Limbo: the unintended consequences of home buyout programmes on peripheral communities

Abstract

Home buyout programmes are designed to permanently relocate households away from areas that are vulnerable to future hazards, though their impacts are not well understood. Among the least understood impacts of these programmes are those related to non-participating households located near buyout zones. Here, we present findings from a study of Oakwood, NY, a peripheral community that was impacted by a buyout programme in a neighbouring community. Drawing on qualitative data collected three-and-a-half years after Hurricane Sandy, we examine the experiences of affected households through the lens of Conservation of Resources theory. We find that residents of the peripheral community experienced a suite of losses associated with the implementation of the buyout, including losses in the physical environment that impacted their sense of safety, losses in conditions resources reflecting a perception that the government had failed to act in their best interests, and the threat of long-term financial losses associated with post-buyout land use decisions over which they had no control. Taken together, these losses contributed to an experience of stalled recovery that left residents in a permanent state of limbo. Policy implications related to the consideration of peripheral communities in the assessment and implementation of buyouts are discussed.

Keywords:

• Home buyouts
• post-disaster relocation
• housing recovery policy
• Hurricane Sandy
• managed retreat

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For examples of disaster-related resource losses and resource gains, see Ritchie, Little, et al. (2018).

2 For examples of ways in which COR theory has been related to individual stress, see Halbesleben et al. (2014).

3 The psychological constructivist perspective draws upon the works of Wilhem Wundt, Alfred Adler, George Kelly, Jean Paiget, Viktor Frankl, and Jerome Frank (Meichenbaum & Fitzpatrick, 1993). For more recent considerations of constructivism in psychology, see Raskin (2002).

4 The rumored redevelopment of the buyout land had the potential to positively impact the peripheral community, though buyout participants listed that among their biggest fears, as it would mean someone else had profited off of their loss (Baker et al., 2018; Binder & Greer, 2016).

5 For a comprehensive review of these concepts, see Gill and Ritchie (2018).

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the National Science Foundation [grant number 1536217].