Flood risks keep rising in N.J. Will more homeowners be paid to leave?

Flood risks keep rising in N.J. Will more homeowners be paid to leave? / January 27, 2024 / NJ.com

By Steven Rodas

Outside Phil Rosso’s porch sits the empty lot where his daughter’s house stoodbefore the remnants of Hurricane Ida blew through opens in a new windowLambertville in 2021 and sent the house careening into the nearby creek.

That home and another next to it were ultimately bought by opens in a new windowNew Jersey’s Blue Acres program and the remaining structures were torn down.

Only a barren patch of land remains, a stark reminder for Rosso of what storms and flooding could bring to his own property right next door.

“Honestly, I don’t feel safe here,” the 60-year-old building inspector admits.

Rosso’s home did not qualify for a buyout because, state officials told him, the level of damage was not significant enough.

“We still return there all the time … that can be a blessing and a curse,” Stephanie Cepparulo, Rosso’s daughter whose home was purchased, chimes in. “You’re still sort of stuck looking at the trauma of it but I’m grateful that my parents’ home still stands.”

It’s a story that will only continue to play out across New Jersey for the years and decades to come, forcing residents statewide to confront the realities more floodwaters will inevitably bring — as many did opens in a new windowin early January.

Over the past 30 years, New Jersey has used more than $211 million, of mostly federal funding, to buy more than 1,100 flood-prone homes from their owners, according to data obtained by NJ Advance Media from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection via an Open Public Records Act request.

The goal, state officials said, is to help homeowners who face repeated flooding risks by encouraging them to relocate.

But its intent is also to acquire entire flood-prone neighborhoods so the land can remain as open space, absorb stormwater runoff and act as a buffer to lessen impacts in other areas — and to try do so proactively. Since the program’s inception, though, that’s rarely been the case.

An NJ Advance Media analysis of state data found that more than half the funds have been spent buying hundreds of properties in just four towns — Woodbridge, Sayreville, Manville and South River — and most of it in the wake of major storms like Hurricane Sandy. Of the 35 towns that have seen funding for buyouts, more than half had fewer than 10 homeowners — in some cases just one — taking the offer.

As climate change increases the frequency and severity of storms across New Jersey, more people’s properties will be in jeopardy. opens in a new windowSome estimates from New Jersey planners have placed as much as 18% of the state in opens in a new window“flood hazard areas” where families are especially at risk of being overwhelmed by stormwater from inclement weather.

State officials and experts say paying people to leave their homes through the voluntary Blue Acres program will be an increasingly important tool — and could even become mandatory. But homeowners and critics say the state-administered program — which relies on opens in a new windowup to 75% in federal funding — can be time-consuming, forestalled by bureaucracy, and will need to drastically improve.

What’s needed for a better outcome?

Throughout interviews with NJ Advance Media, officials acknowledged more resources at the state level, more state-dedicated money to hand out, fewer hurdles to access those funds, better communication for people affected, an improved application process — and a less reactive andmore proactive system.

The reason for that was readily apparent in Little Falls this month.

The Passaic River, which snakes by the 3-square-mile town, rose and flooded parts of the Singac neighborhood. Water seeped into the backyards of homes along Riverview Circle, caking the area in mud and muck, and sending debris down streetscapes.

Gov.Phil Murphy would later visit a flooded section where a former homeowner — who now lives in Florida but still rents a place in the neighborhood to visit — would remark that “they should have never built here.”

Despite constant and devastating flooding, Little Falls has relocated just 8 homeowners via buyouts since 1995, the year the state’s Blue Acres program launched.

It’s just another example of what critics argue has been a somewhat haphazard system.

“People have different risk tolerances. Some people want to stay in their home no matter what. Other people have lower risk tolerances, and they’re more willing to consider relocating,” said Laura Geronimo, a PhD candidate with Rutgers University’s Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy. “So ultimately, this whole process is really a social process.”

Winning the lottery or years of headache

Cathy Smith was among New Jersey’s first buyout recipients.

She was 40, single and pregnant when she got the $141,000 offer on her Lincoln Park home in 1998 — just six weeks after she submitted her application.

“When I tell people the story, they’re like, ‘Really?’ I say, ‘I swear to God,’” said Smith, now 65 and living in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Smith has never won the lottery but joked “that day was that for me.”

Buyouts are inevitably complicated and no one’s experience is the same, activists with the New Jersey Organizing Project said about the stories upon stories they’ve encountered. The grassroots group helps families navigate the complicated natural disaster recovery system and secure housing.

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Maryann Morris, 44 of Manville, is one of the latest to close the deal on a buyout just this month, but the process was “convoluted” and lacked clear communication, she said. Morris said it took “fighting” after receiving an initial $325,000 buyout offer she was not happy with, to get another $98,000 to cover relocation costs.

Leanna Jones, 40 of Milford, applied for Blue Acres in early September 2021 right after Ida and hopes she receives an offer soon. But the single mom, who was recently laid off, admits her already-existing depression has only worsened while waiting for buyout updates that will affect her and her two children.

Chris Varga, a 57-year-old film set technician who lives in High Bridge, launched an entire website dedicated to laying out information to his case manager and others during his buyout application, which closed in 2013 after two years.

New Jersey Organizing Project members worry that accepting a buyout offer isn’t feasible for homeowners who can’t afford to wait six months or more for the money — or the time after for it to close and their relocation begin.

“That is an issue,” said Geronimo, of Rutgers’ planning and public policy school, while discussing the expenses people take on while waiting for buyouts.

”Did they have to rent a house?” Geronimo asked. “In the meantime, are they still paying mortgage on their damaged home? If we can speed up the process of the buyout, then that’s a huge financial relief.”

NJDEP spokeswoman Caryn Shinske said one way the department has worked to alleviate slowdowns in the process is to offer closing services via its own title company to save homeowners on attorney closing costs and time.

“However, some factors like homeowner responsiveness during the process or the time it takes for a homeowner to secure replacement housing can impact the process duration and these elements are largely out of DEP’s control,” Shinske said. “The buyout process can also be longer if there are on-site environmental issues (e.g., buried/underground storage tank), title issues that must be resolved, or if homeowners appeal their appraisal value.”

Money, but no plan?

In Lambertville, Stephanie Cepparulo and her husband Nick accepted a $380,000 offer last March to leave a home that was no longer habitable.

Her house is one of only two properties that have been bought out in Lambertville since Ida hit more than two years ago, despite the town being inundated by floodwaters in 2021.

In all, the NJDEP heard from about 400 property owners throughout the state interested in receiving a buyout after that storm and another 180 since.

Meanwhile, in Manville, more than $22 million has been spent paying homeowners to flee their flooded properties over the years — the third-highest amount spent in any town across the state.

And more are likely on the way.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently approved a policy — separate from Blue Acres — that would no longer pay residents to elevate their homes in Manville. That includes the entire “Lost Valley” section of the town, which straddles the Raritan River. Elevations in the state, managed by the Department of Community Affairs, are often covered by other federal funds.

For some in Manville, homeowners’ only options will be to brave the risks of more flooding likely to come, whether they pay for costly elevations themselves or not, or get paid to leave.

And their frustrations are evident.

“Our families spent insurance and/or personal funds to rebuild, took out loans, and went into crippling debt to have a safe place to live,” said Holly Ganz, a homeowner in Manville who pointed out that the new policy came into effect more than two years after Ida struck the town.

A combination of mortgage interest rate increases and the difficulty of finding a home in the first place has made for an untenable recipe for many families, she said.

“We believe New Jersey can do much better by its families that have faced horrific floods,” said Ganz, growing exasperated, “and the challenges of a broken disaster recovery system.”

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Mandatory buyouts, online forms and upgrades

Buyouts typically gain traction in the Garden State in the aftermath of a natural disaster.

Seven years after Hurricane Sandy, the state opens in a new windowbought out its 700th home — but none at the time were on the ocean which bore the brunt of that storm.

New Jersey benefits from having a longstanding permanent Blue Acres program, which not all states have, to help funnel federal post-storm funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other sources. That doesn’t mean there aren’t delays, according to Susan Bristol, a municipal policy specialist for The Watershed Institute.

“Weather events and climate change-induced flooding is accelerating,” said Bristol, also a councilwoman in Rocky Hill, “and government typically moves relatively slowly.”

Delays in federal funding for buyouts come in all forms. They may happen because a new administration is in office and money available for a program meets a roadblock. An impacted homeowner may want to dispute the initial appraisal they get. Or they may need time to get their documents — some of which may have been destroyed by flooding — in order. Or they’re waiting to hear back from a case manager.

A FEMA spokesperson highlighted some of the same causes of delays the state did, namely environmental and historic preservation reviews that can turn buyouts into a slog.

Because of the drawn-out process, some of the eligible homeowners lose interest. As a result, the attempt to buy contiguous parcels of land — the best plan for building a buffer against future floods and letting nature take its course — ends up unsuccessful.

The Nature Conservancy and Texas A&M University opens in a new windowin a recent study found “clustered buyouts” had benefits for flood mitigation, people and the environment. Lead authors said that planning ahead of time with that in mind, especially in areas known to have repeated flooding, will only save lives and be a boon for nature.

“We need to tool ourselves to respond … more immediately to those (natural disaster) events but also plan proactively with respect to the places that we know are going to be repeatedly damaged,” NJDEP Commissioner Shawn LaTourette also noted in an interview at the start of January.

LaTourette told NJ Advance Media that mandatory buyouts, as opposed to the traditional voluntary program, are not out of the question for New Jersey.

“I don’t think we’re at that point yet as a matter of political attention and will. But I do think that we ultimately will find ourselves in that point. I couldn’t possibly tell you when that will be,” LaTourette continued, “but I think you see the beginnings of that trajectory in a story like Manville.”

Last September, the NJDEP — which only just in July 2022 launched online buyout applications — also opens in a new windowoutlined how it could expand the program in other ways going forward. That included bettering how it “prioritize(s) socially vulnerable populations.”

Historically, that has been harder to do due to worries over redlining and applications not specifically seeking homeowners’ race and ethnicity, said Clinton Andrews, the director of Rutgers’ Center for Urban Policy Research.

Federal money can come from various programs, such as the Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery program or FEMA “Swift Current” resilience funding.

The amount of state money allocated to the program each year through the corporate business tax can vary. This year, however, another $10 million was requested to be set aside for Blue Acres, the DEP said.

Although it is a positive step, those funds are “still small in relation to the demand, which is small in relation to the actual need,” the NJDEP commissioner said.

The state also intends to work more so with towns to incorporate buyouts into broader “climate resilience planning,” said Nick Angarone, the state’s Chief Resilience Officer. Rutgers University has developed a calculator that will help by determining where buyouts make the most sense for towns to do economically.

Courtney Wald-Wittkop, the state’s program manager, said having a public display indicating which properties have been recipients of buyouts would be helpful, as well.

“This is something that historically hadn’t been done,” Wald-Wittkop said. “I think it’s super important that if you’re driving through a neighborhood, that you can see a sign and it indicates that this was Blue Acres-funded, that it’s a flood-prone area.”

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As the Blue Acres program expands, advocates say they’ll be able to make better decisions with more data.

Some of the gaps that exist today are glaring.

Before Ida, Blue Acres did not track where homeowners moved post-buyout. That information is now gathered, although residents aren’t required to provide it and it doesn’t influence who gets buyout offers, state officials said.

The department, which doesn’t have data on how long each buyout can take from start to finish, said it estimated on average six to 12 months. But that timeline has been disputed by some environmental groups and opens in a new windowRutgers found programs solely using federal money can take as long as 18 to 36 months.

Morris, the Manville woman who recently closed on her buyout, said hers took about two years. And she had to use $25,000 of her own money for legal fees and other expenses while advocating for a better offer.

“You have to … pretty much have all your ducks in a row,” Morris said.

Why has she been so vocal against a program that, in short, rescued her from the harm and financial pitfalls of flooding?

After some thought, Morris answers bluntly: “I don’t want anybody to go through the same situation that I’ve gone through.”