Christopher Flavelle, Columnist

A New Strategy for Climate Change? Retreat

New Jersey offered to buy homes at risk of repeated flooding. It hasn't gone quite as planned.

August 22, 2016 at 8:00 AM EDT

Christopher Flavelle covers climate change and adaptation policy, and the business implications of those policies, for Bloomberg News. He was previously an editorial writer for Bloomberg View and a senior policy analyst at Bloomberg Government. Before joining Bloomberg, he wrote for ProPublica, Slate and Newsweek.

When adapting means leaving.
Photographer: Chris Goodney/Bloomberg

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Years from now, as the rising tides and brutal storms wrought by climate change push the residents of coastal towns around the U.S. away from the water's edge, each of those towns will confront some version of the same question: What do you do about people like the Nelsons?

Michael and Kate Nelson are the last permanent residents of Bay Point, New Jersey, a few dozen homes perched on the nub of land where Cedar Creek empties into the Delaware Bay, 30 miles northwest of the Atlantic Ocean. After Superstorm Sandy ripped out five of those homes in 2012, the state of New Jersey offered to buy those that remained, aiming to clear the land and restore it as a habitat for oysters and crabs. Most homeowners said yes. The Nelsons refused.

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