nearly two million people in Norfolk, Newport News, Virginia Beach, and the surrounding communities that make up the Hampton Roads region of southeastern Virginia, the Atlantic Ocean is not only the cultural lifeblood of the area, it is an economic driver. Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval facility, hosts more than 330,000 active-duty personnel, military retirees, families, civilian employees, and others and spends billions in the state.

Yet for an area inextricably linked to water, the water is now a serious problem. Climate change is bearing down on Hampton Roads. The bowl-like shape of the Chesapeake Bay, and the way the James and Elizabeth Rivers flow into that depression, means that the region has the dubious distinction of dealing with both rising seas and sinking land. Norfolk has the highest rate of sea level rise on the East Coast, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts the sea level will rise between one and three feet in the region by 2050. According to a new Virginia Tech Earth Observation and Innovation Lab study, sections of land along the Chesapeake Bay shoreline are sinking at rates of nearly a quarter of an inch a year. Hampton Roads is sinking at a relatively high rate, with the Navy’s assets in some of the most at-risk places.

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This rate of sea level rise is faster than local planners had previously anticipated. Local maps are now seriously out of date, especially when it comes to charting and preparing local communities for rising waters. The region’s municipal officials have been well aware of this problem and have gone to great lengths to come up with fortification strategies, building seawalls, retrofitting old buildings with climate-resistant infrastructure, and elevating roads. Sometimes, however, mitigation is not enough, and communities must consider how to accurately communicate to residents that certain areas are just plain risky areas to live and that they’ll have to plan for the previously unthinkable: moving out of harm’s way.

Managed retreat is the purposeful movement of people and infrastructure away from risky areas prone to repeating natural disasters. The most common type of managed retreat is a buyout program funded by either the local, state, or federal government. Virginia state officials have indicated that relocating people away from those areas is one option in the state’s 2021 Coastal Resilience Master Plan. The state intends to work with communities to “plan, implement, and support successful and lasting adaptation and protection strategies,” while also instituting buyout programs for the most flood-prone areas. Auctioning off of carbon credits created through Virginia’s participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative was intended to provide partial funding for these efforts. However, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin recently announced plans to withdraw from the cap-and-trade agreement. (The state has until the end of 2023 to formally leave the pact.)

Newport News, Virginia, which sits on the James River north of Naval Station Norfolk, leads the state with the highest number of buyouts at 80. The city’s annual budget allocates about $200,000 to buy out properties that repeatedly flood. The city uses FEMA maps to determine the riskiest areas and then offers to buy out the riskiest properties. If the owners accept the buyout, the city then does its own mitigation projects like turning the vacant lots into parks that can better soak up floodwaters.

Funding climate change mitigation projects is costly no matter how a community does it.

While Newport News officials have had some success in persuading people to accept buyouts, nearby municipalities like Norfolk and Virginia Beach have been slower to adopt managed-retreat strategies. They’ve opted instead to fund resilience measures like elevating homes and roads. In 2021, the residents of Virginia Beach voted to approve a $585 million bond, one of the largest in the country, to finance infrastructure projects that will help fortify the area against sea level rise.

Funding climate change mitigation projects is costly no matter how a community does it. But managed retreat, unlike funding seawalls and elevating roads, is likely cheaper in the long run since seawalls and roads are constantly getting damaged by rising seas. Buying a property and removing costly infrastructure is a large up-front cost but means future fixes to that infrastructure are no longer needed. Relocating people away from risky properties should therefore be considered in a town’s climate strategy.

Communicating to residents what managed retreat is and the options it can provide for the region’s residents can go a long way in helping residents address the negative climate impacts the region faces. Americans have relocated away from risky areas for at least a century. In 1881, the town of Niobrara, Nebraska, was flooded under roughly six feet of water. After the waters receded, town residents decided to relocate a mile and a half away to higher ground.

Moving is a decision that is usually left up to residents. “Sometimes people hear managed retreat and they think, ‘I’m going to be forced out of my home,’ which is not the way that 99.99 percent of the programs work,” says A.R. Siders of the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center.

Almost every managed-retreat program in the United States is voluntary, with the exception of Harris County in Texas (which instituted mandatory buyouts in seven Houston neighborhoods after Hurricane Harvey decimated the region in 2017). In 2020, Harris County mandated buyouts after receiving Housing and Urban Development relief funding. County officials noted that the area of Allen Field in Houston had flooded 12 times in the past four decades and felt that there were no infrastructure projects that would keep the area safe from future flooding.

In almost all these cases, the state or town will offer to buy a home and the owner has the option at every stage of the process to decline offers. In fact, in most areas where managed-retreat programs are in effect, there is not enough funding available to reimburse all the residents who want buyouts.

Local officials should also let people know that managed retreat is not a decision that happens in isolation. “We tend to think about [managed retreat] as a one-time process. But with managed retreat it very rarely is,” says Siders, one of the country’s leading experts on managed retreat. “Don’t think about it as you’re going to take the buyout or you’re not and then that’s it.” Siders believes that it’s better to think about the move as a “change of footprint.”

“We know that the boundaries of towns shift over time,” she says. Framing these moves as a shift in where people live rather than an erasure of a community is much more palatable, and better reflects what it means for residents to relocate to safer places.

Every type of climate mitigation, of course, has trade-offs. Communities lose property tax revenue from homes in a floodplain, and buyout program trade-offs certainly require robust evaluation and debate. Relocating to higher ground challenges residents to form new and lasting communities. But in an area like Hampton Roads, these conversations need to be happening. The 2021 Virginia Coastal Resilience Master Plan estimates that in the next six decades, the number of residential, public, and commercial buildings exposed to extreme coastal flooding risk will rise 150 percent to roughly 340,000 structures. The projected cost of annual flood damage is $5.1 billion.

For a crisis as multifaceted and complex as climate change is, our public policies need to be creative and diverse. Managed retreat may not be the best option for every resident living on a flood-prone lot in Newport News, or Norfolk, or Virginia Beach. Some people may continue to prefer fortification strategies. But at the very least, managed retreat should be an option for some severe repetitive-loss properties. The number of properties a state or local buyout program can buy in a given year is mostly dictated by the available funding, but even buying out a few properties every year “opens up a lot more space to be creative,” Siders says.