Carried by Water Season 2, Episode 2: “A Matter of Consequence”

Full Transcript

Mario: In the early spring of 2015, Monique Coleman’s house on Heidelberg Avenue in Woodbridge, New Jersey was demolished. It was among the first properties acquired by the state’s Blue Acres program in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

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Monique:  My family sat and watched our house being razed. I think we were one of the first houses to be demolished. Not the first, but one of the first. So they kind of made an event out of it. So we sat in our chairs in front of the property and, you know, just saw the whole process. That was really incredible to see the home that we had lived in for seven years be reduced to nothing.

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Mario: Photos from that day show a yellow excavator tearing into a two-storey A-frame, colonial style house. Standing on the street are Monique and her family, along with city and state officials and the media, all bearing witness.

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Monique: You see different parts of the house going down, right? And it's like, oh, that's where their bedrooms were, where they played, you know. My kids didn't really show a lot of emotion. I think they were just amazed at the whole production, right? Um, but yeah, it was a little emotional just seeing that where they had lived and spent a lot of their childhood years playing and, and growing up. You know, it was emotional, I guess, to an extent, but at that point I was just relieved that we were going to be out of the situation that we were in. And it had been a stressful, long period. So we were ready to move on.

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Mario: When we met with her in the fall of 2024, Monique vividly recalled that her house had suffered back-to-back flooding in 2010 and 2011. Then, in 2012, Superstorm Sandy hit, bringing catastrophic flooding to her community that far exceeded those previous experiences. That was the final straw for Monique. Retreat sounded like relief.

Monique’s house was located in the Watson-Crampton neighborhood of Woodbridge Township. About 100 acres, this  part of town is bounded by water on three sides: the Woodbridge River, Heards Brook, and Wedgewood Brook. Nearly a fifth of Woodbridge lies within a “Special Flood Hazard Area”, as designated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA.

In the late 90’s to early 2000’s, the Army Corps of Engineers led study after study to investigate the feasibility of doing structural flood mitigation in town. Each time, their conclusion was either that more study was needed or that such measures were infeasible.

Many in the community had voiced frustration with government inaction despite the frequency of flooding events. One of Monique’s neighbors wrote the following in a 2003 letter addressed to a New Jersey senator at the time:

Dear Senator Frank Lautenberg:

As a resident of Woodbridge Township who often falls victim to flooding as result of our proximity to the Woodbridge River, I wish to express my dissatisfaction with the decision by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to only perform further study of the flooding problem, rather than immediately begin corrective action.

Further study will only confirm what we already know...that people whose homes lie near the Woodbridge River will be in constant danger of flooding until the Army Corps acts. The problem is obvious. At this point, we need help...not further study. It is imperative that federal funding be made available to alleviate this situation, which erodes the quality of life for dozens and dozens of Woodbridge Township families.

Very truly yours,

Alberta D. Gladis

Woodbridge, NJ 07095

October 21, 2003

Despite such advocacy, no concrete measures were approved at the time. The Army Corps concluded that any flood mitigation investments were economically unjustifiable and therefore warranted quote “no further Federal interest.” end quote

After Superstorm Sandy, in 2012, the state government finally did offer something to residents of Woodbridge and other New Jersey flood-prone communities. The government’s proposal: a $300 million dollar buyout fund for repeatedly flooded homes, to be administered via Blue Acres, a state program first established in 1995.

With this influx of money into Blue Acres, both the state’s Department of Environment that administers Blue Acres and the federal agencies wanted to target for buyouts homes in contiguous neighborhood blocks. For Monique Coleman, that directive led her to organize her neighbors to come together and apply to the program collectively.

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Monique:   There was just so much that we had to do, in terms of the community organizing piece. It was knocking on doors, speaking to neighbors, letting them know about the program. This could be an option for us, but it was a community model.  And also just spreading awareness about what would happen if they did stay, with the flood insurance rates promised to increase substantially because we were now clearly this high risk zone. That was an important part of our process. But it was difficult because some of the people had been there for like 30, 40 years, right? Multi generational families had been in the community for a long time. And so ultimately it really was about, for us, helping other people understand what the consequences would be of staying there. Right?

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Mario: Monique’s and others’ grassroots efforts gained steam, and as a result, Woodbridge holds the distinction of being the town with the largest number of post-Sandy buyouts in the state of New Jersey.

In the years after the storm, Blue Acres acquired over 170 properties in the township, many of them concentrated in the Watson-Crampton neighborhood. Since the buyouts, most of those houses have been demolished. Today, a decade later, those blocks once occupied by homes have become permanent open space.

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Monique:  My kids used to go and play back there. So it was a very short dead end street. Where those posts are, was the cutoff for the block.

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Mario: We’re standing in this open space in the place where Monique’s house stood.

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Monique: So, yeah, this is it. We had a colonial style two story home and really, pretty nice sized property. We had a beautiful garden that my husband kept, vegetable garden that my husband kept here, and we missed that a lot, you know. But, yeah, this is it.

Mario: Was this tree here when you lived in the area?

Monique:  Yeah, I'm trying to picture, yes, this was the tree that was actually… Was this on my property or was this on the neighbor's property? I feel like this tree might have been on the neighbor's property, right? Near our driveway, I'm not sure. It is hard to put everything where it was because it's just this wild land, so to speak, now.

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Mario: Monique’s experience—of organizing her neighbors to apply for Blue Acres buyouts but also of grappling with the emotional weight of leaving one’s home and community—shows how such local, individual decisions are bound up with complex histories of places designated as too hazardous to be sustained, as ideal candidates for “managed retreat.”

If we take a closer look, who, can we say, is really managing managed retreat?

From Princeton University’s Blue Lab, this is Carried by Water. I’m Mario Soriano.

Episode 2. A matter of consequence

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Liz:  You know, you could talk about the managed part and you could talk about the retreat part. I actually felt more critical of the managed part because this idea that someone's managing someone else and that's how retreat is going to play out is an assumption that's embedded in the term and an assumption that I've tried to challenge through my own research.

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Mario: This is Liz Koslov. Now a professor in urban planning and environment and sustainability at UCLA, Liz was a PhD student in New York City when Hurricane Sandy struck. Curious about managed retreat as a response to the disaster, she ultimately designed her dissertation around a study of neighborhoods on Staten Island, where communities were organizing to advocate for buyouts from the government. Residents of the Staten Island neighborhood of Oakwood Beach in particular took the lead in advocating for their own retreat.

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Liz:  These residents in the neighborhood who were already organized around flooding, this group that had called itself the Oakwood Beach Flood Victims Committee, and then became the Oakwood Beach Buyout Committee after Sandy. They organized a meeting. They were leading it. The media was not there. Government officials were not there. It was really a meeting for them and their neighbors to talk about, “What's our future going to look like here?” And so most people in the neighborhood encountered buyouts as an option through people they already knew and trusted and identified with. Demand for buyouts became so widespread in this particular neighborhood and really, you know, almost unanimous.

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Mario: I asked Liz if this was an example of grassroots managed retreat. Her response made it clear that there wasn’t a straightforward answer.

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Liz:  There was a lot of debate when buyouts were first announced among the residents I was spending time with who were saying that officials at different levels of government were taking a lot of credit for something that they saw as their initiative and their plan, because they were the ones to advocate for this. But on the other hand, of course it couldn't have happened without there being a government program. So, the idea that it was sort of managed and clear-cut in the New York case was not, not my experience.

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Mario: Similar to Woodbridge, for Oakwood Beach, a community’s voluntary retreat required both grassroots organizing and government investment and infrastructure. But even then, the consent for retreat was not universal. Only some neighborhoods that wanted buyouts got government funding for them, while others did not. Other neighborhoods did not want buyouts at all, and instead wanted help so they could stay and rebuild in place.

In a later study, Liz and her colleagues surveyed residents across these different neighborhoods to gain insights into the long-term outcomes of these different paths. They found that people who stayed, whether out of choice or for not having received a buyout, faced higher stress levels than people who received a buyout and relocated. The study called this “the stress of staying put”.

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Liz: And some of this higher stress was partly down to rising flood insurance rates, you know, the sense that even if people were opting to stay and rebuild their homes, not only were they maybe having to fight their insurance companies, take on a lot of debt, but they were also facing down a future where they might still wind up displaced. Could they afford to stay in those houses if flood insurance rates went up? Could they afford to sell them if they did decide to move? Would the effects of climate change, you know, make their neighborhoods increasingly uninhabitable? And so I think there were all these ways in which staying in that situation didn't necessarily equate to a recovery, even if people did manage to rebuild in place. Whereas, what I certainly noticed from talking to people who were seeking buyouts is that a number of them felt very strongly that a buyout offer was  their greatest chance to achieve some sort of closure.

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Mario: Closure was what Monique Coleman felt as she witnessed her home being torn down. She also felt relief knowing that no one else would face flooding on the same plot of land.

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Monique:  I know it sounds probably not like it was great to see your home being demolished, but for us it was like, okay, this is the finality of it all. Like, we have closed the book, this chapter is over, and this is what it looks like. It was a kind of a good feeling, too. Like, finally, this is what we needed, this is what we fought for this long, and here we are.

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Mario: The road to this moment was not always smooth. Monique shared that it took convincing the Woodbridge town council to work with her neighborhood for the Blue Acres buyouts. She recalled that those conversations were initially adversarial, with she and her neighbors storming council meetings to have their voices heard. Eventually, the township got on board and saw Blue Acres as a way for people to get the relief they sought.

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Monique: I  think the council and the mayor saw how organized we were becoming with having our meetings, you know, spreading awareness. Especially with the state having developed this Blue Acres model for Sandy victims. So it really made a lot of sense to work together as opposed to being oppositional. Yeah, especially because we knew at that point that we were not going to get relief any other way. The Army Corps of Engineers, they said, you know, it's not economically feasible to do any kind of structural mediation here. Once that option was out the picture, we're like, this is all we have. You know, we have the Blue Acres program and it may not be the best financially for the municipality, but you have a whole community here that is, you know, is really hurting.

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Mario: Multiple levels of government needed to be on board with Monique and her neighbors in order for retreat to happen.  In the case of local governments, they have to consider the potential implications for their tax base, as well as the fact that they will have to steward the new open spaces from the buyout lots.

One place that appears to have avoided retreat is the waterfront town of Lambertville, New Jersey— a tight-knit community of about 4,000 people that’s 45 miles southwest of Woodbridge. We spoke with the town’s mayor, Andrew Nowick.

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Andrew: I was elected in 2021 and was sworn in in January of 2022. I'm finishing my first term. I've just been re-elected for a second term, which will start on January 1st, 2025. Um, I've lived here in Hunterdon County for the last 20 years, in Lambertville for the last 13 years. My husband and I have raised our three children here and have found it a great community in which to live and work.

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Mario: Lambertville sits on what’s been called the “other” Jersey shore, along the banks of the historic Delaware River.

Andrew was campaigning for mayor when the remnants of Hurricane Ida caused massive flooding in town. His first term as mayor was shaped by that Ida flood experience, and the town’s recovery became his administration’s central focus.

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Andrew: It shaped everything I did. The city had suffered more than three million dollars worth of infrastructure problems. Our creeks were decimated. We lost a 44-apartment complex, you know, in the flood. A number of houses were uninhabitable for months and months. My house wasn't flooded, but a lot of my neighbor's houses were, and it was so monumental, it took me a couple of hours just to figure out what I wanted to be doing as a person that day. And I finally just went up to somebody and said, let me help you carry that out of your house. And that began my commitment to the community in terms of recovery, in terms of support, and in terms of setting future goals.

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Mario: The flooding that happened with Ida was unprecedented. Given the widespread damage and the physical hazards posed by the town’s geography, the number of Blue Acres buyouts in Lambertville is surprising. In the four years since the storm there have been just two such buyouts.

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Andrew: So initially there was a lot of interest in the program, and I think part of why there weren't more applicants that kind of followed through on that were, was that, people did start to rebuild, right? And, you know, these programs take a long time. So it was more than two years for the first buyout to happen on Curly Lane. So people began to reassess, I think.

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Mario: Mayor Nowick noted that there were at least  three more Blue Acres applications that were being processed at the time when we spoke. For his part, he was focusing more on various efforts to enhance the town’s capacity to manage stormwater—efforts that are within the town’s direct control.

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Andrew:  We just recently adopted the stormwater control ordinance. We have stricter requirements here to deal with impervious surface and recharge and development. We got a stormwater utility feasibility study that we did last year that's given us incredible data about what the city will need to undertake in the coming years to better manage stormwater. We have a resilience team undertaking a resilience action plan. So we're looking at all the different ways in which we can have an impact on stormwater and flooding here in town.

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Mario: While  Mayor Nowick does not see large-scale managed retreat materializing in his town in the near term, he ultimately recognizes that it’s an important option to keep open in the face of increasing flood risk.

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Andrew: I think that we're coming to a place in communities, whether it's Lambertville or Manville or other communities across the country where managed retreats are going to be an important part of dealing with climate volatility. But I don't know that we're going to see it in a large scale way here in Lambertville anytime soon. We're certainly at risk, but three years after the most consequential flood in a generation or more, people have settled back in, people want to be here. Market rate values continue to increase. So it's hard to put forward a policy of managed retreat when people really don't want to leave, right?

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Mario: People don’t want to leave, and market rate values continue to increase.

In the mayor’s reflections, we see that the deep attachments people have to their homes and communities and economic forces are all in the mix when it comes to managed retreat. According to Data USA, the median value of a property in Lambertville was over $530,000 in 2022. In comparison, it was $344,000 in Woodbridge and $301,000 in Manville.

Viewed one way, residents who can afford expensive properties in the first place probably have more resources and capacities to rebuild in place after a disaster. Or, viewed from another way, maybe the state finds it harder to justify funding buyouts in places where the properties are expensive compared to places where the homes are more affordable.

How do these market forces and economic realities shape managed retreat?

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Jim: When you put money from managed retreat programs through the same market mechanisms and questions of voluntary retreat, it's going to end up like most market outcomes. Very unequal.

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Mario: Jim Elliott is a sociologist who studies the disparities in the outcomes of managed retreat.

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Jim: I'm a professor and chair of the sociology department here at Rice University in Houston, Texas. I'm also the co-director of a newly formed center called the Center for Coastal Futures and Adaptive Resilience. I do research on social inequalities and climate events, including long term recovery and adaptation and increasingly the question of climate relocation or mobilities.

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Mario: Jim has been looking at how recovery unfolds after disasters, having experienced a number of them himself. He was in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck. He moved to Houston, Texas in 2014, and was there when Hurricane Harvey caused massive flooding three years later.

He discovered that Harris County, where Houston is located, is a national leader in government funded buyouts. The county, which is about 1/5th the size of New Jersey, had acquired over 4,000 flood-prone properties since 1985. That’s almost quadruple the number of properties acquired by Blue Acres.

The vast majority of the Harris County buyouts are voluntary. But in 2020, the county commissioners instituted mandatory buyouts as part of a post-Hurricane Harvey recovery program. The first mandatory buyouts happened in 2021. Early reporting in the target communities shows that the new program is leading to the disintegration of Black and Latino communities.

Jim Elliott’s work has uncovered similar racial and socioeconomic inequities in the outcomes of voluntary buyouts. Those inequities are not only material but also manifest in terms of community attachment.

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Jim:  What we found is that neighborhoods that were more white and residential composition and that were more affluent in terms of median home values in that area tended to stay closer both to their homes when they retreated and to each other. So in other words, they were able to maintain attachment more than neighborhoods or people retreating from neighborhoods where they might have been more composed of people of color or lower value housing.

And so what that told us is that as this retreat is happening, more privileged communities can actually maintain their social value, and those that have been historically underserved and underprivileged have been facing more of a choice. Do I stay in place and maintain my social capital or do I leave and maintain my economic equity in my home because I can move now and take that money with me to a safer place, but basically having to sacrifice more of their social and community attachment.

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Mario: We see this tension between economic and social values in both the drivers of retreat, as in where buyouts are implemented in the first place, as well as in its outcomes, as in what happens after. Jim says that current policies for retreat tend to prioritize economic factors and cost-benefit ratios at the expense of social capital. He says that unless something changes in the implementation of managed retreat, these programs risk replicating historical inequities.

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Jim: What's entered into the conversation more locally is a realization that I think that's been there and suspected, but hasn't been empirically verified until some of our research, which is again, same policy, comes into the same disaster zone. But when it enters into communities that have been historically unequal in terms of access to resources and expectations of public infrastructure, that same policy can end up in very different results. And so, is that a matter of intent? Do we think FEMA is intending to do that? No, but it is a matter of consequence. So, what if we are able to provide more funds to buy out participants in lower income communities, would that allow them to find housing that's closer, might be a little bit more expensive, but if we provide more of a down payment assistance, can we sort of tip the balance so that the outcomes and the metrics become more equitable or similar.

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Mario: As Jim and I were wrapping up our conversation, we got to talking about floods in the Philippines, the setting of this podcast’s first season. I shared how flooding was such a common life experience that people would often just clean up any debris left behind the day after and move on. Jim offered a provocative insight about choice and agency in such communities. Here’s that part of our conversation.

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Mario: One of the researchers I've been reading a lot like lately, um, was Greg Bankoff, who writes about in the context of the Philippines, like hazard as a frequent life experience and how people have really absorbed the hazards into their everyday life ways.

Jim:  And probably not by choice, right? Although people love their villages, right? So this is the tension I always see. Yeah, people are attached to the community, but they really wish it didn't flood. And sometimes you become more attached to your community because you can't imagine where else you could go. One because you haven't necessarily been a lot of different places. But the other is you don't necessarily have the resources to go actualize those choices. So a big part of this in our minds when we are studying this, it seems like people, even in the face of climate risk that's been manifest, you know, in their neighborhoods three, four times.

You don't move from something. You got to move to something. So unless there's a ‘to’, this sort of stays in place. So that's community attachment, but it's also something else. It's not necessarily having the options or being well resourced or knowledgeable about what the ‘to’ could be, right?

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Mario: Let me just repeat that simple yet incredibly profound insight.

You don’t move from something. You have to move to something.

How do we reframe the managed retreat rhetoric and policy to focus on what communities could be moving towards? How do we empower residents of flood-prone places to imagine a suite of desirable futures, and how do we make sure they have the resources needed to turn their vision into reality?

John McCormac, the long-time mayor of Woodbridge, has done just this. Here he is in a 2019 interview with PBS’ Ivette Feliciano:

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Ivette: Some people might look at what Woodbridge is doing and call it retreat. What do you think about that?

John: I think it's an attack. We're attacking the problem. And we're making the quality of life better for the rest of our community. By doing this, the houses that are on the fringe now are in much better shape near the zone than they were before.

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Tom:  So this is a rain garden. And it was the roadway extended all the way down.

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Mario: Tom Flynn, the floodplain manager of Woodbridge, is taking me and producer Asela Perez-Ortiz on a walk through a former neighborhood. He’s showing us what the township has done with the land where Sandy buyout homes once stood.

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Tom: Yeah, so there were homes here.  This was, this was the extension of Claire Avenue that came down.  And then… Oh, look at all the milkweed. Looks great.

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Mario: The township has been working on restoring these former home lots to a functioning floodplain. They have planted native vegetation, including wildflowers, grasses, shrubs, and trees, all adapted to various ecological zones in the area.

It was midday, and the only other person we saw on the trail was a man walking his dog. The landscape was serene.

Tom told us earlier that his office had just ordered a batch of 12,000 more plants for this ecological restoration. He pointed out some flowers in bloom.

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Tom:  These are all black eyed susans. They're all native. They're beautiful. They were all planted, obviously.

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Mario: His statement peels back the curtain on this landscape shaped by intentional management to maximize ecological benefits and floodplain functioning.

All of this is part of what the township calls the Woodbridge River Passage, a series of trails connecting various open spaces in town. We’re in the part of the passage that’s now known as the Watson-Crampton Blue Acres Restoration.

There are various signages along the trail. Maps pointing out how the trail connects to the rest of the passage. Pictures of wildlife that one might encounter. Signs prohibiting mowing and identifying the space as a quote “open space restoration-slash-resiliency zone”.

One sign that was posted on what appeared to be a parcel the township was still working on reads:

RESTORATION IN PROGRESS

Woodbridge Township is restoring open space in this area. This initiative will promote flood mitigation and stormwater management in an effort to increase the community's resilience against storm events. We appreciate your patience as we steward this land for the community.

There are still people here. Homes in the regulatory floodplain have been elevated. Presumably, these residents are now also seeing benefits of reduced flooding and access to nature from the land restoration.

Monique Coleman certainly hopes so.

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Monique:   Having it really be a nature, um,  preserve, a sanctuary, and then also allowing the community to have spaces to enjoy nature, I think that's wonderful. That's what that land should be, right? I don't think that it really should have residential housing, those kind of structures on that property. Where it's below sea level, it's susceptible to flooding clearly. Um, and so this is the best use of that land.

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Mario: She also thinks it would be nice to have some kind of visible marker to help people remember the community that once thrived in this place.

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Monique: I think that would be nice as well. To incorporate that there was actually a different community, a full community here of homes at one point.

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Mario: Next time on Carried by Water, we shift our attention to scientists witnessing and grappling with the physical drivers of retreat in real time.

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Able:   We've got a tide gauge in the boat basin, a US Geological Survey code tide gauge. And we know that on, at 2. 6 ft, water is going to start coming onto the road. That was installed in 2002. And if we plot the number of times the road is flooded, gets over 2. 6 ft, tt's increasing over time. And pretty consistently. Variable between years but increasing. So the road is a concern and could influence retreat. If we used to say, let's get together at nine o'clock in the station and we'll discuss whatever the issue is. Now we say that and then we say, has somebody checked the tide tables? Because you may not be able to get here.

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Mario: Carried by Water is a production of Blue Lab at Princeton University. The podcast is created and hosted by me, Mario Soriano. This episode was written by me, with production support from Asela Perez-Ortiz. Additional background research by Hannah Riggins and Farah Arnaout. Voice-over for archival material by Asela Perez-Ortiz, and mixing by Hannah Riggins and Asela Perez-Ortiz.

Conversations with Nathan Jessee and Yukiko Hashida also informed this episode.

Allison Carruth is the director of Blue Lab, and Barron Bixler is the creative director.

Visit our website, bluelabmedia.org, for more information and photographs for this episode.

Until next time.

~~~END OF EP02~~~