The Flood Buyout Program’s Impact On Dove Springs

When Jo Garcia bought her Dove Springs home in 1994, her kids didn’t even think they were in Austin anymore. Their new home was next to the greenbelt. She and her family would take their dogs on long walks and watch deer flit between the trees.

“We had so much greenery,” Garcia says. “That’s what I miss the most.”

She lost her home, and nearly her life, in the historic 2013 Halloween flood. The event left hundreds of houses destroyed, at least four lives lost, and many families displaced after floodwaters rose within minutes. Garcia was trying to get her grandson on the roof of her home when the truck they were climbing on was swept away.

“We were there for hours,” Garcia says. “That was the beginning of a horrible, horrible experience.”

Garcia and her family survived but their home was beyond repair. But then came an offer from a new city program that would buy out houses in flood-prone areas. This new program would try to help residents find comparable homes, and help cover moving expenses. At the same time it would bring frustration and heartbreak. And it could be a program Austin needs in the future.

“Austin's always had flash flooding in this area just because of the topography,” says Jorge Morales, the Director of the Watershed Protection Department with the City of Austin. Morales says the combination of the area’s limestone watershed plus moisture from the Gulf of Mexico together produce acute flooding conditions.

“I think some of the most intense rainfalls in the world can be captured in central Texas,” Morales says.

Flooding has been so prevalent over the years that in 1998, the city partnered with the Army Corps of Engineers to study Austin’s most flood-prone areas. The hope was to find ways to mitigate flooding hazards projects like environmental restoration to engineering solutions like floodwalls and drainage systems. But the Onion Creek watershed, which feeds into Onion Creek and Williamson Creek near Dove Springs, would prove too big for such solutions. Covering over 340 square miles, it is Austin’s largest watershed. It snakes across Hays and Travis counties, gathering water along the way. Engineering solutions, says Morales, wouldn’t be enough.

“The best alternative was to basically get the homes out of harm's way,” Morales says.

The buyout program was started in 1998. Its goal was to purchase homes in flood-prone areas across Austin, but Onion Creek was a top priority because homes there were at higher risk. Initially the program was funded by the City of Austin, until federal money was funneled to the program following the 2013 Halloween flood. Morales says the buyback program worked like this: third-party appraisers would first value the home, Values were set using 2012 Travis County Appraisal District figures. The city would also cover relocation costs, in an effort to make sure families could find a home close to the one they lost.

“If the home was valued at $200,000, but say a comparable home in Austin was $250,000,” says Morales. “So the city will cover that 50,000 as part of the relocation benefit. In addition to closing costs for the new home and moving costs and all that.”

According to data from the Watershed Protection Department, the average buyout and relocation package in 2014 totalled just over $172,000, about $18,000 more than the median home sale price in Dove Springs that same year.

But at the same time, housing prices skyrocketed. The average sale price had jumped over 6% from the year before. And Dove Springs was the more affordable part of town. The median home price for Austin that year was roughly $305,000, a 71% increase over the average buyout. At the same time, not enough affordable housing was being added to the market. According to the Texas A&M real estate center, the housing affordability index dropped in Austin every year from 2012 to 2018. This left lower income families with difficult, and fewer, choices on where to live, according to Kijin Seol, a postdoctoral researcher with the Urban Information Lab at the University of Texas in Austin. She researched the flood buyout program.

“Their Median household income values were relatively lower than the average Austinite,” Seol says. “For the lower income residents, especially for the residents who were affected by the 2013 flood, I’d guess the home price [was] still a big hurdle for them.”

Of the 176 buyout participants she sampled for her study, Seoul found that half of them left Austin, often relocating to areas like Buda or Kyle. One of them was Jo. She says when they were looking at where they could move, they realized their money would go further outside of Austin.

“We found something in Buda,” Garcia says. “I couldn't afford to find something like what we have now in Austin. [There’s] just no way.”

Not all residents had flood insurance. But those like Garcia who did would come to find flood insurance wouldn’t cover loss of belongings. And homeowners may have even fewer options in the future. New research shows a tight correlation between climate disasters and insurance cost hikes. Some insurance companies will no longer cover homes in disaster-prone areas.

The buyout program wrapped up in 2017, but concerns over flooding remain. New storm data analysis from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that rainfall has intensified, and floodplains are actually larger in some areas than previously thought.

“The climate's been changing and the intensity of the rainfalls have been intensifying as well,” Morales says. “We just saw this year in Asheville and other cities that weren't expecting that kind of rain. We have to prepare for that.”

While new floodplain maps are being prepared with the updated rainfall data, Morales encourages people to get flood insurance, even if they’re not required to. It remains to be seen whether more buyouts are in Austin’s future.

Garcia doesn’t live in the floodplain anymore, but she still misses her old neighborhood. While her old greenbelt is gone, she’s putting down roots here. She’s planting trees in her backyard, creating a new enchanted forest for her family.

“I’m working on making it the neighborhood we want it to be,” Garcia says.