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 New York state has predicted that by 2100, rising seas could swallow up to six feet of its shore, the same year real-estate firm Zillow says nearly 2 million US homes could be underwater. A 2016 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences predicts a Sandy-level flood will be more than four times as likely by that time. As this plays out, academia and government officials increasingly agree that large numbers of Americans will need to move, even as some experts warn that we don’t really know how to effectively pull it off……..

 Relocation programs are a historically sensitive topic for local governments, which don’t like to see decreases in population or in their tax base. But with climate change increasingly threatening the lives and homes of people on the coasts, that reluctance is starting to shift. Post-Sandy, the city and the state of New York both established programs to purchase homes damaged by the storm in certain risky areas, theoretically allowing for homeowners to pick up and move somewhere safer. As of now, there is no requirement as to where state-buyout recipients must move, but the state offers a 5 percent bonus for relocating within the city to those in the special buyout areas of Staten Island. So far the state has officially purchased 613 of the 750 houses it made offers on in Staten Island and Long Island, totaling $240 million. For its part, New York City just proposed adding a $50,000 bonus to its acquisition offers for homeowners willing to relocate within the five boroughs. The city plans to make 600 such offers, and has already purchased 31 homes. According to NYC Housing Recovery Operations, “The vast majority of Sandy affected applicants whose homes were substantially damaged would have been consulted about the possibility of selling their home.”

 But the buyouts and acquisitions are dwarfed by the money spent on rebuilding and stormproofing housing where it stands. New York State has paid $1 billion to 11,000 residents to repair and rebuild their homes, and $76 million to repair rental properties. The city projects it will serve 19,500 households through its Build It Back program—of which acquisition is just a small part—with nearly 4,000 construction starts to date. Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported that program’s total cost would be $2.46 billion.

That the bulk of money is being spent on rebuilding belies the fact that experts and government officials acknowledge that relocation from the riskiest areas will be necessary. “Managed retreat is the strategy that most effectively mitigates the risk of catastrophic flooding,” a spokesperson for the Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery told The Nation. “By removing man-made impediments and restoring the wetlands, we are recreating the best coastal buffer that nature can offer. This is all the more important in the face of imminent sea level rise and the new reality of increasingly frequent storms.”

This acceptance of relocation reaches up to the federal level, says Brian Sullivan, a spokesman for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

 We have a lot of our built communities increasingly in harm’s way,” says Sullivan. “With the frequency and the severity of these events, with storm surge and sea-level rise, we can’t afford to rebuild in the way that we’ve always intended to rebuild. The model a generation ago was to rebuild to what things were. And we can’t do that.”

Yet there is no consensus on how this retreat should be managed. …….. https://www.thenation.com/article/to-adapt-to-climate-change-retreat-is-necessary/