The Promise and Challenges of Managed Retreat

[Brenda]

Frankly I'm surprised that South Carolina has a plan like this. Finally! Some acknowledgement of the dire straits we're in! The feds no doubt have some plans but all coastal states better be building their own.

South Carolina is facing the reality that in some areas, managed retreat may be the only option. A 2023 resilience report found that the state may need to buy out and tear down roughly 700,000 flood-prone homes.

South Carolina is one of the few states with a dedicated climate resiliency office and a plan for adapting to climate change. In some coastal areas, the state is offering to help homeowners move by buying out homes from residents living in floodplains and turning the land into green space better adapted to absorbing and retaining water.

Managed retreat strategy or policy is the idea that instead of hunkering down, we will move back away from the coasts. The most equitable way to do that, when some people can’t afford to just up and move, is to have a kind of buyout.

The state or federal agency offers homeowners some kind of amount pegged to the value of their home, to buy their home from them so that they can relocate somewhere more inland.

Looks like it was resident Melissa Krupa who kick-started this process.

SHAILER: Melissa is a real force of nature. When I first spoke to her, it was kind of at the tail end of a six-year battle for her. First to get a buyout and then to get the state to actually demolish her home like they promised. I’ve got a clip from Melissa talking about what she went through:

“In 2016, my house flooded with three-and-a-half feet of water in my house,” Krupa said. “I did start to remodel and rebuild, and then in 2018 I lost my house again to flooding—five-and-a-half feet of water. At that time I realized I had to do something; I couldn’t keep rebuilding. I didn’t want to live in flood waters, and I knew I had to do something for me and my community because we kept losing our house. Some people in my neighborhood who are closer to the water lost their house like 10 times. That’s when I decided to start speaking up.”

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/14092024/managed-retreat-promises-and-challenges/