Mandatory Home Buyouts in Houston, Texas: Program Overview and Lessons Learned

In Harris County, Texas, home to Houston and 4.7 million residents, flooding is a perennial issue exacerbated by climate change. In August 2017, Hurricane Harvey flooded over 160,000 homes and damaged a quarter of Houston’s affordable housing stock. The unprecedented storm set a record for the most rainfall from a single storm— 48 inches—in the lower 48 states. In the aftermath, Harris County’s governing body—the Commissioners’ Court—approved the use of federal disaster recovery funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to buy residents’ homes in certain flood-prone areas, pay them to relocate, and convert the neighborhoods to green space. Harris County has implemented federally funded buyouts since 1985, but this program is unique in that participation is mandatory for the homeowners and tenants living in the program’s seven target neighborhoods.

Harris County’s initiative, part of a suite of post-Harvey programs called Project Recovery, is the only mandatory buyout program at this scale to be implemented in the United States. By the time the program ends in early 2026, 585 households and 390 business or property owners will relocate out of flood-prone, predominantly Latino neighborhoods, hopefully disrupting a cycle of destruction and repair, but not without significant personal cost.

“By the time the program ends in early 2026, 585 households and 390 business or property owners will relocate out of flood-prone, predominantly Latino neighborhoods, hopefully disrupting a cycle of destruction and repair, but not without significant personal cost.”

In recent years buyout program participants organized and spoke out at public meetings to share serious grievances with their case management and financial compensation, which pushed the county to make some changes to the program. A countywide lack of available and affordable housing continues to make successful relocation difficult for some participants.

Home buyouts following a natural disaster, even voluntary ones, are disruptive and challenging for participants and their communities. As climate change prompts other localities to consider incorporating mandatory buyouts into their own managed retreat strategies, Harris County’s successes and challenges can provide important takeaways to help jurisdictions plan and implement ethical, equitable buyout programs. These takeaways include:

• High-quality, multilingual communication and case management are crucial.
• Invest additional resources into making the most vulnerable buyout participants whole.
• Be prepared to use local dollars to plug budget shortfalls.
• Don’t underestimate the importance of the relocation phase—the scarcity and unaffordability of replacement housing stock should be factored into program planning from the start.

In a post-disaster buyout program, a local government offers homeowners the fair market value of their house, allowing residents to move away rather than rebuild. In a post-flood context, the local government then demolishes the homes and converts the land to green space. Voluntary buyouts, in which eligible homeowners may choose to sell their property to a local government entity, have been conducted in over 1,000 counties throughout the United States to relocate nearly 50,000 households. The Harris County Flood Control District, a special purpose district created by the Texas Legislature, has used Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funding to buy over 4,000 at-risk structures from willing property owners starting in 1985 and expanding in earnest in the early 2000s.

On the other hand, mandatory buyouts are extremely rare, and likely unprecedented at the scale implemented by Harris County. Mandatory buyouts have technically been available to municipalities since they were first authorized in 1993 with the passage of the federal Hazard Mitigation and Relocation Assistance Act. In 2015, a policy change by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) further paved the way for these programs by requiring buyouts funded by USACE to be mandatory. But despite these changes, few local governments are willing to adopt such an aggressive strategy to prevent homes from flooding.

Prior to 2020, when Harris County Commissioners instituted mandatory buyouts under the post-Harvey program Project Recovery, the only example of mandatory post-flood buyouts came from Minot, North Dakota. In this town of 47,000, a 2011 riverine flood prompted a mandatory buyout program that has since acquired 229 properties. Harris County, via its Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD), set its sights on acquiring almost twice as many properties as the City of Minot. Since then, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, began mandatory acquisition of 24 houses. Otherwise, examples of mandatory buyouts are scarce.

Topography and Development Make Harris County Particularly Flood-Prone

A low-lying city near the Gulf of Mexico, Houston sits on 22 different watersheds drained by bayous, which are slow-moving, marshy bodies of water that might elsewhere be called creeks. During the area’s frequent floods, the bayous sometimes overrun their banks, posing particular danger to nearby residents. While contemporary housing policy discourse urges relaxed zoning in many areas throughout the country, Harris County’s history of lax or nonexistent zoning has increased hazard risk in these neighborhoods.

Although the Harris County Commissioners’ Court approved some of the country’s most restrictive floodplain development regulations in 2017, historical development did not adequately mitigate flood risk. According to the Harris County Flood Control District, the areas where buyouts occur should never have been built on in the first place. There were no restrictions on development in floodplains in the area until the 1980s, after much of the county was already developed. Not only does building in the floodplain produce a high risk of flooding for those structures, it also affects flooding downstream by covering porous ground necessary for drainage with concrete. As a result of its development patterns and high rainfall, Harris County is home to almost 12 percent of the nation’s FEMA-designated “severe repetitive loss properties.”

Hurricane Harvey Prompted the Need for Decisive Action

The destruction of Hurricane Harvey in 2017 prompted local consideration of a forceful approach to address Houston’s grave risk of flooding. In the months after the storm, residents and leaders on both sides of the aisle recognized the need for unprecedented investment in flood management infrastructure. The then-presiding member of Harris County Commissioners’ Court, Republican County Judge Ed Emmett, unveiled a 15-point flood mitigation plan, emphasizing that the period after the storm was “not the time for a piecemeal approach. The sense of urgency created by Harvey will fade, so we must quickly commit ourselves to a comprehensive plan to redefine Harris County and the surrounding region as a global model for living and working in a flood-prone area.” This bipartisan sense of urgency spurred Houstonians to approve a historic $2.5 billion bond initiative to invest in improved drainage infrastructure at a scale never before passed by voters (which was nonetheless still several billion dollars short from addressing the county’s total need).

Having received $885 million in HUD funding to support post-Harvey housing recovery efforts, Harris County Commissioners’ Court planned a suite of programs called Project Recovery, which included expanding traditional voluntary buyouts. However, initial efforts found few residents willing to participate, despite the fact that homeowners’ interest in buyouts is usually highest during the “window to woo” immediately following a disaster. As time passed, urgent drainage needs remained, while the time window for using these grant funds to move people out of harm’s way dwindled. In 2020, Commissioners’ Court approved making the Project Recovery buyouts mandatory instead of voluntary, with the goal of acquiring over 400 properties using $224 million from HUD. This gave HCD, then known as the Community Services Department, the green light to begin community outreach letting residents of targeted neighborhoods know that they would be required, not invited, to sell their property to the county. Mandatory buyouts began in 2021.

The program’s target areas are in the Allen Fields, Bluebell, Highland Shores, Green Road Mobile Homes, Aldine Place, Meadowview Land, and Hahl Sites communities, located across the northern part of Harris County. Properties were found eligible for Project Recovery’s mandatory buyouts if they were in an area with at least a 10 percent chance of flooding in a given year, or with a one percent annual chance of flooding and adjacent to a bayou. The areas ultimately deemed eligible for buyout, located along Greens Bayou and Halls Bayou, flooded an average of 12 times in the four decades preceding Hurricane Harvey. Insurance providers paid out over $51 million in flood insurance claims over the years in these areas, with 122 flood insurance policies still active. Each neighborhood’s chance of flooding in the next 30 years ranges from 20 to 97 percent, leaving hundreds of households at risk. Homes in the mandatory buyout areas are considered by the county to be “hopelessly deep in the floodplain”—in other words, no drainage improvement project could meaningfully mitigate flood risk for these properties.

In 2020, 585 households, primarily renters, lived in the neighborhoods slated for buyouts, in five mobile home parks and over 300 single-family homes. Two dozen businesses, several commercial properties, and over 200 vacant lots also stood in the buyout areas.

Residents of the buyout areas are predominantly Hispanic or Latino. Some participating households have no or mixed citizenship status. As required by HUD guidelines governing the program’s funding, all of the targeted neighborhoods are low- to moderate-income (LMI).

Across all of Harris County’s 22 watersheds, the residents facing the greatest flood risk tend to be Latino and working-class, in part because less-expensive housing is often built in more flood-prone areas that lack adequate flood mitigation infrastructure.

The Project Recovery buyout program has several phases, of which the purchase of a property is only a part. The program should really be understood as a “buyout and relocation program,” as the county is obligated to provide financial and advisory assistance towards relocation for buyout participants under the federal Uniform Relocation Assistance and Real Property Acquisition Policies Act (URA).

The process began with an appraisal of each property in the eligible neighborhoods. Harris County HCD then sent each property owner a purchase offer. If the owner accepted the offer, Commissioners’ Court had to vote on and approve the sale. From there, each sale proceeded more or less like any other home purchase, and the county sent a check to the title company to begin the closing process.

If a property owner rejected HCD’s offer, then the department would return with a counteroffer, which if accepted, prompted the same closing process. If a resident rejected the county’s counteroffer, then HCD referred their case to the County Attorney’s Office to begin eminent domain proceedings. This meant that homeowners must go to court to negotiate the sale of their home, a process that lasts several months.

After or even while the county was acquiring a property, case managers hired or contracted by the county worked to assist both homeowners and renters in finding a suitable replacement home. Per program guidelines, residents had one year to use relocation funds provided by the program (outlined in more detail below) towards their move to a new home. Renters living in a bought-out property also received relocation funds supplementing their rental costs for up to 42 months.

As for the property, once the sale was finalized, the Harris County Engineering Department coordinated the property’s demolition. From then on, the Harris County Flood Control District managed the property for flood mitigation purposes by turning the properties into green space.

Payment to buyout participants is federally mandated by the URA in order to ensure that Americans are “made whole” when displaced by a government entity. The URA required Harris County to provide just compensation for homeowners’ properties as well as an additional payment “based on the difference, if any, between the acquisition price of the acquired dwelling and the purchase price of a comparable decent, safe, and sanitary replacement dwelling” (HUD). Renters were similarly guaranteed payments over the span of 42 months to help make up any difference between the costs of rent and utilities at their former and replacement apartments. Mobile home owners were given funding to defray the cost of moving their mobile home. All participants were eligible for some discretionary money to help with moving costs. HCD added an additional payment, close to $20,000, to the program in 2023 for each participant who stayed in Harris County.

The funds paid to residents for home purchases, home replacement, rental assistance, relocation assistance, and relocation incentives, as well as the administrative costs of implementing the program, came from HUD Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) funds. After Hurricane Harvey, HUD awarded $5.68 billion to Texas’ General Land Office (GLO), of which $885 million went to Harris County. HUD and the GLO approved the program’s guidelines, which were developed by Harris County in accordance with federal and state requirements.

As of August 2024, the county acquired almost all of the roughly 420 properties in the buyout areas. Of these, 184 properties were successfully acquired through negotiation, and 228 properties were acquired through eminent domain. Only 13 properties—one awaiting offer, three awaiting a response from the resident, and nine in eminent domain—remained.

As of July 2024, 450 households had successfully relocated into a new home or apartment. Close to 50 were in the process of moving or had a move-in date scheduled. Yet most concerningly, almost 90 families were in the process of searching for a new home to buy or rent while renting a temporary place or doubling up with family members. It took residents an average of 133 days to relocate after either accepting their purchase offer, entering eminent domain, or receiving a tenant notice of benefit eligibility.

The average purchase price was $155,687, although as discussed in greater detail under the “Inadequate compensation” section of this brief, this amount fell far short of the average home value—$316,000—in the areas where participants sought to relocate. About 90 percent of program participants relocated within Harris County. Most of these households moved to nearby zip codes in the north of the county, further out from downtown Houston. The rest of the participants relocated elsewhere in Texas, mostly staying near the Houston metro area.

Average purchase prices varied widely for homes acquired via offer agreement ($73,800) versus eminent domain ($325,430). The large discrepancy in these purchase prices is likely because properties acquired through eminent domain included several manufactured home parks, which were valued at an average of $3.9 million, while all other (residential and commercial) properties’ average valuation was $82,800.

In the early years of Project Recovery, former HCD leadership recommended homeowners who were dissatisfied with their home offers and counteroffers to go through eminent domain in the hopes of securing a higher purchase price. Administrative data suggests that this strategy, which is no longer recommended by current HCD leadership, may have paid off and yielded higher offers in some cases, although the price difference between manufactured home parks and single-family homes makes comparison difficult. Accepting or negotiating a purchase offer took an average of 185 days, while eminent domain proceedings took an average of 305 days.

By mid-2024, Harris County spent over $190 million in HUD funds on Project Recovery buyouts. For comparison, over $51 million in insurance claims were paid to these buyout areas in the past, with presumably millions more in damages expected from future storms. Federal hazard mitigation funding requires proposed projects to demonstrate that buyouts are more cost-effective in the long term than rebuilding in place.

Project Recovery’s mandatory buyouts posed serious challenges for participants and for the county, which is not surprising given how significantly the project design requires participants to upend their lives. Buying out hundreds of properties without buy-in from residents was never done before. Even guidance on this type of grant from HUD, which funded and approved the program, emphasizes that “voluntary participation is critical to success.”

Presiding member of the Commissioners’ Court, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, noted in 2022 that, “It’s inherent that there’s going to be challenges with buyouts…But it needs to be done well.” As Harris County enters the final stage largely on track to reach the program’s acquisition goals, whether or not the buyouts were “done well” is a question that must be answered by participants.

Many participants, in partnership with the Texas Organizing Project, organized and attended multiple Commissioners’ Court meetings to offer testimony about their serious grievances with the buyout program. While not necessarily representative of every participant, these public comments outline three main challenges with the program: 1) residents found the program stressful and confusing; 2) financial compensation from the county was too low, particularly for undocumented participants; and 3) finding a replacement home was and continues to be very difficult. How Harris County leadership chose to or was able to address these grievances provides important lessons for any future implementation of mandatory buyouts elsewhere. These lessons include:

• High-quality, multilingual communication and case management are crucial.
• Invest additional resources into making the most vulnerable buyout participants whole.
• Be prepared to use local dollars to plug budget shortfalls.
• Don’t underestimate the importance of the relocation phase—the scarcity and unaffordability of replacement housing stock should be factored into program planning from the start.

Participant Experience

Many participants, both in public comments made at Commissioners’ Court and through op-eds and articles about the program, shared detailed accounts of the ways in which the stress of the mandatory buyout process caused serious mental health impacts, including anxiety and depression. Participants were reluctant to leave behind their close-knit communities and felt frustrated by the lengthy processes of benefit eligibility determination and eminent domain proceedings. After Winter Storm Uri in February 2021, some homeowners who were awaiting their purchase offer from the county lived with damaged pipes or roofs for months, because neither the county nor FEMA would offer financial assistance or compensation to repair a home slated for eventual demolition. Participants also reported that some case managers lacked empathy or did not explain the buyout and relocation process fully enough, at times failing to return calls or emails from residents. Although some outreach and case management was conducted in Spanish, language barriers persisted for some participants struggling to connect with their case managers.

As a result of these case management problems, many participants were confused about what types and how much funding they qualified for under HUD guidelines. Questions like “why did my neighbor receive a bigger offer than I did when we have the same size house?” proliferated at meetings with HCD staff. Distrust of the program and county staff were widespread, particularly among residents without legal status, who in general are more likely to have low trust in government. While the mandatory nature of buyouts was bound to cause stress and uncertainty for participants, HCD could have mitigated many of the above challenges with improved case management. Indeed, with a change of leadership at HCD in spring 2023, the department augmented case management services by increasing the number of case managers focusing specifically on LMI participants and establishing in-person office hours with program leadership close to the targeted neighborhoods.

Inadequate Compensation

Besides overburdened and unresponsive case management, the primary problem expressed repeatedly in program participants’ public comments was inadequate financial compensation. Both home offers and relocation assistance were too low in many cases for participants to move without taking a significant financial hit. Some residents took out loans to pay for a home of comparable size to their previous one, even though the nature of the program should make this unnecessary. In a 2023 meeting with county staff, a resident who is a parent of five said she would need to double her hours at work because she couldn’t find a new apartment that was affordable. These compensation shortfalls were largely created by inflexible federal and state guidelines governing the use of the CDBG-DR grant funding, which hampered Harris County’s ability to flexibly address participants’ needs in the face of unforeseen changes in the local housing market.

In the grant guidelines approved by the Texas GLO, Harris County promised to offer homeowners the pre-Harvey value for their property. Since property values declined in the buyout-eligible neighborhoods—from an average of $85,700 in 2017 to $68,700 by 2021—this was a better deal for participants than an offer based on post-2017 values. However, HCD could not have foreseen that home values in most of Harris County would dramatically increase during and after the coronavirus pandemic. Plus, the fact that Houston’s more affordable housing is more likely to be located in areas with greater flood risk means that the homes participants sought to buy were much more expensive than the county’s purchase offers. In 2021, the median home value in areas that most participants relocated to was $316,000, while Harris County bought out each home for an average of $155,700.

The buyout program’s design required offers to be based on family size, not the size of the home being bought out, meaning a family of three living in a five-bedroom house would only receive an offer based on the value of a three-bedroom house. And any delay in completing the buyout and relocation processes in an inflationary environment meant that residents’ compensation packages didn’t go as far as they could have when benefit eligibility was initially calculated.

While GLO guidelines and finite grant dollars limited HCD’s ability to make purchase offers large enough to buy or rent comparable replacement homes, Harris County attempted to make up the difference in residents’ finances through other line items in each household’s compensation package. The $19,000 incentive to stay in Harris County boosted compensation, as did replacement home assistance mandated by the URA. Under the URA’s guidelines, participants were eligible for up to $2,500 in moving assistance, as well as additional assistance based on their home type: Homeowners could receive up to $210,000 in replacement home assistance, while renters could receive up to $36,000 in rental gap assistance and mobile home owners could receive up to $15,000 to help with the costs of moving their home. But in practice, the amount of additional assistance each household actually received to meet the benchmarks set by the URA varied. The average cost of a comparable replacement dwelling, as determined by criteria outlined in the URA, was $191,051 for non-vacant homes in the program. And as residents’ anecdotes attest, it sometimes fell short in completely covering the costs of new homes or apartments.

The replacement home assistance funding had another significant drawback: The URA prohibits residents without legal status from accessing relocation or replacement home funding. In the working-class Hispanic neighborhoods targeted for buyouts, this left a critical mass of residents—perhaps 80 of the 585 participating households—severely undercompensated. In response, in 2020 Harris County Commissioners’ Court set aside $1.5 million in local funds called Project SAFE to provide funding for this population, but this wasn’t nearly enough to meet participants’ financial needs and provided less financial assistance per household than the amount that citizens or legal residents received.

Increasing the amount of SAFE funding was a key demand of residents’ public comments at Commissioners’ Court, and in June 2023 the Court unanimously approved allocating an additional $7.7 million to the fund. This meant undocumented participants could receive up to $210,000 in their compensation package, on par with citizens or legal residents eligible under the URA. While this funding allocation was necessary to adequately compensate vulnerable residents, it put strain on the county’s tight budget, which is projected to go into a deficit for the first time in the coming years.

Availability of Replacement Housing

While HCD and Commissioners’ Court took action throughout 2023 to attempt to address the challenges above, the most urgent remaining problem facing program participants and staff is where participants will relocate to after a buyout. Almost 90 families as of July 2024 continued searching for a new home to buy or rent while staying in temporary housing or doubling up with family members. Housing instability is linked to a variety of negative outcomes for households, particularly children. But relocation navigators, who help program participants find new housing, have few replacement homes to offer residents in the price range dictated by the program’s funding and federal eligibility constraints.

Harris County is not alone in this regard. As home prices and rent increase across the country, the stock of housing accessible to low- and moderate-income buyers and renters dwindles. This places program participants in a tough position, and gives the county few options to help. Another Project Recovery program, also funded through HUD CDBG-DR, is allowing Harris County to construct as many as 161 single-family homes to replace a small portion of the housing stock lost to Hurricane Harvey. Although HCD plans to offer mandatory buyout participants a “first look” on roughly a dozen of these homes, there are not enough of them at an affordable price point to meet the needs of all households awaiting relocation. These participants may have no other option but to accept a home offer and relocation assistance that, while representing the maximum amount federal and local funds can provide, still does not go far enough to address the challenges posed by the housing affordability crisis in Harris County.

Home buyouts following a natural disaster, even voluntary ones, are disruptive and challenging for participants and their communities. For less wealthy residents in particular, buyouts disrupt community ties that “contribute to the social value of home,” as shown in research of Harris County’s past buyouts. Although Harris County’s example provides valuable lessons about the importance of funding case management and relocation assistance, there are certain intangibles—like sense of place and the strength of kinship networks—that require more than just funding to maintain. An equity approach to buyouts requires bringing affected residents into program planning from the very beginning and meaningfully incorporating their perspectives into innovative approaches to preserving social ties throughout relocation. Even so, mandatory buyouts necessarily have a high human cost.

In an ideal world, mandatory buyouts would not be necessary. Residents would have autonomy over when and where they move. Homes would be built in areas able to withstand flooding and other disasters with a little help from beneficial flood mitigation and drainage infrastructure improvements. However, worsening extreme weather and histories of irresponsible development mean that localities may increasingly seek more drastic measures to address repeat flooding, such as mandatory buyout programs. And as in Harris County, it’s likely that residents of the neighborhoods targeted for buyout would predominantly be people of color and/or low- to moderate-income, due to legacies of redlining and racialized poverty.

Governments should learn from Harris County’s experience by investing significant resources in communication, case management, and compensation. A sufficient supply of adequate and affordable housing for residents to relocate to is essential for program success. Mandatory buyout programs must be, in the words of Harris County buyout participants Dolores Mendoza and Gabrielle Luebano, “based on human rights so that [residents] can be bought out and relocated with dignity.”