Color-Blind Housing Buyout Programs and White Privilege: A Case Study of Cheraw, South Carolina

Abstract

As climate change increases extreme weather events, housing buyout programs due to repeated flooding will also increase. U.S. buyout programs run through FEMA or HUD do not consider race in their program applications, presumably employing a “color-blind” philosophy where they assume equitable outcomes can occur by only considering income level and flood risk. Moreover, there are few, if any, studies that incorporate toxin exposure flood-related buyouts and a theory of white privilege enacted through colorblind governmental policies. In this paper, I examine the connection between toxins, color-blind racism, and housing buyout programs in Cheraw, SC, a town with an EPA Superfund site, riverine flooding, and an ongoing buyout program. Extreme flooding in 2015, 2016, and 2018 washed PCB-contaminated soils into people’s yards and homes, leading them to request a buyout from the South Carolina Office of Resilience. Their application was accepted, but homes closer to the source of PCB pollution are not receiving buyouts due to being outside the floodplain. Broadly, I ask: Are buyout programs privileging white populations in the eligibility process? Specifically, I ask: How do buyout managers talk about race? And how do buyout policies address race and toxins in eligibility criteria across scales? Based on preliminary analyses of semi-structured interviews with program managers, buyout participants, and other stakeholders, and textual analysis of government documents from public records, I argue that buyout programs are privileging white populations by explicitly eschewing race and toxin exposure as a factor in buyout policies.