Charlotte Empties Its Flood Plain

Florence’s record rains highlight an innovative buyout program that removed the risk to hundreds of flood-prone homes

When the remnants of Hurricane Florence settled over Charlotte during the weekend of Sept. 15, drenching the flood-prone city with a near-record amount of rain, Justin Parmenter felt one thing above all else: relief. A seventh-grade English teacher with two young children, Parmenter used to be one of the thousands of people living along Charlotte’s many creeks, which regularly top their banks. His house, six miles and a world away from the gleaming, hill-top towers downtown, stood on a low patch of land next to Briar Creek, whose waters constantly reached his property, ruining his appliances and eventually wrecking two of his cars.

“I can recall walking through knee-deep floodwater, carrying my infant daughter in my arms, because we didn’t know how much higher the water was going to get,” Parmenter says of one morning in 2010 when he had to rush out of the house. But he and his family were stuck: As the years went by and the flooding got worse, nobody would buy their home, at least not for the $80,000 Parmenter still owed on his mortgage.

Then, something happened that would be impossible in most U.S. cities: Local officials agreed to buy the house, no questions asked, for a fair market value of about $100,000—then tear it down and prohibit anyone from building there again. Now he and his family live in a two-story on a hill; their biggest worry during Florence was that a branch might fall in their yard. “I’ve always been so grateful to them,” Parmenter says, sitting in his new home. “I was desperate to get out of that house.”