The first year of the pandemic gave us new household names, like George Floyd and Dr. Anthony Fauci. For some along the East Coast, Isaias is a name from 2020 that they’ll never forget. After pummeling the Caribbean, the hurricane pursued a destructive course through the Carolinas on its way to the mid-Atlantic, spawning tornadoes that lifted mobile homes into the air in places unaccustomed to twisters.

The ragged remnants of Hurricane Isaias in 2020 still had enough punch to devastate parts of Pennsylvania. Among the areas pummeled by the storm was the Philadelphia neighborhood of Eastwick. Sweating in the post-storm heat, resident Earnest Scott Jr. pointed out one of the cars on his street to the FOX 29 news cameras. The water “was gushing, hitting cars: that gray car started bobbing up and down,” he said. As the lowest neighborhood in the city, several feet below the Delaware River, Eastwick has struggled with hurricane flooding for at least a century. Residents live with the threat of the next storm hanging over their heads.

Isaias lingered as a household name in Eastwick. Even with flood insurance, some residents had to spend tens of thousands of dollars to make up for coverage shortfalls. And when the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) declined to name Pennsylvania a disaster area, making it ineligible for federal relief, residents despaired. Resident Lemuel Bannister spent the first winter after the storm without heat until local charitable organizations could raise enough money to get him a solution. It took until 2023 for community groups to receive city funding for flood repairs, and that only amounted to maximum grants of $7,500.

Across the United States, the pressures of disaster relief are building. In Vermont in 2023, flash flooding killed thirteen people and caused $2.2 billion in damage. California started this year with damage from “atmospheric rivers,” concentrated moisture plumes that readily create flooding. This isn’t surprising. Most of the U.S. population lives near waterways and some three percent lives in the hundred-year floodplain, meaning there’s a one percent chance of flooding in any given year. Homeowners outside flood zones feel the downstream influence of flooding events, too: home-insurance premiums continue to rise across the country as insurers pool risky real estate with everyone else. Some homeowners, facing astronomical costs for homeowner’s insurance because of disaster risk, have decided to forgo insurance altogether. One insurance-company analyst told the New York Times we’re facing an “uninsurable future.”

Not content with the piecemeal progress since Isaias, Eastwick residents have searched for outside-the-box solutions. The situation there is urgent, and not just because of risk from climate change. Adding to Eastwick’s troubles is the Lower Darby Creek Area Superfund site upstream, which adds a noxious cocktail of forever chemicals to floodwaters. Community leader Carolyn Moseley insists that without some kind of coordinated action, any stormwater-engineering solution means that “you’re laying carpet in a room full of furniture.” But Moseley has an idea. She wants entities, government or otherwise, to buy out owners most at risk for destructive flooding. “We’re not married to it,” she says about the idea. “But if someone can come up with a solution that will number one, keep residents safe; number two, keep people from being displaced from this community; and number three, make people whole, we want to hear it.” Moseley’s Eastwick United Community Development Corporation continues to look for pots of money that might be tapped to buy out these at-risk homeowners. 

Buying out homeowners for environmental health and safety purposes isn’t a new idea; a century ago, the Tennessee Valley Authority relocated churches, cemeteries, and residents to build dams and control flooding. In the 1990s, coastal engineers coined the term “managed retreat,” the organized relocation of current residents and forced exclusion of future residents. The idea continues to gain momentum as a solution to that uninsurable future. In recent decades, FEMA embraced managed retreat as a salve for the worst of its portfolio of flood-prone areas. FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program has bought out homeowners since 1990 using pre-disaster “fair market” prices. Buyouts are the most expensive solution, often a last resort, but also the most direct method for creating the retreat outcome: people are out of harm’s way, permanently. Other mechanisms—like municipal rezoning of flood-prone residential and industrial areas and required setbacks for new development—work alongside buyouts to limit future human presence in these landscapes. 

But the scope and urgency of the problem is troubling. In the United States, FEMA has funded managed retreat in more than 1,100 counties, acquiring more than four hundred thousand properties. It’s a mere drop in the ocean compared to the potential need. The costs of managed retreat on coastlines, the riskiest areas, are astronomical. Real estate located within seven hundred feet of the coast is worth more than $1.4 trillion and its relocation would affect as many as 13 million Americans. Private-property protections mean that any buyouts need to be pursued piecemeal, and each potential buyout requires years of effort. On top of logistical challenges, federal money to make these transactions happen is getting scarce. Nationwide, FEMA allocated $1.78 billion to hazard mitigation in fiscal year 2022, a serious reduction from the previous year, when Covid-era stimulus funded far more of the managed-retreat grant programs and mechanisms.

Data on managed retreat’s efficacy remains scant, but research funded by the National Science Foundation has identified a few patterns. People offered a chance to voluntarily move in a managed-retreat situation usually only do so if they can find a new residence nearby. Recapturing the feeling of home requires some proximity to the home that’s been lost. The study team also found that racism influences the retreat process. Homeowners in majority-white communities seem to tolerate higher flood risks before they abandon their homes, and will abandon their homes only if they can resettle in majority-white communities; moreover, white homeowners are more likely to flee neighborhoods that are racially transitioning. Disasters can thus fuel a kind of de facto segregation that can influence a neighborhood for generations. Critics of managed retreat have cited a lack of transparency in the process as well as political pressures to focus managed-retreat buyouts in low-income communities. There are also numerous logistical challenges: taking on high-risk real estate is a cost burden for local governments, which in some places are then responsible for the newly purchased land. It’s also hard to motivate people to move because of our national shortage of affordable housing—there are fewer places to go than are needed, and homeowners sitting on low-interest mortgages in an era of high rates have had a financial incentive to stay put.

For a neighborhood like Eastwick, where some residents face unpredictable risks to their safety, managed retreat seems like the best solution in a constellation of bad options. But history weighs heavily on Eastwick. The neighborhood has already been subjected to buyouts and their racialized dimensions. As part of what was, at the time, the country’s most expansive urban redevelopment project, the City of Philadelphia displaced eight thousand residents from this working-class, integrated community in 1958. They bulldozed homes and imported dredged river silt to try and raise Eastwick’s grade and prevent flooding of the brand-new neighborhood. With this “slum clearing,” the city made clear that it wanted a dry, majority-white, middle-class neighborhood in the southwest. Technocrats of the era chased that outcome with vigor, including instituting racial quotas for Black residents.

The unjust efforts to create a majority-white Eastwick arguably failed, given Eastwick’s middle-class, majority-Black population today. The city’s attempt at regrading also failed to improve the neighborhood’s flood risk; homes are sinking into the lackluster soil imported by the city decades ago. Philadelphia’s Office of Sustainability pointed out that one legacy of redevelopment, the introduction of row homes to the newly rebuilt neighborhood, limits the efficacy of buyouts, given that all the homes are connected at the hip.

Managed retreat as a practice may still be the best way forward for a neighborhood like Eastwick, with some residents wholeheartedly interested in the solution. But the confluence of past injustices, pressing problems, and a lack of funding has created waters that are nearly impossible to navigate. Eastwick residents, like many around the country, continue to look skyward for whatever comes next.