A Historical Assessment of Home Buyout Policy: Are We Learning or Just Failing?

Households face many difficult decisions after a disaster, including decisions about whether to rebuild their homes or relocate to a new area. These decisions are bounded by federal housing recovery policy and the ways it is interpreted and applied. In this article, we examine the use of home buyout programs as housing recovery policy tools and assess buyout policy using policy learning theory. According to policy learning theory, policies should evolve and improve over time. Instead, a historical review of buyouts implemented in the United States suggests that policy learning related to buyouts has been, at best, limited. Rather than showing evidence of learning from one iteration to the next, individual buyout programs continue to reflect unique objectives and features, lacking evidence of an iterative process. We propose a novel typology for organizing buyout programs and conclude by exploring implications of this finding and offering recommendations for moving forward.