A Historical Assessment of Home Buyout Policy: Are We Learning or Just Failing?

Households face many difficult decisions after a disaster, including decisions about whether to rebuild their homes or relocate to a new area. These decisions are bounded by federal housing recovery policy and the ways it is interpreted and applied. In this article, we examine the use of home buyout programs as housing recovery policy tools and assess buyout policy using policy learning theory. According to policy learning theory, policies should evolve and improve over time. Instead, a historical review of buyouts implemented in the United States suggests that policy learning related to buyouts has been, at best, limited. Rather than showing evidence of learning from one iteration to the next, individual buyout programs continue to reflect unique objectives and features, lacking evidence of an iterative process. We propose a novel typology for organizing buyout programs and conclude by exploring implications of this finding and offering recommendations for moving forward.     

Potential Challenges to Targeting Low- and Moderate-Income Communities in a Time of Urgent Need: The Case of CDBG-DR in New York State after Superstorm Sandy

New York State received $4.5 billion in Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) funds after Superstorm Sandy. A major CDBG-DR requirement is to prioritize assistance to low- and moderate-income (LMI) populations. The state is spending two fifths of funds on community-wide (e.g., infrastructure) recovery activities. For these activities to be documented as LMI, a specified percentage of residents benefiting from them must be LMI. We explore the potential tension between addressing community recovery needs and prioritizing LMI assistance. Specifically, we develop a series of scenarios to estimate the likelihood that any community-wide activities will be documented as LMI in New York State. We find that documenting these activities as LMI is largely dependent on the underlying demographics of disaster-impacted areas. Additionally, as recovery activities increase in size, thereby impacting larger populations, they are less likely to be documented as LMI, potentially disincentivizing larger, more impactful investments. We recommend empirically based LMI targets for CDBG-DR grantees.