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Protected by Cape Cod and the Islands, the cities and towns along the South Coast are less vulnerable to the tropical storms, hurricanes and nor’easters that batter much of the Massachusetts coastline. However, a new draft plan released by the state sounds the alarm on how rising tides will reshape the waterfront — and what homeowners could do to help.
State officials are exploring a voluntary buyout program that would return waterfront homes at high risk of flooding to natural salt marsh. The Healey administration released a proposal in May with a feasibility study scheduled to begin in the next year or two.
The proposal comes as Buzzards Bay faces rapidly rising sea levels due to climate change — impacting environmental quality, storm preparedness and the region’s economic growth.
According to the draft plan, the New Bedford-Fairhaven area alone could lose up to $5 billion in property damages over the next several decades, with nearly 80% of those losses coming from residential properties. A map of vulnerable areas in the state draft plan shows that much of New Bedford’s working waterfront could lie within the floodplain by 2070. The risk of flooding increases in more suburban areas to the east in Fairhaven, Marion and Wareham, where a greater proportion of homes sit beachside outside of a dense urban center.
Voluntary buyout programs like the one proposed in the 2025 draft plan would allow homeowners in high-risk areas to sell their property back to their city or town so the land can be conserved in perpetuity. The idea, the plan outlined, is to provide homeowners with resources to empower them to move out of high-risk areas and relocate to safer ones.
“These investments will reduce our physical and financial exposure to climate change impacts and position Massachusetts as a coastal state that not only adapts but thrives in the face of changing climate conditions,” Rebecca Tepper, the secretary of Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA), wrote in a letter introducing the plan.
Though the thought of a government payout is tempting, a buyout program is still three to five years away. And it won’t apply to every homeowner in vulnerable areas. The draft plan suggests that most eligible properties will be in areas with fewer homes and lower market value, where taxpayer dollars can stretch further to create larger swaths of conserved marshland.
In New Bedford, where most homes lie within the hurricane barrier, a buyout program might not apply to many homeowners, said Michele Paul, New Bedford’s director of resilience and environmental stewardship. Other solutions, such as incentives that move development deeper into urban centers, might prove more impactful.
“There’s not a lot of development right along the coastline,” Paul said. “It’s a little bit of a different situation, like in Fairhaven, where they have a lot more residential development right on the water.”
Bruce Webb, Fairhaven’s director of planning and economic development, said a potential program was still too far off to consider in any concrete terms, but agreed that it could be helpful for some of the town’s higher-risk residents — such as those whose homes dot the Nasketucket Bay.
“It’s too early to say at this point,” Webb said. “It’s still a ‘wait and see’ kind of situation.”
Chad McGuire, a professor of environmental policy at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, doesn’t envision that a statewide buyout program would help coastal homeowners writ large. What the program would do, he said, is get homeowners used to the idea of managed retreat.
McGuire compared the program to a parent offering to pay some of their child’s college tuition but not all.
“It tells you there’s going to be some resources, but it’s not going to be enough to fix the problem or pay for you to go to school,” McGuire said. “It signals to people that things are changing. We wouldn’t be doing this, obviously, unless there’s a problem.”
Moving back to move forward
Most of the South Coast, particularly communities along Buzzards Bay, lies within a high-risk floodplain where damages due to frequent flooding, storms, and erosion will only increase in frequency and severity.
With support from state and federal grants, these waterfront communities have already begun to bolster their climate resilience. But resilience can take different forms depending on one’s approach, McGuire said.
The state defines coastal resilience as the capacity of coastal systems and communities to both anticipate and respond to environmental challenges, particularly those related to climate change and natural disasters.
For an engineer, resilience may come in the form of built infrastructure like New Bedford’s hurricane barrier, McGuire said. But resilience also looks like the squishy marshland dotting the Massachusetts coast.
In times of storm surge and flooding, coastal wetlands act like a sponge absorbing excess water and shouldering storms’ worst impacts before they reach more developed areas. When sea levels rise, however, valuable marsh sinks underwater, leaving less of a barrier between the ocean and hard, dry land.
Managed retreat is the idea of moving development back, not only to protect homes and infrastructure such as bridges and roadways, but also to restore wetlands. In some areas, conservation organizations like the Buzzards Bay Coalition have already started working with property owners to build back the marsh.
On June 13, the organization made its largest-ever purchase, with the $9.5 million acquisition of natural marsh and cranberry bogs along the Weweantic and Sippican rivers. Purchases like these, although distinct from a state- or local-run buyout program, also ensure that land can remain undeveloped in perpetuity, said Rachel Jakuba, the Buzzard Bay Coalition’s science director.
“If we want to keep marshes, the way to do that is to allow them to migrate inland as sea level rises,” Jakuba said. “We think of those places as our marshes of tomorrow.”
It’s easier to foster the “marshes of tomorrow” on undeveloped land, Jakuba said, which is where a voluntary buyout program can help.
The Trustees of Reservations is a statewide nonprofit managing roughly 47,000 acres of public land, from natural resources to areas of cultural significance. For years, the organization has advocated for a statewide voluntary buyout program like the one outlined in the 2025 draft plan.
“We and other nonprofit organizations and the agencies have been trying to teach people what the risks are in their areas, showing them the maps for the flooding and the storms and sea level rise,” said Cynthia Dittbrenner, the Trustees’ vice president of natural resources. “But the problem is so often, if people find themselves in an area that’s at risk, there aren’t a lot of options for how to protect themselves against it right now.”
Voluntary buyout programs help make the idea of managed retreat less “scary” for homeowners by giving them the means to take action, Dittbrenner said.
“The point of this is not to identify areas where we’re going to say, ‘Sorry, we’re not helping you,’ but rather, ‘These are some really amazing resources and tools that you can use to get out of harm’s way in a voluntary way,’” Dittbrenner said.
Hidden costs
You can lead a homeowner to water, but you can’t make them move.
Once the director of the Massachusetts Bureau of Relocation, Steven Mollica has spent the better part of 40 years persuading property owners to voluntarily pull up stakes in the face of urban renewal projects, environmental hazards, and other grounds for displacement. The key, he said, is understanding the unique relationship between people and the places they call home.
“One time this particular guy said, ‘Well, I really don’t want to move. I know it’s the best thing for me, but I’m worried about my camels,’” Mollica said. “I asked, ‘Why are you worried about your camels?’ ‘Well, I have a lot of camels, and I want to make sure they’ll be okay.’ It turned out he’s a collector of camel figurines.”
Now a consultant based in Hudson, Mollica has started to advise on more flood mitigation buyout programs over the past five years. But unlike more immediate hazards like noise pollution, Mollica has found that flooding can be too abstract of a threat for some homeowners.
“You might have a flood one year, and it would be horrible, and then it stops,” Mollica said. “The rain stops, the flood goes away. It’s not something that you’re facing every day, and I think that you can start to lose some perspective of the need for it.”
In other instances, buyout programs may not offer homeowners enough relocation support beyond the initial appraisal. Under federal law, homeowners not only receive payment for the property itself, but also a list of comparable homes on the market in real time. Mollica said these kinds of support make the act of moving — particularly in Massachusetts’ competitive housing market — less daunting for homeowners.
Fortunately, Massachusetts leaders may not need to reinvent the wheel to come up with a buyout plan that works. Other states and some local municipalities have offered voluntary buyouts for decades in high-risk areas.
Since 1995, New Jersey’s Blue Acres program has relocated homeowners in floodplains to safer areas with considerable success, Mollica said. Similarly, in Texas, the Harris County Flood Control District has purchased more than 4,000 homes in the Houston area since 1985 — roughly a quarter of those purchases coming after Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
Closer to home, the town of Wareham is looking into a municipal buyout program after a long-term study found that the entirety of downtown would be flooded by 2100.
With any buyout program local or statewide, the greatest limiting factor is funds. Both the Blue Acres program and the Harris County Flood District partially depend on Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funding to acquire properties, a spigot that could run dry amid ongoing federal cuts.
When it comes to appraisals, coastal homeowners may be unwilling to accept that their property’s value is not what it once was.
“Whatever perceived benefits of living near the coast have always far exceeded whatever those costs are, including the increase in costs,” McGuire said. “The problem is now the rate that those costs are increasing. People don’t want to buy into it… It’s always hard to tell somebody, ‘Hey, that decision you made, it’s not as good as you thought it was.’”
Land projected to be below annual flood level in 2050
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Thinking bigger
McGuire said buyouts, used strategically, should be just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to coastal resilience. The same draft plan also offers larger-scale solutions for more developed areas like New Bedford and the Boston Harbor.
Transfers of development rights, for example, offer a roadmap for municipalities to implement managed retreat without hindering overall economic growth and development. Under the transfer of development rights, municipalities can discourage development in a high-risk or vulnerable area by offering to transfer property rights to other areas with added development incentives. Those incentives can include density bonuses, but they’re still entirely voluntary for developers and property owners to utilize.
These kinds of solutions also help drive home the relationship between climate resilience and economic growth, McGuire said. The EEA estimates that Massachusetts could lose more than $1 billion per year to coastal infrastructure damages by 2070. Just three feet of sea level rise over the next 25 years could cost municipalities $104 million in lost revenues.
In the meantime, South Coast towns have their hands full with other short- and long-term sustainability initiatives.
In New Bedford, conservation officials are updating their resiliency plan for the first time in five years. The new draft, to be completed over the next year, will revolve around community impacts and solutions, with a particular focus on energy efficiency, Paul said.
Fairhaven also recently completed its local hazard mitigation plan required by FEMA, Webb said, which requires municipalities to conduct a top-to-bottom review of all vulnerabilities to natural disasters.
If nothing else, McGuire said residents should take comfort in knowing that their state government is taking the threat of climate change seriously.
“We’re all in this together,” McGuire said. “We’re all paying the cost together, so it’s like, ‘How do you want to pay it? Do you want to be smart and pay less today, or do you want to wait and pay a lot?’”
Brooke Kushwaha is an environment reporter and can be reached at bkushwaha@newbedfordlight.org.
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Great story. Thanks for working so hard on this.
Why should the state buy out these owners? They built close to the water, knowing sooner or later their real estate would be worth nothing. So it’s their own fault, and they should take the responsibility themselves, not the state.
It’s not a matter of when this will happen, it’s happening before our eyes. All over the country and world. We’re worse because we have done nothing but exploit our natural resources. No replenishment, just destroy, destroy, destroy. It’s a little late now, but I’m trying to help living creatures survive a few more years.