America spends money to relocate an entire town because of rising sea levels

The situation will only get worse, with water levels along Washington's coast likely to rise between 2 and 3 feet by the end of the century.

“I’ve never seen flooding like this in my life,” Lia Frenchman, who lives on a street that has flooded twice in the past few years, told CNBC. “Unfortunately, at the end of my street, when it floods, there’s a big hole in the road and water can sit for up to a week. And so I’m stuck, I can’t get home.”

Now, the Quinault Indian Nation plans to move the entire town of Taholah, where the Frenchmans live, to a steeper area on tribal land. A smaller town north of Taholah, Queets, is also planning to move.

Quinault is one of three Native American communities to receive $25 million from the U.S. Department of the Interior to resettle communities affected by climate change.

But that $25 million is just a fraction of what would be needed to move an entire community. Ryan Hendricks, who oversees the construction of the new village on higher ground for the Quinault tribe, estimates that it would cost about $450 million to build all the necessary infrastructure at the new site. While he hopes people will eventually move there, he can’t force them to move. And there are still questions about how tribal members will afford their new homes.

“If I wanted to move, I figured I would be responsible for the entire mortgage payment and a whole new house,” Frenchman said. “I really didn’t know how I was going to do that.”

Communities across the U.S. face a myriad of climate-related hazards, from increased extreme weather events to rising sea levels. One study found that by 2050, nearly 650,000 properties will be below high-tide level, wiping more than $108 billion off the U.S. real estate market.

However, marginalized communities like Native American tribes are often hit particularly hard as climate change threatens lands that are vital to tribal identity and livelihoods. That’s the case for the Quinault tribe, whose culture developed around the Quinault River and the Pacific Ocean.

“The needs across Quinault are in the billions of dollars because we see tribal communities really facing challenges from flooding, coastal erosion, wildfires, drought,” said Bryan Newland, assistant secretary for Indian Affairs at the U.S. Department of the Interior.

To date, the Infrastructure Act and the Climate Relief Act have dedicated more than $460 million to help tribes respond to the threat of climate change.

Quinault has discussed the possibility of moving for nearly a decade, ever since the ocean first breached the community’s seawall in 2014, causing extensive damage. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers helped repair and reinforce the seawall, but major flooding inundated the village again in early 2021 and 2022.

“I feel like the river is higher than before, like it's coming right up to the bank and almost eroding the bank along here,” said Kaylah Mail, who lives right next to the river in the house her grandparents lived in.

In 2017, Quinault approved a master plan that involved relocating the town of Taholah to an adjacent hill 120 feet above sea level, out of the tsunami and flood risk zone, but still close enough to the river so that fishing and boating could continue to play an integral role in tribal life.

The first phase of the village is now nearly complete. The land where the new homes will be built has been cleared and work crews have been busy since June.

Mr Hendricks hopes that within a decade, about 75% of the new homes will be built and all government offices will be relocated.

Even as construction continues in the village, it remains an open question how Quinault community members will pay for the move.

The homeownership model in Taholah is different from most places in the United States. Here, residents own the homes rather than the land they rent from the Quinault government. This unusual situation affects the types of buyout and relocation grants homeowners may qualify for.

The Quinault tribe is looking at ways to buy back homes in the lower village and looking at other sources of funding to help people.

In addition to the Quinault grant, the Interior Department also awarded two additional $25 million resettlement grants to Newtok and Napakiak, both in Alaska. Together, the three grants serve as model projects for similar plans in the future.

Quinault hopes their relocation story will not only provide important lessons for the federal government, but also help demonstrate the dangers the world faces from climate change.

According to Tin Tuc Newspaper