Given the high cost of infrastructure investments, picking the right projects is important. Three chapters in the Lincoln Institute book Infrastructure Economics and Policy: International Perspectives describe how cost-benefit analysis has come to be almost universally applied by governments and international financial institutions for evaluating infrastructure projects, despite some notable limitations—and how investment decisions are affected by biases and politics. 

The Development of Cost-Benefit Analysis 

Don Pickrell, chief economist at the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, describes the evolution and methodological challenges of cost-benefit analysis in a chapter on economic evaluation. As he explains, a mid-nineteenth-century French engineer, Jules Dupuit, is widely credited as the originator of cost-benefit analysis. Dupuit’s main concern was to determine whether the investment in a new infrastructure facility, such as a bridge, was worthwhile; he proposed that the test should be whether the benefits to the bridge’s direct users—for example, savings in time, labor, fuel, and other areas—exceeded the cost of building and maintaining the bridge. 

This focus on direct user benefits has long been criticized by some for ignoring the wider economic impacts of infrastructure. Proponents of the wider impact approach argue that the time savings and other benefits to direct users may be passed on to downstream firms, allowing them to implement further productivity improvements. They argue that ignoring these impacts will understate the benefits of the project to society as a whole. Pickrell explains that over the years, researchers have attempted to measure these wider economic impacts by building models of the entire economy that include estimates of the effects of changes in the productivity of infrastructure on the productivity of other sectors  

This approach—building models to estimate both the direct and wider economic impacts of a project—did not prove popular with researchers or governments until the last decade, when several researchers returned to the topic. Pickrell speculates that the use of these economy-wide models was discouraged in part by the need to estimate, or assume, so many parameters. The models are also less suitable for choosing from a number of individual infrastructure projects—the task officials were typically charged with—than for evaluating economy-wide reforms. 

Skeptics of the approach also argued that the wider economic impacts identified were often not new and additional impacts, but rather transfers of impacts from the direct users to other parties. The opening of a new bridge, for example, usually stimulates an uptick in property values and the construction of new housing or other developments nearby. Land values and housing increase primarily because the bridge makes travel faster; to count the property value or new housing as benefits along with the travel time savings to the direct users would be to count the same benefit twice. 

In practice, a consensus has emerged that wider economic impacts can be included without double-counting if they involve the correction of inefficiencies in the affected downstream markets. Examples include environmental costs and benefits imposed on third parties, the general improvements in productivity caused by the growth of urban agglomerations, or reductions in prices caused by an increase in competition from the breakup of a monopoly.  

The development of cost-benefit analysis into a tool used almost universally by governments and international financial institutions to evaluate major public infrastructure projects is remarkable. The practice has been encouraged in large part, Pickrell explains, because it has become increasingly sophisticated over the last century.  

Despite the value of cost-benefit analysis, the relatively few studies of its influence on the actual choices of government produced discouraging results: the highest-ranked projects are rarely selected, the research shows. Defenders of cost-benefit analysis argue, however, that the real advantage of this approach is unlikely to be the selection of the best project over the second-best alternative, but rather the elimination of some of the worst from consideration. 

Optimism Bias 

Cost-benefit analysis is not perfect. A careful analysis in chapter 7 by Professor Bent Flyvbjerg of Oxford University and statistician Dirk Bester reveals overwhelming statistical evidence that costs tend to be strongly underestimated, while benefits are strongly overestimated. Their amazing dataset includes 2,062 infrastructure projects representing six investment types in 104 developed and developing countries, which were put in service between 1927 and 2011. 

Forecasting errors are often blamed on proximate changes in project design or environment, such as unforeseen increases in scope or complexity, higher than expected inflation, lower than expected competition, and various similar factors. But Flyvbjerg and Bester argue that the root causes of the errors are well-known behavioral limitations, especially optimism bias and overconfidence bias. This observation suggests that improving forecasting will be difficult because the problems are so deeply ingrained in human nature. Flyvbjerg and Bester make specific recommendations for reforming cost-benefit analysis, such as debiasing and giving consultants a financial stake in the accuracy of their forecasts. 

Politics of Excess or Shortfall 

In chapter 8, John Donahue of Harvard’s Kennedy School describes the political forces that lead to excesses or shortfalls of public spending for infrastructure. Donahue explores the school of public choice economics, whose theoreticians assume that individuals rationally pursue their self-interest in a democratic society governed by voting rules of various kinds. 

Not surprisingly, the answer to the question of whether this pursuit will result in excess or shortfall depends on one’s assumptions about how well informed the voters are as well as the voting rules. For example, one famous public choice scholar, Anthony Downs, argues that spending will be less than optimal mostly because voters tend to underestimate benefits more than they underestimate costs. Another scholar, Mancur Olson, argues that spending on public goods is driven by coalitions, which are often most effective when they are small, or when they can devise perks—e.g., roadside assistance from the American Automobile Association—for those who join them. Finally, Gordon Tullock demonstrates how majority voting to determine whether to fund similar projects would lead to overspending, because the proponents of each project have incentives to exchange support with the proponents of the other projects (a practice known as log rolling). 

All three chapters inform the reader about the strengths and weakness of cost-benefit analysis, the existence of optimism biases driven by human nature, and how public choices influence the level of public spending for infrastructure. Knowing more about these factors can help improve decision making for public infrastructure investments. 

José A. Gómez-Ibáñez is the Derek C. Bok Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning and Public Policy at Harvard University. Zhi Liu is senior fellow and director of China Program at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. They are the editors of Infrastructure Economics and Policy: International Perspectives. 

Image: Construction of a bridge in downtown Miami. Credit: CHUYN via istock/Getty Images Plus.

This interview, which has been edited for length, is also available as a Land Matters podcast. 

A native Vermonter who was first elected in 2012, Miro Weinberger is serving his fourth term as the mayor of Burlington, Vermont. He attended Yale and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and worked for Habitat for Humanity before founding his own affordable housing development company. He’s also a part-time athlete, playing catcher in an amateur over-35 baseball league. 

Vermont has long been a progressive kind of place with a population dedicated to environmental measures, whether solar and wind power, electric vehicles, or sustainable farming practices. Burlington, its change-agent capital—the place that gave rise to Bernie Sanders, who served as mayor from 1981 to 1989—became the first city in the country to source 100 percent of its energy from renewables in 2014, a goal set in 2004. Now Weinberger and other leaders are building on that foundation, committing to shifting the city’s energy, transportation, and building sectors away from fossil fuels entirely. 

ANTHONY FLINT: Tell us about this ambitious goal of becoming a net-zero energy city by 2030. What is that going to look like, and what are the steps to make that happen? 

MIRO WEINBERGER: As a result of decades of commitment to more efficient buildings and weatherization, Burlington uses less electricity as a community in 2022 than we did in 1989, despite the proliferation of new electrical devices and whatnot . . . that sounds exceptional, and it is. If the rest of the country had followed that trajectory, we’d have something like 200 less coal-burning plants today than we do. 

When we became a 100 percent renewable electricity city in 2014, there was enormous interest in how Burlington had gotten here. After talking to film crews from South Korea and France and answering question after question about how we did this, I came to think we had achieved it for two big reasons. One, there was political will. Second, we had a city-owned electric department that had a lot of technical expertise and that was able to make this transformation to renewables affordable. 

The way we are defining net zero is to essentially not use fossil fuels in—or have a net-zero fossil-fuel use in—three sectors. For the electricity sector, we’re already there. That gets [us] about 25 percent toward the total goal. The [others are the] ground transportation sector and the thermal sector—how we heat and cool our buildings. 

The big strategies are electrifying everything, electrifying all the cars and trucks that are based here in Burlington. Moving the heating and cooling of our buildings to various electric technologies, the most common one probably being cold-climate heat pumps. Then, rounding out the strategies, we are looking to implement a district energy system that would capture waste heat [from the city’s biomass facility] and use it to heat some of our major institutional buildings. Then we also are making changes to our transportation network to make active transportation account for more of our vehicle trips and bring down fossil-fuel use that way as well. Those are the major roadmap strategies. 

AF: Is there one component of this that you have found particularly tough in terms of trying to go citywide? 

MW: In general, I’ve been really pleased with our progress. We actually found in our first update in 2021, we were on target to meet this incredibly ambitious goal of essentially phasing out fossil fuels by 2030. Part of that, admittedly, was that, as we all know, 2020 was a pretty exceptional year and we did see transportation-related emissions drop as a result of the pandemic. We just got a new measurement and we did see some rebounding, so that we are not quite on track through two years the way we were [after] one. The rebound that happened here in Burlington was about a quarter of the nationwide rebound in emissions. Basically, we had a 1.5 percent increase in emissions after the pandemic, whereas the rest of the country grew by 6 percent. We’ve seen a rapid increase in the adoption of heat pumps and electric vehicles over the last couple of years since we came forward with what we call green stimulus incentives very early in the pandemic. 

That said, I often have this sensation that we are fighting this battle with one hand tied behind our back, because it is not a level playing field for new electrification and renewable technologies. The costs of burning fossil fuels are not properly reflected in the economics right now. We need a price on carbon in some form. The fact that we don’t have that holds us back. When we get that—and I do think it’s just inevitable that eventually we will get this policy right, like a growing number of jurisdictions around the world—I think we’re going to have a wind at the back of all these initiatives. It will help with everything we’re trying to do. 

AF: Now, I want to make sure I understand. Do you want everyone in the city of Burlington to operate an electric vehicle by 2030? Is it that kind of scaling up and adoption? 

MW: Basically, yes. That is what it would really take to fully achieve the goal, that or some offset investments to help us get there, but we are very serious about doing everything we can to bring about as quickly as possible this transformation.  

A year ago, we passed a zoning ordinance that [says] new construction in Burlington cannot burn fossil fuels as the primary heating source. We didn’t prohibit fossil fuels—we thought that was too onerous, and the technology’s just not there to go that far. Regulating the primary heating source can bring down the impact of a new building by as much as 85 percent. In recent weeks, the state signed off on a change to our charter that gives us the ability to go beyond that and put new regulations in place for all buildings in Burlington. By next town meeting day, next March, we plan to have in front of the voters a new ordinance that would start to put requirements in place for the transformation of mechanical systems for major new and existing buildings when they get to the end of their useful life. When water heaters break, for example, we are both going to have this strategy through our utility, offering very generous incentives, and have actual regulatory standards in place that require transformation. 

AF: I want to ask about the utilities. You mentioned Burlington Electric and then, of course, you have Green Mountain Power. How important is that piece, given that utility companies elsewhere seem to be wary of renewables and may even end up hindering that transition? 

MW: I’ve got to say, a decade in office grappling with these issues has made me a big believer in publicly owned power. All of the work that I described over the last 30-plus years, the city-owned electric department has been a big part of that. Municipalities, towns, mayors that don’t have their own electric utility, I think it’s harder. I do think there are things that any local community can do to collaborate with and, when necessary, bring public pressure to bear on utilities, which tend to have to answer to some public regulatory authority. I think that there are ways to push other utilities to do what Burlington Electric is doing. I think it’s an exciting story in Vermont that the other utility that has really been quite innovative, Green Mountain Power, is an investor-owned utility. 

If we get anywhere near this net-zero goal, it’s going to mean we’re selling a whole lot more electricity than we are now. We estimate at least 60 percent more electricity than today. Every time someone buys an electric vehicle and charges it up in Burlington now, and they do it at night, we’re able to sell them off-peak power in a way that just brings more dollars into the utility. It’s very good, the economics. That’s why we’re able to offer these very generous incentives—every time we bring another electric vehicle or heat pump online, that’s a new revenue stream to the city. These incentives in many ways largely pay for themselves with that new revenue. To me, it seems like good business sense as well to move in this direction. 

AF: Vermont has become a very popular destination for mostly affluent climate refugees [who are] buying up land and building houses. What are the pros and cons of this? 

MW: You’re right, we are seeing climate refugees here. We also had pandemic refugees. We’ve seen big new pressures on our housing markets, and that’s the downside. We’ve long had an acute housing crisis, [but] it’s worse than it’s ever been now. The silver lining of that may be it may finally force Vermont to get serious about putting in place land use rules at the local and state level that make it possible to build more housing. 

We desperately need more housing. We’ve got to get better about that, and I think there’ll be environmental benefits if we do. To me, more people living in a green city like Burlington is a good trade-off for the environment. 

AF: Are there other strategies that you have in mind for keeping or making green Burlington affordable? Burlington has a successful community land trust, you encourage accessory dwelling units, you have inclusionary zoning . . . what’s next? 

MW: We have a lot of work to do on our zoning ordinance and our statewide land use reform. Many projects in Vermont now—good projects, good green, energy-efficient projects in settled areas—have to go through both local and statewide land use permitting processes, an almost entirely redundant process that slows things down, adds a lot of costs, and creates all sorts of opportunity for obstruction. We have a lot of work to do and we’re focused on it. There are three major upzoning efforts that we’re pursuing right now and there’s a big conversation about Act 250 [Vermont’s land use and development law] reform happening in the state as well. 

AF: Finally, what advice do you have for other city leaders to take similar climate action, especially in places that aren’t primed for it quite as well as Burlington is? 

MW: Whenever I talk to other mayors about this, I try to make the point that this is an area where political leadership [and community will] can have a huge impact. When I came into office, we had almost no deployed solar here in Burlington. We made it a priority. We changed some rules about permitting. We made it easier for consumers to have solar installed on their homes. The utility played a role, and over a very small number of years, we became one of the cities in the country that had the most solar per capita. We’re number five in the country. The only city in the top 20 on the East Coast at one point, and it’s not an accident. This is making a decision to lead in this area and to make change. You can have a big impact. 

At a time when clearly the climate emergency is an existential threat, at a time when clearly the federal government is paralyzed in its ability to drive change, and when many state governments are similarly gridlocked, mayors and cities can really demonstrate on the ground progress. I think when we do that, we show everybody else what’s possible. 

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor to Land Lines. 

Image: Burlington, Vermont. Credit: Denis Tangney Jr. via iStock/Getty Images.

Even though she’s expecting it, Frances Acuña screens my call. “I’ve been getting a lot of people trying to buy my house,” she explains, after calling me right back. “Sometimes I get five letters in the mail. Five, six, seven, ten calls.”  

The Dove Springs neighborhood in southeast Austin, Texas, where Acuña has lived for 25 years, is just 15 minutes from downtown and right on the edge of the latest wave of gentrification. A decade ago, she says, outsiders wanted no part of the working-class community of modest ranch homes: “To them it was a ghetto area.”  

Then in 2013, the waters of nearby Onion Creek—burdened by nearly 10 inches of rain in a single day—poured into the streets. Five residents died, and more than 500 homes were flooded. Two years later, another historic flood swept in. The City of Austin, which had already begun to buy out and remove homes from this low-lying area with the help of federal grants, accelerated its efforts, eventually acquiring and demolishing more than 800 homes. 

Property acquired through FEMA-funded home buyout programs is legally required to remain “open in perpetuity,” allowing it to safely flood in the future. In this case, the city transformed hundreds of acres of land left behind near Dove Springs into a park. The area now boasts attractive amenities—a playground, a dog park, walking trails, and shady places to rest. These urban improvements, explicitly driven by climate adaptation policy, have made the area even more appealing to the city’s recent influx of newcomers. (With an estimated 180 new arrivals per day in 2020, Austin ranks among the country’s fastest-growing metro areas.) 

But for Acuña, the park is a painful reminder of neighbors who suffered losses—and of the fact that even well-intentioned efforts to move people out of harm’s way can themselves cause harm. “To me, it’s not a happy place to go to,” Acuña says. “Maybe [new residents] don’t even know, because all they see is green space.”  

As floods, wildfires, hurricanes, and other disasters escalate under the influence of climate change, experts from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) to the U.S. Government Accountability Office now widely recommend that municipalities move homes and infrastructure out of hazard-prone areas to save lives and money. But how can that kind of relocation occur in a way that avoids gentrification and displacement, honors the culture and history of the original residents, encourages a shift from reactive to proactive planning, and ensures that those who relocate can find safe, affordable places to live? 

These are the kinds of questions Acuña and a growing web of other community leaders, planners, researchers, agency officials, and policy makers are coming together to address as part of the national Climigration Network. 

Established in 2016 by the Consensus Building Institute, the Climigration Network aims to be a central source of information and support for U.S. communities experiencing or considering relocation due to climate risks. More than 40 percent of U.S. residents, some 132 million people, live in a county that was struck by climate-related extreme weather in 2021 (Kaplan and Tran 2022). Population growth in wildfire-prone areas doubled between 1990 and 2010, and continues to rise. And FEMA counts 13 million Americans living in the 100-year flood zone, while at least one prominent study says the figure is closer to 41 million (Wing et al. 2018). 

The United Nations, the World Bank, and scholars alike recognize that most climate-driven migration occurs within national borders, not across them. But in the United States, conversations about the systems needed to support climate migration have been slow to coalesce, even as climate change bears down on riverine, coastal, and other vulnerable regions. A White House report on the issue released last year marked, by its own estimation, “the first time the U.S. government is officially reporting on the link between climate change and migration” (White House 2021). 

Currently, most climate-related relocation in the United States happens the way it unfolded around Dove Springs. After a disaster strikes, federal recovery money, usually through FEMA or the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is funneled to states and municipalities to buy out damaged homes. Individual homeowners sell their homes at prestorm market value to the government and move elsewhere. According to the NRDC, FEMA has funded more than 40,000 buyouts in 49 states since the 1980s.  

Yet, despite federal buyout programs dating back decades, no official set of best practices or standards exists. Wait times for buyouts take five years on average. Costs for fixes and temporary housing stack up in the interim. Guidance for homeowners on navigating the buyout process is confusing or nonexistent, and relocation policies and funding focus on the individual, not on neighborhoods or communities that want to stay together. 

At the local level, communities considering relocation face a range of social and financial barriers. Municipalities don’t tend to encourage relocation, because they don’t want to lose population or tax revenue. And residents—especially those reeling from a crisis—often lack the capacity and resources to find a new, safe place to live, even if they are willing to leave. 

Despite those obstacles, some small towns have designed new neighborhoods and even entire new towns to relocate to. In the 1970s, a couple of Midwestern villages experiencing chronic flooding—Niobrara, Nebraska, and Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin—initiated some of the earliest community relocation projects. In the 1990s, Pattonsburg, Missouri, and Valmeyer, Illinois, among others, relocated to higher ground following the Great Flood of 1993 along the Mississippi River. As climate impacts escalate, towns and neighborhoods from the Carolinas to Alaska are developing similar plans. But knowledge sharing is rare, as is coordination that could help other communities to refine or even reimagine the process. 

The Climigration Network, in partnership with the Lincoln Institute and others, is connecting climate-affected communities with one another and with professionals poised to help. One of its early concerns was how to introduce the concept of “managed retreat” as an adaptation option for communities facing substantial risk. Meant to convey strategic moves away from disaster-prone areas, the term had become common in the policy discussions that had followed hurricanes and major floods over the previous decade. Should New York City consider managed retreat from its coastline, instead of costly and potentially ineffective seawalls, after Superstorm Sandy? Should Houston, after Hurricane Harvey? Policy makers, planners, and researchers discussed these questions at length, often without input from the affected communities, which found the term and the concept alienating. 

As the Climigration Network began its work, it was immediately obvious that a different kind of conversation was needed, says its director, Kristin Marcell. With funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the network commissioned a Black and Indigenous–led creative team whose members hailed from or had worked with communities affected by the climate crisis. The team, helmed by Scott Shigeoka and Mychal Estrada, proposed reframing the discussion around the actual issues facing towns and neighborhoods that might relocate. Project leaders invited more than 40 frontline leaders to share their post-disaster experiences, and the network compensated them for that work. The result was a set of real-world insights now compiled in a guidebook for discussing climate relocation. 

One clear takeaway: “managed retreat” suffers from more than bad branding. The word “managed,” community leaders made clear to the researchers, calls to mind paternalistic, top-down government programs. In Black and brown communities, it conjures not-so-distant memories of forced removal—the slave trade, the Trail of Tears, internment camps, redlining. And the concept of “retreat” left a lot of questions unanswered. 

“It creates a negative narrative that people are fleeing from something, instead of working toward something else,” the researchers wrote in the guidebook. “The word communicates what we should do, but doesn’t communicate where to go or how to do it” (Climigration Network 2021). 

The Climigration Network is now drawing on those insights in conversations with three community-based organizations in the Midwest, Gulf Coast, and Caribbean that are supporting locals actively weighing adaptation strategies including relocation. Partners in these conversations include the Anthropocene Alliance, a coalition of flood and other disaster survivors across the United States, and Buy-In Community Planning, a nonprofit working to improve home buyout processes. 

Network members have started using more empowering alternatives to “managed retreat,” including “community-led relocation” and “supported relocation.” But the goal isn’t to come up with a single new term or a rigid plan that can be universally adopted. As Marcell notes, it can be “very offensive” when outsiders approach communities with nothing but models and templates. 

“You can’t expect to build trust in a community if you don’t start with an open-ended conversation about how to approach the issue, because [each] context is so unique,” she says. Instead, the network aims to co-create, with each of the three community-based organizations, a method for identifying the specific needs and goals of each place. That includes identifying and interviewing community “influencers” and, with the help of Buy-In Community Planning, developing questions for a door-to-door survey. 

“There’s a lot more individual interaction and coaching that needs to be done with people who are at the hard edge of climate change,” says Osamu Kumasaka of Buy-In Community Planning. He first came to this conclusion while working as a Consensus Building Institute mediator in Piermont, New York, in 2017. The Hudson River town was experiencing the beginnings of chronic flooding: water in basements, swamped backyard gardens, denizens wading through streets on their way to work. A wealthy small town with its own flood resilience committee and access to world-class flood risk data, Piermont nonetheless found itself uncertain about how to move forward. 

“We really struggled to figure out how to squeeze all the work that needed to be done with all these homeowners into public meetings,” Kumasaka says. Each household had very specific factors influencing decisions to stay or leave: elderly parents with special needs, kids about to graduate from high school, plans to retire. Organizing surveys, small discussions, and individualized risk assessments was a more effective approach, Kumasaka says, in helping the community get a better picture of where it stands and where it wants to go. 

In the end, the hope is that this type of legwork can help inform a community strategy, from identifying risk tolerance to submitting an application to a buyout program. The network and its partners hope this highly customizable approach will help communities navigate around barriers others can’t see. 

Just as the Climigration Network did when gathering input from frontline leaders for its guidebook, Buy-In Community Planning compensates members of the three community organizations for their time and insights. It’s a key element of the process—helping to flip the dynamic from one in which outsiders dole out generic research and expertise into a true collaboration in which locals and professionals alike are paid to work toward a shared goal. 

Relocation is an especially thorny subject in low-income, largely Black and brown communities, because residents haven’t historically been extended the same flood protections provided to those in wealthier areas. In discussions about home buyouts, as Kumasaka puts it, there tends to be a “feeling that it’s not fair to jump right to relocation.” 

It’s a fair point, and represents a vicious cycle. In 2020, the FEMA National Advisory Council endorsed research findings that “the more Federal Emergency Management Agency money a county receives, the more whites’ wealth tends to grow, and the more Blacks’ wealth tends to decline, all else equal.” Because funding tends to go to larger communities better positioned to match and accept those resources, “less resource-rich, less-affluent communities cannot access funding to appropriately prepare for a disaster, leading to inadequate response and recovery, and little opportunity for mitigation. Through the entire disaster cycle, communities that have been underserved stay underserved, and thereby suffer needlessly and unjustly” (FEMA NAC 2020). 

The concept of voluntary relocation remains fraught, and the Climigration Network’s three community partners preferred not to be interviewed or identified in this article. The stakes are high as this global crisis makes itself felt locally, and careful engagement can mean the difference between quite literally keeping a community together, or not. 

With its focus on community voices, a project like this could signal a seismic shift in how the United States approaches climate migration, says Harriet Festing, executive director of the Anthropocene Alliance. Festing, who helped the Climigration Network build relationships with the three community organizations, which are all part of the Anthropocene Alliance network, underscores the emerging theme of this work: “Really the only people who can change that conversation [are] the victims of climate change themselves.” 

Back in Austin, Frances Acuña works as an organizer with Go Austin/Vamos Austin, or GAVA, a coalition of residents and community leaders working to support healthy living and neighborhood stability in Austin’s Eastern Crescent, which includes Dove Springs. One of her roles is helping her neighbors better prepare for disaster by taking steps like getting flood insurance, dealing with insurance agents, and learning evacuation routes. She’s bagged up the mud-drenched belongings of flooded-out homeowners, brought city officials to meet with locals in her living room, and triaged emergency situations—like when an elderly couple that had been evacuated following a flood found themselves with three dogs, two cats, and nowhere to stay. 

“I used to love thunder and lightning and pouring rain. It was like seeing God himself in the flesh,” Acuña says. Now, she adds, she can’t go long in a rainstorm before nervously checking out the window. 

Austin’s buyout program in her area provided relocation assistance for homeowners, who had the option to reject or counter the buyout offers they received. But many did not want to leave at all, lobbying unsuccessfully for the city to implement solutions such as a flood wall or channel clearing. 

Despite nearby flooding and the calls and mail from realtors and developers, Acuña has no immediate plans to leave her home. Taking part in Climigration Network conversations with other local leaders guiding their communities through floods, fires, and droughts, she says, has provided a major release: “It was a very therapeutic process, at least for me.” 

In addition to the guidebook, the input from those frontline leaders—who hailed from 10 low-income, Black, and Latinx communities from Mississippi to Nebraska to Washington—powered a strong statement acknowledging the “Great American Climate Migration” and calling for the creation of a federal Climate Migration Agency “to help plan, facilitate, and support U.S. migration.” 

Many of the group’s suggestions—most of which are aimed squarely at government officials—are practical, if not straightforward to execute: provide information free from jargon. Streamline the FEMA home buyout process so money no longer takes five years to land in pockets. Reduce federal grants’ local matching requirements for small, under-resourced communities. 

Other recommendations tackle the larger context of racial inequity, acknowledging the findings that FEMA programs benefit wealthy homeowners more. “People here are living in tents,” says one testimonial included in the statement. “Thousands still don’t have homes after the storms. It frustrates me because I know the government has the funding and the ability to help us. The reason we can’t get the services we need is because of our zip codes.” 

The statement also urges authorities to back plans that allow tight-knit communities the option to relocate together instead of sending each homeowner off individually. 

It’s an option that Terri Straka of South Carolina would appreciate. Like Acuña, she’s an active leader in her community who has participated in Climigration Network conversations and joined the call for a new climate migration office. She’s lived in Rosewood Estates, a blue-collar neighborhood in Socastee, South Carolina, on the Intracoastal Waterway outside of Myrtle Beach, for nearly 30 years. For a long time, flooding wasn’t an issue, but in recent years, that changed: since 2016, Straka’s county has weathered at least 10 hurricanes and tropical storms. Average national flood insurance payouts there have increased fivefold in less than a decade, from a little less than $14,000 to just under $70,000. In the most recent flood, Straka’s 1,300-square-foot ranch took on four feet of water, which didn’t drain for two weeks. 

“It’s nothing fabulous, but it’s home,” Straka says. “I raised all my children in it. I know everyone.” Her parents live in the neighborhood. Local high schoolers use the streets for driving school practice. “I’ve watched so many kids grow up.” 

These days, she says, “they call me Terri Jean the Rosewood Queen.” It’s a name she’s earned following the neighborhood floods, as she advocated for her neighbors in visits to local FEMA and county housing offices, made phone calls to state recovery officials, and staged protests at county council meetings. Many of her neighbors would have moved after the first couple of floods if they’d been able to, Straka says. She and others pushed for a buyout program, but the federally funded offers were less than adequate by the time they came through in 2021; community members continue to push for better offers. A lot of her neighbors are service industry workers in Myrtle Beach’s robust tourism trade. Others have retired on a fixed income. Many had already sunk money into repairing their homes. For others, buyouts would only pay off their current mortgages, falling far short of the amount needed to purchase comparable new homes, to say nothing of flood insurance.  

“You live on the outskirts of Myrtle Beach itself because, number one, you can’t afford to live in Myrtle Beach,” Straka says. “Even if you have the option, if the buyout would be financially beneficial, where do you go? And how do you do that?” 

The Climigration Network and its partners are coming at these questions from several directions. The three community organizations now working with the network are on track to conduct their surveys and use the results to begin developing local strategies this summer. The network hopes to create a small grant program that could fund similar work in other communities. Meanwhile, members have formed six workgroups of technical experts and community leaders, with focus areas ranging from policy and research to narrative building and communications, that meet regularly to discuss how to identify and help dismantle the many roadblocks communities face. Taken together, these efforts are an attempt to lay the foundation for a whole new field of climate adaptation. 

“Not everyone is trying to go out in the field and build a system for helping 13 million people move in the next 50 years,” says Kelly Leilani Main, executive director of Buy-In Community Planning, chair of the Climigration Network’s Ecosystems and People workgroup, and a member of its Interim Council. “We’re building the bridge as we’re walking across it.” 

Doing so, Main and other network members agree, will require continuing to build trust and deep working relationships with residents on the ground. Like Acuña, Straka says that sharing the story of her own experiences with others in the Climigration Network has been a critical first step. “When we would have meetings, I was completely honest,” Straka says. “And they gave you that capability to be vulnerable, because you are vulnerable.” 

The whole process was far removed from her experiences hitting walls with state and federal officials, she adds. The officials she’s dealt with “don’t get it. It’s a job to them, they go to work, they’ve got these projects to do,” she says. “The involvement on a personal level is what’s going to bring big change. That’s what’s needed.”  

Alexandra Tempus is writing a book on America’s Great Climate Migration for St. Martin’s Press. 

Lead image: Frances Acuña walks through a detention pond area designed to help protect her Austin, Texas, neighborhood from flooding. Credit: Austin American-Statesman/USA TODAY Network.

REFERENCES 

Climigration Network. 2021. Lead with Listening: A Guidebook for Community Conversations on Climate Migration. https://www.climigration.org/guidebook. 

FEMA NAC. 2020. “National Advisory Council Report to the Administrator.” November. Washington, DC: Federal Emergency Management Agency.  

Kaplan, Sarah, and Andrew Ba Tran. 2022. “More Than 40 Percent of Americans Live in Counties Hit by Climate Disasters in 2021.” The Washington Post. January 5. 

White House. 2021. “Report on the Impact of Climate Change on Migration.” October. Washington, DC: The White House. 

Wing, Oliver E.J., and Paul D. Bates, Andrew M. Smith, Christopher C. Sampson, Kris A. Johnson, Joseph Fargione, and Philip Morefield. 2018. “Estimates of Current and Future Flood Risk in the Conterminous United States.” Environmental Research Letters 13(3). February. 

In San Diego, the owner of a newly purchased, median-priced home paid more than $9,000 in property taxes last year, about $3,400 more than somebody who has owned an identical home for 14 years, the average duration of home ownership in the city, according to a new study from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Minnesota Center for Fiscal Excellence.  

A result of the assessment limit contained in California’s Proposition 13, the disparity in tax bills for new and longtime homeowners in San Diego grew by $600 last year alone as property values increased, and it has grown by more than $2,000 in five years, according to the 50-State Property Tax Comparison Study.  

Assessment limits restrict the growth in the assessed value of a home for tax purposes, usually allowing a property to be assessed at its full market value only after it is sold. Over time, as the value of a home increases, its owner receives an increasingly large tax break. New and recent homebuyers make up for these tax breaks by paying higher bills. San Diego is one of 29 large cities with assessment limits analyzed in the study. In these cities, longtime homeowners receive an average tax break worth $1,600, a 30 percent discount compared with tax bills of new homeowners. 

Produced annually, the 50-State Property Tax Comparison Study provides the nation’s most comprehensive analysis of local property tax rates by calculating the effective tax rate—the tax paid as a percentage of market value—for 74 large U.S. cities and a rural municipality in each state. The study considers property tax exemptions, credits, the accuracy of assessments, and other factors to provide meaningful comparisons of tax rates and bills for residential, commercial, and industrial property. It also analyzes the key factors that drive differences in tax rates among cities. 
 
One of the main drivers of variation in tax rates is the extent to which each city relies on the property tax. In Bridgeport, Connecticut, for example, residents pay one of the highest effective property tax rates on a median-valued home, but they pay no local sales or income taxes. Birmingham, Alabama, by contrast, has some of the lowest effective property tax rates, but its residents pay significantly more in total local taxes than Bridgeport’s—$3,201, per capita, compared to $2,221 in Bridgeport—because Birmingham also relies on local sales and income taxes. 
 
A second major driver of variation in tax rates is the difference in property values in different markets. Cities with high property values can collect the same revenue with a lower rate than cities with low property values. For example, to collect $3,424—the average amount collected for a median-valued home in the study—the effective property tax rate would need to be 20 times higher in Detroit, which has the lowest home values in the study, than in San Francisco, which has the highest home values.  

Other factors in the variation of property tax rates include differing levels of local government spending, and differences in how various classes of property, such as residential, commercial, and industrial, are treated relative to each other. 
 
The study found that among the largest cities in each state, the average effective tax rate on a newly purchased, median-valued home was 1.3 percent in 2021, with wide variation across cities. Three cities had effective tax rates that were at least double the national average, and eight had rates that were less than half the average.

Highest and Lowest Effective Property Tax Rates on a Newly Purchased Median-Valued Home (2021) 

The study also finds significant variation in effective tax rates for commercial property such as office buildings. In 2021, the average tax rate on a $1 million building was 1.9 percent in the largest city in each state. Detroit and Chicago had the highest rates, at more than double the national average, and Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Seattle had the lowest rates, at less than half the national average. 

Highest and Lowest Effective Property Tax Rates on $1-Million Commercial Property (2021) 

The report is available for download on the Lincoln Institute website: https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/other/50-state-property-tax-comparison-study-2021

Will Jason is the director of communications at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 

Image: La Jolla Coast Aerial. Credit: Art Wager via GettyImages.