Dangerous flooding has damaged neighborhoods in almost every state in 2025, leaving homes a muddy mess. In several hard-hit areas, it wasn’t the first time homeowners found themselves tearing out wet wallboard and piling waterlogged carpet by the curb.

Wanting to rebuild after flooding is a common response. But for some people, the best way to stay in their community, adapt to the changing climate and recover from disasters is to do what humans have done for millennia: move.

Researchers expect millions of Americans to relocate from properties facing increasing risks of flood, fire and other kinds of disasters in the years ahead.

What people do with those high-risk properties can make their community more resilient or leave it vulnerable to more damage in future storms.

We study flood resilience and have been mapping the results of government buyout programs across the U.S. that purchase damaged homes after disasters to turn them into open space.

Our new national maps of who relocates and where they go after a flood shows that most Americans who move from buyout areas stay local. However, we also found that the majority of them give up their home to someone else, either selling it or leaving a rental home, rather than taking a government buyout offer. That transfers the risk to a new resident, leaving the community still facing future costly risks.

FEMA’s buyout program at risk

Government buyout programs can help communities recover after disasters by purchasing high-risk homes and demolishing them. The parcel is then converted to a natural flood plain, park or site for new infrastructure to mitigate future flood damage for nearby areas.

FEMA has been funding such efforts for decades through its property buyout program. It has invested nearly $4 billion to purchase and raze approximately 45,000 flood-prone homes nationwide, most of them since 2001.

Those investments pay off: Research shows the program avoids an estimated $4 to $6 in future disaster recovery spending for every $1 invested. In return, homeowners receive a pre-disaster price for their home, minus any money they might receive from a related flood insurance payout on the property.

But this assistance is now in jeopardy as the Trump administration cuts FEMA staff and funding and the president talks about dismantling the agency. From March to September, governors submitted 42 applications for funding from FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, which includes buyouts – all were denied or left pending as of mid-September.

Our recommendation after studying this program is to mend it, not end it. If done right, buyouts can help maintain local ties and help communities build more sustainable futures together.

Buyouts vs. selling homes in damaged areas

Our team at Rice University’s Center for Coastal Futures and Adaptive Resilience developed an interactive mapping tool to show where buyout participants and neighbors living within a half-mile of them moved after FEMA initiates a buyout program in their area.

The maps were created using individual data, down to the address level, from 2007 to 2017, across more than 550 counties where FEMA’s buyout program operated nationally.

Zoomed out, they show just how many places the program has helped across the U.S., from coastal cities to inland towns. And, when zoomed in, they reveal the buyout locations and destinations of more than 70,000 residents who moved following FEMA-funded buyouts in their area.

The maps also show which people relocated by accepting a federal buyout and which ones relocated on their own. Nationwide, we see the vast majority of movers, about 14 out of every 15, are not participants in the federal buyout program. They are neighbors who relocated through conventional real estate transactions.

This distinction matters, because it implies that most Americans are retreating from climate-stressed areas by transferring their home’s risk to someone else, not by accepting buyouts that would take the property out of circulation.

Selling may be good for homeowners who can find buyers, but it doesn’t make the community more resilient.

Lessons for future buyout programs

Our interactive map offers some good news and insights for buyout programs going forward.

Regardless of how they occur, we find that moves from buyout areas average just 5 to 10 miles from old to new home. This means most people are maintaining local ties, even as they relocate to adapt to rising climate risks.

Nearly all of the moves also end in safer homes with minimal to minor risk of future flooding. We checked using address-level flood factors from the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit source of flood risk ratings that are now integrated into some online real estate websites.

But many homes in risky areas are still being resold or rented to new residents, leaving communities facing a game of climate roulette.

How long that can continue will vary by neighborhood. Rising insurance costs, intensifying storms and growing awareness of flood risks are already dampening home sales in some communities − and thus opportunities to simply hand over one’s risk to someone else and move on.

The U.S. can create safer communities by expanding federal, state and local voluntary buyout programs. These programs allow communities to reduce future flood damage and collectively plan for safer uses of the vacated lands that emerge.

Giving residents longer periods of time to participate after the damage could also help make the programs more attractive. This would provide property owners more flexibility in deciding when to sell and demolish their property, while still taking risky property off the market rather than handing the risk to new residents.

James R. Elliott is Professor of Sociology at Rice University; Debolina Banerjee is a Research Analyst at Kinder Institute for Urban Research, Rice University

This Oct. 15, 2025 article is republished under a Creative Commons license from The Conversation, which democratizes knowledge by helping academic experts to write for the public. Read the original article.

Is Americans a “car culture” or are they “car dependent”?  Do they drive because they love driving, or are they in an unhealthy relationship with a substance it would be happy to do without?  Obviously there are plenty of Americans who do love their cars, but here’s more evidence that there are fewer of them than you might think, and that the common “car culture” frame is misleading us.

A new study by Nicole Corcoran and others did a nationwide survey with a striking finding:

We find that nearly one fifth of urban and suburban US car owners express a definite interest in living car-free (18 %), and an additional 40 % are open to the idea. This is in addition to the small share (10 %) of urban and suburban US residents currently living without a car.

Five key factors are associated with interest in car-free living: having prior experience living without a car, using alternative modes of transportation for at least five percent of trips, lower car dependence, riding transit regularly, and having less enjoyment of travel by private car. Further, we find that car owners interested in car-free living are a diverse group, with few significant associations between interest in car-free living and key socioeconomic or demographic variables.

Given the sizable unmet demand for car-free living, we conclude that planners should allow and facilitate car-free and car-lite developments. In practice, this can be done by embracing zoning reform, investing in alternative transportation infrastructure, lowering parking requirements for development, and encouraging mixed land uses, including in residential neighborhoods.

I wish they had dropped the word “infrastructure,” because the fastest things we can do to make car-free live possible for more people is to expand the provision of public transit service.  That means actually running more buses and trains, not just building facilities for them.

I expect to refer to this study frequently, because it pierces the illusion that public transit faces a “cultural” challenge in the US.  Public transit’s problem in the US is that it isn’t very useful.  That’s something we can measure, and change.

Don’t worry about trying to change a culture.  Change the facts and the culture will follow.

The post Many Americans Are Open to Car-Free Living appeared first on Human Transit.

On more than one muddy Saturday in the 1890s, groups of Tacoma bicyclists pedaled south toward Olympia, only to turn back in frustration. The road between Nisqually and the capital was a slog, a stretch so notorious that “weekend wheelmen” abandoned their plans rather than push their gleaming new safety bicycles through miles of muck.

For decades, Olympia had already endured the political humiliation of defending its status as the state capital against the ambition of cities Tacoma. So to have Tacoma cyclists literally turn up their noses at the condition of the road to Olympia? For men like Dr. P.H. Carlyon, that was simply too much. If the state capital was going to command respect, it needed passable routes. If the county wasn’t going to build them, Olympia’s elite would do it themselves.

Thus began the first organized effort to construct bicycle paths in Thurston County.

The Bicycle Craze Reaches Olympia

The 1890s bicycle boom wasn’t unique to this region; it was a national mania. The safety bicycle, with two equal wheels, a chain, and pneumatic tires, transformed cycling into a middle-class pastime. By 1897 the U.S. was producing up to two million bicycles a year; by 1900, as many as five million Americans owned one.

As crazes sometimes take a while longer to reach us, Olympia’s residents were still no exception. While the nationwide fascination of bikes crested in 1896, in 1897 we formed the Olympia Bicycle Path Association, which grew into the Thurston County Bicycle Path Association by 1899. The membership rolls read like the social directory of the era: physicians, businessmen, former territorial officials. This was not a club of hobbyists, it was a political organization capable of getting things done.

Building the First Bike Network

The Association’s work didn’t focus primarily on city streets. Olympia’s dirt roads were rough but rideable. Most of their work was on the countryside. The challenge wasn’t commuting; it was leisure. Riders wanted smooth, scenic routes to Woodland (now Lacey), to South Bay, to Tumwater, to Little Rock, and even toward Nisqually, where a connection to Tacoma awaited.

Several projects stand out:

• Franklin Street Path (1899): Construction began in May and marked one of the first formal, graded bike facilities in Olympia.
• Little Rock Path (1899): Completed by July and praised as a “splendid path,” it demonstrated the Association’s ability to finish large, coordinated works.
• Olympia–Tumwater Route: Following Cleveland Avenue to Custer, this corridor provided one of the most useful regional connections.
• Olympia–Nisqually Path: A bold link aimed at stitching Thurston County into the broader Puget Sound biking network.

In a sense, these paths were the 1890s equivalent of mountain bike trails or ski slopes, recreational amenities more than transportation necessities. Their funding and maintenance depended entirely on public enthusiasm to pay a fee toward the path association. So when the bicycle craze collapsed around the turn of the century, the paths faded too. By 1901, the association was effectively defunct.

But for former association president P.H. Carlyon, his few years of advocating for bike path construction set him up for his career defining task.

Carlyon’s Next Act: From Wheelmen to Earthmovers

Dr. P.H. Carlyon had been the president of the Bicycle Path Association in 1898. Just over a decade later, he would become mayor of Olympia. And from 1910–1911, he oversaw one of the largest landscape transformations in city history: the Carlyon Fill, which used more than two million cubic yards of dredged material to reshape what is now downtown Olympia.

In 1913, Carlyon was elected to the state legislature, where he became one of the driving forces behind Washington’s early highway system. Long before the interstate system, Washington built an ambitious network of paved highways connecting cities, routes like Martin Way and Capitol Boulevard that we now take for granted.

It was Carlyon, the former bicycle-path enthusiast, who championed the funding, engineering, and political will for this transformation.

The irony is almost too perfect: the man who once built bike paths so Tacoma riders wouldn’t mock Olympia eventually built the paved roads that would help bicycles vanish from everyday use.

Why the Early Highways Stuck—and the Bike Paths Didn’t

The bicycle paths of the 1890s died because they were built for fun. Highways, on the other hand, were built for commerce, growth, and a modern identity. People had traveled between cities by boat or train. Paved highways were a radical new form of freedom and a new type of economic infrastructure.

Once the state invested in roads, every subsequent decision reinforced the automobile’s dominance. Land was platted for cars. Businesses oriented their entrances around them. Neighborhoods sprawled out to follow them. By the mid-20th century, the original bicycle network was not just forgotten, it was unimaginable.

Today, we can’t picture tearing up paved streets and going back to gravel. The world Carlyon helped build is so complete, so normalized, that even questioning it feels disruptive.

Now, more than a century later, Olympia is again working to expand bike infrastructure. But today’s bike lanes aren’t recreational corridors stretching into the countryside. They’re transportation, intended to help people move within the city, through the very corridors Carlyon and his peers carved out for cars.

This is a second blog post reflecting on some of the meta-lessons that came out of local elections in Thurston County this year.

The New York Times recently ran a story about how The Stranger sets the tone in Seattle politics. This is not breaking news for anyone who has watched Seattle politics for the last two decades.

The secret is simple: The Stranger shows up. It is consistently present, consistently relevant, and consistently part of the political conversation.

On a recent episode of The Olympia Standard, campaign consultant Rob Richards talked about the failure of the Workers’ Bill of Rights and how the yes campaign faced an uphill battle from the start. The opposition narrative was already circulating almost a year before the campaign really got rolling. And he’s right. The first public attention the idea got wasn’t from the campaign; it was from a flare-up of misinformation about a possible minimum wage increase more than a year earlier.

The campaign eventually launched with a petition drive last spring, but real messaging didn’t start until August. And in a town with fewer than half a dozen full-time local reporters, what earned media campaign can you realistically run? There simply aren’t enough people covering local government closely or consistently to help counter a false narrative once it takes hold.

We saw this same dynamic in the Regional Fire Authority vote a few years ago. The JOLT, in particular, published a lot of stories leading up to the election that, while not necessarily inaccurate, clearly shaped the public conversation. The RFA election became a turnout election. The precincts that voted “no” were the ones where people just didn’t vote at all. Many voters were confused, caught between the campaigns’ messaging and the churn of coverage and commentary on social media. Faced with confusion, they defaulted to the “safe” choice: not voting or voting no.

I’ve heard some fair criticism that JOLT’s model (reporters overseas watching meetings remotely and writing from the recordings) made it difficult to provide the broader context of why the RFA mattered. That coverage tended to highlight debate and points of disagreement, because that was what stood out in public meetings. Without interviews, on-the-ground sourcing, or deeper reporting, the coverage didn’t really capture the larger picture of why the RFA might be beneficial. That isn’t a slam on the reporters; they were doing the best they could with limited resources and time.

Could the cities or RFA supporters have engaged more with JOLT? Absolutely. But it’s also fair to say that the resulting coverage skewed toward highlighting the questions and the drama, not the underlying case for the proposal. That imbalance, born from limited capacity, not ill intent, helped create confusion.

And that’s the common thread between Proposition 1 and the RFA: a negative discussion, powered by limited local reporting and social media algorithms that amplify emotional scepticism, grew in the absence of steady, contextual information. Confusion became the common voter experience, and in low-turnout elections, confusion is fatal.

What we need is clarity.

I generally appreciate news coverage. I’m not someone who gets angry every time a reporter writes something that makes a campaign uncomfortable. But we have to be honest about something: in a community with shrinking traditional media, campaigns still spend money on mailers and consultants and ads. But aren’t investing in the thing that makes campaigns possible in the first place: local media.

There’s been a lot of talk about how much the Prop 1 campaign spent on signature collection and basic campaign work. But how can complex, structural policy changes succeed when there isn’t a consistent media presence helping the public understand them? A community cannot hold informed elections without informed voters, and voters don’t have the time or energy to attend every meeting, read through every governing document, or fact-check every post on Facebook. That’s what journalism is for.

Which brings us back to The Stranger. It is only one outlet in a city that still has a relatively healthy Seattle Times. KUOW spends a significant amount of airtime on Seattle politics. Smaller niche outlets like PubliCola and The Urbanist also contribute to the political conversation. But for capturing the mood and narrative arc of Seattle politics, The Stranger is uniquely powerful, not because it is perfectly neutral, but because it is present, consistent, and willing to frame debates with a point of view.

In Thurston County, with so few journalists, coverage is often reactive. Journalism focuses on the easiest available material: summaries of meetings, recaps of official statements, and the occasional story on a high-profile incident. There isn’t enough capacity for the proactive, explanatory reporting necessary to unpack something like a Workers Bill of Rights. And when a reporter tries to be fair in that environment, “balance” can easily look like “There’s a real debate here,” even when one side is working with a year-long head start fueled by fear, confusion, and online misinformation.

Without sustained reporting, balance becomes ambiguity. And ambiguity becomes a “No” vote.

The absence of robust journalism means our community lacks the civic infrastructure necessary for democratic decision-making. The cost of a policy failing, of housing going unaddressed, fire services going unfunded, worker protections never advancing, is far higher than the cost of supporting journalism that helps voters understand what’s at stake in the first place.

If campaigns can’t count on local media to provide that clarity, then some of that investment needs to shift. Local media is not optional. It is foundational civic infrastructure. Until we treat it that way, we will keep re-running the same story: big ideas, complex policies, passionate campaigns, and a confused electorate that never gets the chance to truly understand the choice.

We can add Olympia, Washington, to the growing list of Cascadian cities moving to loosen zoning laws that ban all but detached houses from most of their residential land. Washington’s state capitol (pop. 52,000) adopted on Monday new rules that would relax restrictions and legalize more types of modest multifamily dwellings citywide.

The intention is bold: in most US cities, tampering with single-family zoning laws has been a political third rail for decades. But as home prices and rents continue to rise faster than incomes, and as the climate change clock keeps ticking, the case against reserving large swaths of cities solely for big, expensive houses on large lots is getting harder for city officials to ignore.

Olympia’s newly-adopted changes cover the full spectrum of so-called “missing middle” housing options, including: duplexes/triplexes/fourplexes, townhouses, cottages, courtyard housing, small apartments, and accessory dwellings (also known as mother-in-law apartments). Some of the rule changes open up more areas of the city to housing types that were previously banned, and some loosen restrictions such as building size limits.

But there’s a catch: the liberalization isn’t likely to boost Olympia’s flow of homes by all that much. Planners estimate that the changes could yield between 948 and 1,892 additional new homes city-wide over the next 20 years. In a city with 23,000 housing units, that corresponds to an increase in homes of just 0.2 to 0.4 percent per year. Two main reasons for low expectations:

• off-street parking requirements will make many potential homebuilding projects unworkable
• minimum lot size restrictions will exclude a large portion of lots from the new allowances

That said, Olympia’s planners and elected officials deserve big kudos for pushing through allowances for more housing options in single-family neighborhoods. With this first step taken, Olympia need only continue ratcheting back the restrictions to reap the full affordability and sustainability benefits of missing middle housing.

Cascadia’s big three—Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, BC—please take note: a city one tenth your size is getting ahead of you on making zoning more equitable. Read on for the deets.

Housing in Olympia

Rents and prices in Olympia, though far lower than in Seattle an hour’s drive to the north, have risen rapidly in recent years. Average rents for all apartments in Thurston County, in which Olympia is the largest city, increased from $854 per month in 2013 to $1,187 per month in 2018, a gain of 39 percent.

Prices for single-family homes in Thurston County jumped from $267,500 to $297,000 from 2017 to 2018 alone. Meanwhile, census data show total housing units in Olympia rose from 21,729 in 2010 to 22,701 in 2016, an increase of 4.5 percent.

In Olympia today, 55 percent of housing units are detached single-family houses. Similar to other Cascadian cities, much of Olympia is dominated by neighborhoods of single-family homes. Interestingly, duplexes and multi-unit townhouses were allowed in all but a tiny sliver of the city, even before the recently-adopted liberalization. That is to say, technically Olympia already had almost zero single-family zoning—and the new rules have pushed much of the city’s land even further beyond the traditional definition. The low-density residential zones primarily affected are known as R4-8 and R6-12 (the numbers indicate the range of allowed density in dwelling units per acre), which together comprise 53 percent of the city’s land (excluding rights-of-way).

Here’s the rundown of Olympia’s changes for each missing middle housing type

Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs)

Olympia already allowed one ADU per lot, either attached to the main house (as in a basement apartment) or detached (as in a backyard cottage), and currently has 98 permitted ADUs. The new rules include these important fixes:

• removal of the requirement for the owner to live on site
• removal of the requirement for an additional off-street parking space
• increase in the allowed height from 16 to 24 feet

Duplexes

Olympia already allowed duplexes in its R6-12 single-family zones, and there are 684 in the city. The new rules extend the duplex allowance to R4-8 zones. However, minimum lot size requirements of 6,000 square feet in R6-12, and 7,200 square feet in R4-8 may preclude duplexes on a large portion of the city’s lots.

Triplexes and fourplexes

Olympia formerly treated triplexes and fourplexes like apartment buildings and only permitted them in specified, limited portions of the city’s R6-12 zones. The city has 151 housing units in these two types. The new rules allow them throughout R6-12 zones, and also in R4-8 zones if located within 600 feet of commercial zones or selected transit routes (definitions here). The changes also impose restrictive minimum lot sizes ranging from 13,000 square feet for a fourplex in an R4-8 zone, to 7,200 square feet for a triplex in an R6-12 zone. Together, the transit/commercial zone proximity and lot size requirements remove 94 percent of the lots in R4-8 and R6-12 zones from eligibility for a triplex or fourplex.

Townhouses

Townhouses are two or more homes with shared walls and a property line running beneath each shared wall that separates each unit onto a different lot. Olympia already allowed townhouses in R4-8 and R6-12 zones, and according to the census there were about 1,000 of them in 2016. The changes remove the maximum of four units per structure and reduce all side setbacks to five feet.

Courtyard Apartments

Olympia’s rule updates establish a brand new allowance for courtyard apartments, which are defined as up to 12 attached apartments arranged around a central courtyard. Courtyard apartments will be permitted in R6-12 zones with a height limit of two stories, and in R4-8 zones if located with 600 feet of a commercial zoning district or a selected transit route, with a height limit of one story. The new rules also set minimum lot sizes of  17,500 square feet in R4-8 zones and 13,000 square feet in R6-12 zones. These limits remove 97 percent of lots from eligibility for a courtyard apartment.

Single-room occupancies (SROs)

SROs are apartment buildings in which residents share bathrooms and in some cases also kitchens. Previously, Olympia only allowed SROs outright in downtown, but the changes extend the allowance to R6-12 zones, with one off-street parking space required for every four units. SROs have the same minimum lot sizes as those for courtyard apartments noted above.

Cottage Housing

Olympia already allowed cottage housing—that is, small homes clustered around a shared open space—in R4-8 and R6-12 zones. The rule changes grant an increase to the allowed home size and density, along with a few other minor flexibility improvements.

The two big flaws: parking and minimum lot sizes

With the exception of ADUs and SROs, Olympia’s new rules mandate one off-street parking space per home for all of the missing middle housing types we listed. Requiring parking may be politically expedient, but it undermines the whole intent of the city’s missing middle strategy.

Off-street parking makes housing more expensive directly through the cost of its construction and the space it consumes, and indirectly by making homebuilding projects either physically or financially unworkable, depriving the city of much needed new homes that would relieve upward pressure on prices. Accommodating parking in small-scale multifamily housing on small lots is particularly problematic because underground garages are prohibitively expensive, and paved surface parking spaces eat up greenspace.

The typical size of single-family house lots in Cascadian cities is 4,000 to 5,000 square feet. As noted in the descriptions above, most of the building types are subject to much larger minimum lot size restrictions that, in combination with the transit/commercial zone proximity requirements, exclude all but roughly one in twenty of the city’s residential lots. That limit quashes the potential for Olympia’s otherwise promising rule changes to actually yield new missing middle homes.

Two-story duplexes, triplexes, and even small apartment buildings can fit comfortably on 5,000 square foot lots. In fact, before zoning laws were imposed to prevent it, most cities built these types sprinkled in with single-family houses, as Sightline has documented in Seattle. An alternative to minimum lot sizes is to keep the same size and setback limits that apply to single-family houses, regardless of the number homes inside the building, as proposed in Seattle’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda.

Conclusion

Olympia’s liberalization of missing middle housing is an instructive example for cities throughout Cascadia and beyond that recognize the need to increase housing options in single-family neighborhoods. The city’s revamped regulations are laudable in that they relax the rules for a broad range of modest multifamily housing types and legalize them throughout most of the city. In practice, however, the new rules are likely to fall short because they retain too many restrictions—most critically, large lots and too much parking. But Olympia has taken an important incremental step to build on.

Thanks to Sightline Research Associate Nisma Gabobe, who provided considerable research for this article.

The post Olympia Moves to Further Loosen the Stranglehold of Single-Family Zoning Laws appeared first on Sightline Institute.

Ryan examines the role Secret Lairs have as storytelling mediums, across several different artist spotlights.

The post For a Limited Time: Experimental Storytelling in Secret Lair Artist Series appeared first on Hipsters of the Coast.