The Trump administration is set to repeal the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) rule establishing requirements on implementing the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard (FFRMS) which went into force May of 2024. Among other things, the rule ensured HUD’s federally funded projects would be built to withstand current and future flood risk. The repeal of HUD’s FFRMS rule will mean that new buildings, facilities and homes, and substantially damaged improvements to these assets will be at an increased risk of flooding from hurricanes, sea level rise and increasingly severe weather that is super-charged by climate change. The impact will be felt disproportionately, harming low-income residents, people of color, the elderly, and those with disabilities.
In President Trump’s second term it’s déjà vu all over again—well, sort of. In 2017, President Trump repealed President Obama’s executive order 13690 that updated the flood standard for the first time since it was established by President Carter in 1977, effectively ending the implementation of the flood standard. However, in President Trump’s second term, he issued EO 14148 to abolish all “harmful” orders under the Biden administration. Included in the recission was President Biden’s EO 14030 on Climate-Related Financial Risk which made it the policy of the US to recognize the risk of climate change impacts to economic growth by disclosing climate change-related financial risk and the FFRMS. One glitch in Trump’s plan is that he didn’t consider (or even know) that each federal agency needed a new rule—not an easy task, since it requires painstaking staff work and public comment—to replace the flood standard rules intended to save lives, homes and money.
The FFRMS was implemented across government agencies. In addition to this impending repeal from HUD, last year FEMA also signaled that it would no longer implement its FFRMS rule (although it has yet to actually roll it back legally). Combined, the rollback of FFRMS in these two agencies means that communities will be less prepared for flooding, even where taxpayers are investing in new or rebuilt infrastructure.
4 reasons why repealing HUD flood standard is detrimental
The methodology and the science behind the flood standard have advanced significantly, and the need for the flood standard has grown as fossil-fueled climate change contributes to more extreme weather disasters.
The numerous benefits associated with federal agencies implementing and enforcing flood standard rules include reducing the loss of life and property damage, ensuring wiser investment in taxpayer dollars, and sustaining the beneficial functions of floodplains.
President Trump’s short-sighted determination to eliminate HUD’s flood standard will set the agency and its housing flood standards back years and allow new affordable housing to be built in areas prone to flood risks and without adequate flood-risk mitigation measures.
The repeal of the HUD rule will:
Keep residents of HUD-financed housing at risk, disproportionately impacting Black and Hispanic people, the elderly, people with disabilities and low incomes.
HUD’s flood standard sought to modernize the agency’s federally funded projects so that they’d be resilient to current and future flood risk and break the agonizing cycle of repetitive flooding that some affordable housing residents have suffered, particularly those with the least resources and those who are historically disadvantaged. The painful historic systems of redlining and other racially biased systems today, such as where environmental pollution is located and policies that prioritize economic considerations rather than social equity, continue to disproportionately impact Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC), linguistically isolated, low-income, elderly people, and people who live with disabilities. An article by Bloomberg covered research by the real estate company Redfin and found the same places that were mapped into less desirable places by redlining also face dramatically higher risks of flooding today.
HUD’s own Regulatory Impact Analysis found that 11% of multifamily properties are located in the 1% annual chance floodplain and this number is projected to double by midcentury to 23%, while there are 14% of properties in the 0.2% annual chance floodplain today that is projected to increase to 42% by midcentury. Often overlooked is the disruptive flooding due to sea level rise that will put critical infrastructure that sustains day-to-day life, like schools, hospitals and affordable housing, at risk. The Union of Concerned Scientists assessed critical infrastructure at risk of sea level rise-driven disruptive flooding and found that affordable housing is at the highest risk among the critical infrastructure assets within this decade and beyond.
President Trump’s repeal of the flood standard rule is a tacit acceptance of threats to HUD’s residents’ physical, social, and financial health amid the growing risk of repetitive and compound flooding.
The decline of people’s overall health after a flood is tragic but particularly for those already struggling financially who tend to have long lasting negative impacts and can suffer a widening of inequalities, according to an analysis by Urban Institute. Disasters, including flooding after storms, have substantial negative impacts on financial health such as lower credit scores, bankruptcy, mortgage delinquency, and can lead to persistent negative impacts. The study found that people living in communities of color are overwhelmingly impacted when hit by a medium-sized disaster and on average have a 31-point credit decline compared with majority-white communities.
Disasters are particularly hard on the elderly people and people with disabilities, posing major challenges when it comes to preparing for a disaster or withstanding a storm, often in lower-quality homes such as manufactured housing. Disabled adults were four times as likely as adults without disabilities to be displaced from their home on a temporary or long-term basis after a severe storm. The National Council on Disability report underscores that “people with disabilities are more likely to live in low-income areas and areas affected by disasters, including flood zones where low-income housing is often built.” Elderly people are also less inclined follow evacuation warnings and often resist leaving their home.
Repealing the HUD rule will increase costs to the federal government from repeated flood damages
By refusing to build housing that will stand up to climate change-fueled flooding, the Trump administration is effectively guaranteeing that federal taxpayers will pay the price for future flood damages. The costs of hurricanes and other major flood events continue to rise due to extreme weather in a heating climate, population growth in risky areas, and the lack of the latest zoning and building standards to fortify against these impacts. The Trump administration may refuse to acknowledge fossil fuel-driven climate change, but the reality is that extreme storms often hit the financially vulnerable residents of low-lying areas the hardest.
While there is an up-front cost for developers to meet the flooding standard, preventing flood damage saves anywhere from $65 million to $357 million over 40 years in avoided property damages and displacement of tenants, according to HUD. That finding is backed up by well-known research by the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) which found that building five feet above base flood elevation (BFE) in riverine floodplains has an estimated savings in avoided future losses of $6 for every $1 invested, and building up to ten feet above BFE in coastal areas impacted by storm surge has an estimated $12 return in avoided damages for every $1 invested.
Repealing the HUD rule will worsen the federal government’s climate change-related financial risk
Since 2013, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has named managing climate change on its High-Risk Series, underscoring the need to enhance climate resilience.
HUD’s largest asset class is its Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insured mortgages. While the numbers change year to year, in 2021 FHA had 7.5 million single-family mortgages with an outstanding balance of nearly $1.2 trillion. HUD has previously recognized that to responsibly manage its FHA-insured mortgages, the agency needed to understand the portfolio’s actual exposure to flood risk and the extent to which FHA homeowners must purchase flood insurance policies. HUD supported case studies in North Carolina and Florida and the findings were eye-opening: in each state, FHA’s portfolio is “very exposed to flood risk” with 73% of the homes located in or near high-risk flood zones and only half are in compliance with the mandatory flood insurance requirement. A Congressional Budget Office report found that the value in 2020 of expected flood damage risk for homes with mortgages backed by FHA was $19 billion, and that increases to $25 billion in 2050.
The data are clear. Repealing HUD’s flood standard will put some FHA backed mortgages at risk, adding even more financial peril to the federal government as it faces increasingly costly weather and climate disasters.
Repealing the HUD rule will reduce awareness of flood risk among tenants and homeowners
HUD’s rule required that all residents be notified of flood risk, flood insurance requirements, past insurance claims, and additional critical safety information such as evacuation routes and emergency resources. HUD’s higher standard accounted for increased flood risk due to projected sea level rise, increased rainfall, and other climate risk—none of which are considered on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) current maps.
Without this specific language in place, residents of HUD-financed properties will be less aware of their flood risk, less safe, and more at risk when the next flood comes. In fact, that was exactly the case before this rule became law.
An exposé by NPR found staggering impacts on homebuyers who had been unaware of the flood risk to their new HUD homes. NPR reported that buyers of HUD homes got less information about flood risk and the cost of flood insurance compared with purchasing a house from a private seller, and that households in neighborhoods where HUD had sold homes are poorer on average than those in areas where HUD has not sold homes.
So what is the FFRMS Floodplain?
When President Carter signed Executive Order 11988 on Floodplain Management in 1977, it required federal agencies to restrict federally funded building in the 1% chance flood (or often called the “100-year” flood) and restrict building critical infrastructure like hospitals in the .2% chance standard (or the “500-year” flood).
The practicality of the order was quite straightforward: each federal agency was directed to “reduce the risk of flood loss, to minimize the impact of floods on human safety, health and welfare, and to restore and preserve the natural and beneficial values served by floodplains.”
In January 2015, 38 years after the original floodplain management order (EO 11988) and with scientific evidence mounting on the impacts of human-induced climate change, President Obama sought to modernize the standard. His action followed major climate change reports, including the Third National Climate Assessment that provided even more evidence for the need for climate-informed scientific standards:
“Sea level rise, storm surge, and heavy downpours, in combination with the pattern of continued development in coastal areas, are increasing damage to U.S. infrastructure including roads, buildings, and industrial facilities, and are also increasing risks to ports and coastal military installations. Flooding along rivers, lakes, and in cities following heavy downpours, prolonged rains, and rapid melting of snowpack is exceeding the limits of flood protection infrastructure designed for historical conditions.”
The updated flood standard was designed by a consortium of experts across agencies who authored a state of the science, methodology and mapping (no longer available) reports to help move the science forward and away from historical conditions and towards resilience solutions.
Under the Biden administration, HUD (among other federal agencies) finalized its rule and implemented the flood standard so that flood risk, informed by climate science, must be considered when federal funds are used to build or substantially improve affordable housing.
HUD’s rule provided flexibility to determine the flood elevation (or how high the flood would be in that area of the project) and the flood hazard area (or the width of the area that would be flooded) when constructing federally funded projects on a floodplain.
HUD included three methods to define the flood standard and when it is applied.
- The first required method, if the data is available, is the Climate-Informed Science Approach (CISA) to understand the flood risk over the life of the project. The user would then select a climate change scenario and tolerance of risk based on the criticality of the project.
- The second method is the 0.2% annual-chance flood approach (“500-year” flood) for non-critical actions.
- The third method is the Freeboard Value Approach (FVA) for non-critical actions if the climate change data is not available and the 0.2% annual-chance floodplain elevation is not defined. This would mean simply adding an additional three feet to the base flood elevation.
The Trump administration must stop its attacks on climate resilience
The HUD rule is really about resilience. The impact of repealing this rule will be felt by those who can least afford to withstand the costs. But this short-sighted action by the Trump administration shouldn’t limit the flood resilience goals of state and local governments who understand the flood risk to their communities. State and local governments must continue to adopt and implement the best and highest protective floodplain management standards, such as what is defined in HUD’s FFRMS.
The Trump administration should follow a wiser course: embrace the flood resilience standard across the federal government and invest in climate resilience programs to better protect residents rather than further worsening the deeply inequitable affordable housing crisis in our nation. The time is long overdue to move away from a history of discriminatory housing practices that have forced underserved communities into substandard housing in flood risk zones and ensure safe and sustainable housing for people with the fewest resources to prepare for a changing climate.