John Knipper is known as a go-to guy, the one who always calls back. He’s the neighbor everybody knows, the former president of his homeowners association. But there is another label he now carries: climate migrant.
It’s the kind of term used by academics and government officials who specialize in disaster response for today's changing world. And it's all because Knipper’s name now appears on a federal database alongside 60,000 others. It has become one of the most scrutinized and controversial lists in Washington, D.C.
“Climate migrant … I never considered myself one," said Knipper, 70. "But I guess there is some partial truth to that."
In some circles, Knipper's life is defined by a financial choice he made nearly five years ago: voluntarily selling his house in West Ashley to the city of Charleston after surviving four catastrophic floods. The final price tag to buy all the homes in Knipper's little neighborhood in 2019 was $5.1 million.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency paid for most of it.
They all took the buyouts — 40 homeowners who once shared one cul-de-sac — leaving behind a now-abandoned man-made island overlooking a golf course in the outer reaches of Charleston. The Post and Courier once called them "a tight-knit band of the suffering."
Can wisdom be gleaned from this kind of suffering? The city thought so. It hired researchers last year to track down all 40 residents who accepted the FEMA buyouts to ask how the process went and, essentially, how things are going now.
They are Charleston’s first cohort of FEMA buyout participants and, as one city official said grimly, "surely not the last."
Jeff Norman consoles his wife Susan on Oct. 7, 2015, as they try to salvage family belongings from her father's Bridge Pointe home. The "1,000-year" flood was the second major flood event the neighborhood endured that year. File/Staff
Time has given Knipper perspective about the yearslong government process that, for him, started with a 1,000-year flood. That led to then-U.S. Rep. Mark Sanford sitting at his kitchen table and ended with a frustrating amount of red tape, all before he could pick up the $116,000 check that afforded him a better life. With it, he purchased a new home 28 miles inland, leaving Charleston forever.
Per the rules that have governed all 60,000 federal disaster buyouts, bulldozers demolished Knipper’s two-story townhome. The nurse who lived across the street watched her house get razed. So did the gardening enthusiast a few doors down, watching her azaleas disappear, too. The property is now a designated green space, meant to soak up water to protect remaining homes nearby. Even the road, Two Lochs Lane, is gone, replaced with tall grass.
Climate-driven migration, climate relocation, climate displacement — the terms, essentially interchangeable — describe the same flow of people following self-determined routes away from today’s encroaching threats.
No one made Knipper and his neighbors leave. They chose it, given a variety of resources and reasons. FEMA's buyout program is meant to avoid future damages in places that are likely to flood again. After the properties are bought, they essentially have to remain empty in perpetuity, with no new structures built on the land. That's a uniform rule. But the people who flee these lands are not uniform.
Charleston's first wave of people displaced by climate change ended up in very different places despite some of their similarities on paper: most were White, over 60 years old and had a college degree.
Some have died. Many just moved on and did not respond. But 19 did want to reconnect, filling out a form received in the mail or picking up the phone. Four of them agreed to speak to The Post and Courier.
Those four expressed surprise that the city went looking for their feedback. They weren't alone.
"This is not something that FEMA ever did. It’s not something local governments ever did," said Jake Bittle, a journalist for the news site Grist and author of the book "The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration." He spent years seeking out and interviewing FEMA buyout participants across the country. He called this type of follow-up survey a "huge deal."
Results of the Charleston survey were packaged into an 18-page report prepared by a consultant for the city and the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental nonprofit that first proposed the idea to city officials to follow up on the buyouts. The existence and contents of the document have not been previously reported.
"Buyouts can take forever. … If it was a headache for us, it was probably a headache for them," said Dale Morris, who was appointed as the city's chief resilience officer in 2021, after the buyouts took place.
Stephen Julka, the city's former floodplain manager, was already in discussions with Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit NRDC, about how to better understand the buyout participants on a granular level. They wanted a roadmap for future buyouts, both for Charleston and nationwide.
Morris picked up where Julka had left off. He shared the buyout report with The Post and Courier in early September, redacting some personal information and clearing it with city lawyers. He also provided a caveat: "This was never really meant to be public."
The Bridge Pointe townhomes in West Ashley flooded so often, they were eventually bought out with city and federal funds. This photo shows the worst of a "1,000-year flood" in October 2015 that brought 2 to 3 feet of water to the neighborhood. File/AP
1. The five floods
Knipper endured four major floods in four years at the now-abandoned community once known as Bridge Pointe. The neighborhood is part of the larger Church Creek Basin, a 5,000-acre tract that is almost entirely developed.
Each time, home repairs cost him tens of thousands of dollars. His former neighbor, Bob Lewe, who had lived there since the late 1990s, endured five floods in total. When Lewe's fifth flood hit, Tropical Storm Irma in September 2017, his refrigerator was floating 3 feet above the kitchen's tile floor.
In the wake of Irma, some residents said the prior floods had already resulted in FEMA paying them more for repairs and replacement of possessions than they paid for the homes themselves. That was before the FEMA buyouts even happened.
About half of the homeowners told the city that they already paid off their homes, which ranged in value from $150,000 to $225,000, before the floods.
This kind of information is emblazoned in the homeowners' memories and, five years later, was easy to provide to Charleston's researchers.
But there were other questions that required tapping into emotions long shut away: Do you feel recovered since the buyout? Which aspects of the (buyout) program were most stressful? Where did you live when you waited for your home to be purchased?
While the the vast majority of respondents said life was better or the same since the buyouts, nearly 30 percent said they were worse off or still feeling unsettled five years later.
More than half told the city they spent years essentially living out of a suitcase while they waited for the buyouts — staying with family members or friends, or scraping together the rent for month-to-month apartments since their home was uninhabitable.
"I found myself living on my boat sometimes," said Knipper, who was newly retired from his job as a newspaper information technology manager when his flood-damaged house first became unlivable. "Anyone who has lived on a boat through the wintertime knows it's not perfect."
None of this was part of Knipper's retirement plans. He never wanted to became the leader of weary band of half-homeless Charlestonians, with his congressman's personal cellphone number on speed dial.
"It's a great place to live ... except for the flooding," said John Knipper, pictured here on Sept. 12, 2017, after inches of water had receded from inside his townhouse in the flood-prone Bridge Pointe cul-de-sac in Shadowmoss a day after Tropical Storm Irma. "If we had electricity, this would be more manageable." File/Staff
2. The leader
Knipper bought the two-bedroom townhome in early 2015 as a place to retire. For the first six months, life was slow, a good slow, with days spent relaxing on his 42-foot sailboat docked in nearby North Charleston.
Then a few inches of water appeared in his living room after a heavy summer rain. And his life forever changed. The changes came quickly, even at first, disasters layering on top of one another. Time, he said, "all blurred together."
Here's how he experienced it: The creek that separated him from the 15th-hole fairway overflowed with the August rain. Knipper had checked the flood insurance rates before buying his house — they were fine. He checked if the house flooded in the epic 1989 Hurricane Hugo — it hadn't. The previous buyer mentioned a minor flood in 2008, but Knipper had done his research. Documents posted on the city's website described a drainage project that had specifically addressed that issue. Someone, he can't remember who, told him that the problem was "fixed."
Nearly 90 percent of homeowners reported the same thing, telling the city in last year's survey that they were not aware their home was prone to flooding when they purchased it.
Knipper assumed the summer flooding was a fluke.
A portable storage container showed up on the street in front of a neighbor's house. Lewe, then the president of Bridge Pointe's homeowners association, starting filling it with his prized collection of Pennsylvania colonial furniture. He was also repainting and reflooring the entire first floor of his townhome with FEMA funds.
Six weeks later, that storage container — still parked out front with prized possessions — flooded. Eight days of rain caused a 1,000-year flood event that, at its height, brought 30 inches of floodwaters to Bridge Pointe. "It was biblical," Knipper recalled.
One day into the rain, Knipper moved into a hotel room.
Two days into the rain, firefighters arrived at Bridge Pointe in a pontoon boat to rescue Lewe and his wife. Both were trapped on the second floor of their home. Others needed rescuing, too.
Lewe, then 85, had to be physically carried to safer, higher ground. The waters were up to his waist. Those waters would continue to rise over the next six days, eventually damaging 80 percent of his possessions.
Members of Charleston Fire and Task Force One rescue Cynthia and Gregory Martin from their Bridge Pointe townhome during a major flood in October 2015. File/Staff
The floods in August and October sparked the city's interest in pursuing a FEMA Hazard Mitigation Grant to fund the purchase of all 32 homes in Bridge Pointe. Officials presented their idea with a slide show, gathering the residents into a local high school auditorium.
But the officials kept warning Bridge Pointe residents they had never done anything like this before — apply for federal monies to help buy and then raze a slew of flood-prone homes. Knipper said he didn't understand at the time why that mattered. Now, looking back, he does.
The city submitted a grant application and notified the residents it could take a year just to get a response.
That response came in October 2016 as Hurricane Matthew barreled toward the East Coast, prompting calls for residents to evacuate. Bridge Pointe homeowners received an email from the city's public works director explaining that FEMA had turned down the city's application.
The city planned to take another swing at it, repackaging the application under a different program. But that could take another year to win approval if funding from Congress didn't come through.
Knipper read the email and booked a hotel room. Again. Most of his neighbors evacuated, too. Knipper recalled going around in a raincoat, knocking on doors to make sure people were getting out.
But one of his neighbors had a wife who used a wheelchair; they didn't have the same options. Fernando and Marion Gambino, then in their 90s, were among the few Bridge Pointe residents who rode out the Category 1 hurricane inside their home.
Fernando Gambino awoke to 16 inches of water in his living room. A Post and Courier reporter visited his house just 48 hours later while there was still an inch of water in the living room. Gambino shuffled around exasperated, telling the reporter he had already spent all his savings.
A Shadowmoss resident since 1986, 93-year-old Fernando Gambino speaks with then-U.S. Rep. Mark Sanford and Mayor John Tecklenburg on Sept. 15, 2017, explaining the number of times his Bridge Point townhome has flooded. File/Staff
Almost a year later, Gambino appeared in the newspaper again. His neighborhood had flooded again. This time, he appeared in a photograph.
In the image, Gambino's long fingers are curled mid-gesture as he confronts Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg on the street in front of his house. Tecklenburg has a hand over his heart, apologetically. Former U.S. Rep. Mark Sanford looks on, forehead wrinkled, clipboard in hand. The pair, accompanied by two state legislators and a city council member, were perusing the aftermath of Tropical Storm Irma.
The September 2017 storm brought so much water to Charleston just four days prior to the photo being taken that it ranked as the worst tidal flooding since Hurricane Hugo, the Category 4 storm that killed two dozen South Carolinians in 1989. In parts of Bridge Pointe after Irma, water levels rose to nearly 9 feet. They didn't return to normal for several days. That's when the lawmakers showed up.
Then-U.S. Rep. Mark Sanford, Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg and other elected officials meet with Bridge Pointe townhome residents on Sept. 15, 2017, in the home of HOA president John Knipper, to discuss repetitive flooding there. File/David Slade/Staff
Knipper, by this point, had taken over as the president of the Bridge Pointe homeowners association. He invited the elected officials into his home. He gave a "little tour" of his torn-away flooring and dank insulation before inviting the officials to an impromptu town hall meeting at his wooden kitchen table.
"We were all really getting disgusted with the flooding. We decided to have a meeting, getting our ducks in order, from both the city and federal government," said Knipper, who said they discussed the city's pending FEMA buyout grant. The residents had just endured their second major flood while waiting for FEMA to respond. "Mark Sanford was really good, he said something like, 'the squeaky wheel gets the grease.' "
Squeaking took many forms. Residents kept speaking to the press. Sanford, the congressman, made calls in Washington. Charleston's mayor told The Post and Courier he was going to drive two hours to Columbia on Sept. 22, the following Friday, to personally petition Gov. Henry McMaster for help. FEMA had reached out to the governor, saying it had more questions.
But some Bridge Pointe residents suspected that FEMA was stalling or, perhaps, overwhelmed. Hurricane Harvey had slammed into Texas and Louisiana just a month earlier, displacing thousands in the heart of Houston and killing over 100 people.
Alison McLeod poses for a portrait on the land where her house once stood in the Shadowmoss neighborhood of Charleston on Sept. 20, 2023. Repetitive flooding led to her small community receiving the city's first federal buyouts between 2018 and 2019. The land was cleared of all homes and designated a green space. Henry Taylor/Staff
3. The nurse
"The hurricane in Houston happened in the middle of our own FEMA application process, and that put things in the back burner," said Alison McLeod, a nurse practitioner and mom to a daughter, Callie Reinecke.
Source: Brokoppbinder Research and Consulting (2022)
Her daughter was barely a teenager when Irma hit.
But she still has fond memories of growing up in Bridge Pointe; she loved collecting the wayward golf balls that landed on the property from the nearby golf course. She had a favorite oak tree.
“We used to be able to sit out and just observe the tree and see its trunk,” Reinecke said, when she joined her mom in September on a visit to the former site of Bridge Pointe. It was her first time back since moving away: “It’s so overgrown with bushes, but I guess that’s what was waiting to sprout when we were trimming around it.”
Despite all the good, there was also the bad. They both lost photo albums and other irreplaceable mementos during Irma as they waited for word on the FEMA buyout.
McLeod told a Post and Courier reporter at the time: "We are just fed up because it’s been 106 weeks, four floods."
She didn't know that her frustrations would only grow.
"You get so tired of fixing it up ... and three or four weeks from now I could be flooded again," said Alison McLeod on Sept. 12, 2017, when this photo was taken. She walks along a flooded Wolk Drive in Shadowmoss, not far from the Bridge Pointe cul-de-sac where she lived at the time. File/Staff
On Oct. 24, 2017, Charleston was awarded two FEMA grants totaling $10 million in funding to buy all the homes in Bridge Pointe, along with three single-family homes in the larger Shadowmoss neighborhood and another single-family home off Wappoo Road. The city agreed to fund 25 percent of the total cost of the buyouts.
McLeod was glad for the buyouts but far from feeling settled.
In the fall of 2017, she was still living at friends' houses in the aftermath of Irma: "I felt like a gypsy."
She wouldn't move out of Bridge Pointe until late 2018. She has lived in three places since then; currently, she lives in the neighboring city of North Charleston, in Park Circle.
“For me, the biggest stress was just how long it took to happen," McLeod said.
Source: Brokoppbinder Research and Consulting (2022)
The slow pace of federal buyouts is a hallmark of the program, said Moore of NRDC. For Charleston's survey respondents, waiting "without a working timeline for when the program will resolve" was marked as the biggest stressor.
As a nurse, McLeod knows a lot about stress and what it can do to the body.
She said two of her elderly neighbors died while the buyout process dragged on. Both were women whose husbands outlived them. McLeod said she doesn't see that much in her patients.
"I just always wondered if the flooding and waiting didn’t stress them out … and their health declined a little more because of it," she said.
Bittle, who wrote the newly published book on FEMA buyouts, sees her point.
"There is definitely a public health justification for streamlining the buyout process," he said.
He has also seen cases where clear communication from FEMA or local officials helps alleviate that stress.
For Bridge Pointe residents, communication started off well. But survey respondents said it deteriorated over time. The lack of a clear schedule took a toll, especially as residents started eating into their savings while they waited for their checks to arrive.
“Communication was terrible. Nobody had the answers. You just felt like you didn’t have control," said Suzanne Buckley, a Charleston native and buyout participant.
She became friends with both McLeod and Knipper. Chaos bonded them. Many still send Christmas cards to each other.
Research shows that timing is everything and essential to someone's feeling of recovery in the wake of climate disasters. Setting expectations and clear timelines can help a person feel closure for a process that is uniformly traumatizing.
"I go back a lot, I go too much … I don’t know why,” Buckley said. She started to cry, recalling her frequent visits to the site of her former home, which is now an overgrown field.
There was a time when she planted azaleas on that land, not too far from a weeping maple tree. She took pride in her garden and tended it to the end. But for her, the end of the buyout process was also messy: "It's not a good feeling when I go by now."
Bob Lewe’s Bridge Pointe townhome suffered extensive damage from flooding in August 2015 and again in October 2015. This photo of him appeared in an article from Dec. 4, 2015, that reported on Charleston's plans to apply for a FEMA Hazard Mitigation Grant to purchase the 32 units in Bridge Pointe. File/Grace Beahm Alford/Staff
4. The widower
Lewe lost his wife in the middle of the buyout process. They were among the Bridge Pointe residents rescued by a pontoon boat in the October 2015 flood. She fell ill while they were mostly living out of the second floor of their home due to repairing and repainting the coral pink walls downstairs, time and again.
"For that last flood, Irma, she wasn’t even here," he said.
When the buyout money was secured, the retired mechanical engineer, now 93, knew he wouldn't leave Charleston. He couldn't even if he wanted to. As a widower, he became dependent on family nearby, a sister and a nephew. He liked his doctors at the nearby Roper St. Francis health facilities.
Source: Brokoppbinder Research and Consulting (2022)
Lewe is among the 67 percent of buyout participants who remained in Charleston, even though the survey participants all said that being in an area safe from flooding was a key factor in deciding where to move. Few areas of Charleston are safe from minor flooding. In fact, 60 percent of the city lies at low enough elevation and close enough to water sources that FEMA requires flood insurance for those homeowners.
Research shows that most homeowners displaced by climate disasters actually don't move far. A 2021 analysis of 1,572 homeowners who accepted government buyouts in urban Texas found that most sought to resettle close to their flood-prone homes. White homeowners are even more likely to stay close.
Jim Elliot, a Rice University professor who led the study, said that buyout behaviors run counter to what most people think.
"Oftentimes, the residents stay within the same floodplain … there are so many reasons to stay," said Elliott. "We're just not seeing these big moves to places with zero flooding, like Duluth or something. So, the question is, do these moves work? Are they out of harm's way?"
Lewe bought a single-family home in Grand Oaks, a neighborhood less than a mile from Bridge Pointe. In total, three former Bridge Pointe residents now live in Grand Oaks, including Buckley, the gardener. He said he's very happy: “We’ve got some higher elevation, luckily.”
But gone are the days of navigating beach sand to reach the ocean and swim. Lewe started using a cane to walk last year. His last ocean swim was in 2022 and he has no illusions of doing it again.
I got a few years left in me, and that will be that," he said.
The water, Lewe said, is what drew him to Charleston from his birthplace in the Midwest over four decades ago. But it could be the water that puts him at risk again in his twilight years. Lewe, surprisingly, doesn't own flood insurance.
The Bridge Pointe townhomes were briefly taken over by vegetation after the condos were bought by the city of Charleston between September 2018 and May 2019, as a part of a flood mitigation project. Bulldozers razed all 32 homes in July 2019. File/Staff
5. The future
Experts believe that millions of Americans will need to escape the worst impacts of climate change by moving to new homes. A Columbia University-led investigative reporting project, done in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, found the federal government isn’t prepared to assist all of the people who currently need buyouts.
It's really up to local governments to find solutions. And this homeowner survey is Charleston's first step, said Morris, the city's resilience officer.
The report was never meant to be a secret, he later clarified. It was not previously made public, in part, because it contained personal identifiable information. The other part of it, Morris presumed, was that the city officials who came before him wanted an unvarnished "internal understanding of what the city could do better."
Morris said he shared the report with The Post and Courier because it's high time the city showed how it makes lemonade out of lemons.
By some measures, Bridge Pointe provides the city with a buyout success story. After all, 66 percent of respondents said they were "somewhat satisfied" or "very satisfied" with the overall program. The residents felt like the program helped them get out of a "bad situation." They considered the city staff members to be accessible and helpful. The city-run neighborhood meetings made them feel informed.
Source: Brokoppbinder Research and Consulting (2022)
But the stress was overwhelming. And breakdowns in communication over timelines made that worse near the end of the buyout process. Trust faded.
One survey respondent wrote: "Understand that the wear and tear emotionally of the events that led to the buyout are huge, and to leave people in the dark with no communication is cruel and feels like torture."
The report provided a suite of recommendations for improvements. Charleston would do well by making sure city staff were informed enough about buyouts to answer the public's questions. They should focus on the clear communication of timelines — after this, then that, by this date. Most importantly, case management support to residents goes a long way. That means helping them finding interim- and long-term housing that is out of harm's way.
"We're not trying to force buyouts on anyone," said Morris. "We're trying to be part of innovation here …. one that makes this buyout process less painful for people."
Alison McLeod (left) and her daughter Callie Reinecke (right) walk out of their old neighborhood in Shadowmoss, which is now a designated green space, and observe a dilapidated street lamp in Charleston on Sept. 20, 2023. Henry Taylor/Staff
He and his staff are using the Bridge Pointe homeowner survey to design a pilot program that would make buyouts faster — and therefore, less stressful — and can be done at scale with more case support for people. It's a soup-to-nuts approach that draws heavily from the report's recommendations. Morris is in the middle of drafting a grant application to fund this idea. The potential funder: FEMA.
Officials from FEMA twice declined to comment on the Bridge Point buyouts or the city's ideas to improve buyouts going forward.
As of 2018, there are 824 "repetitive loss properties" in the city, which means those homes have utilized their flood insurance for repairs more than once in a short time.
Charleston is home to more than half of South Carolina's repetitive loss properties. Only 50 of those have been addressed through a buyout or some other mitigation. The Bridge Pointe homes and the nearby home in the Church Creek basin account for almost all of them.
In other words, hundreds of Charlestonians from other problem neighborhoods — from James Island to the peninsula — could be seeking buyouts in the coming decade. That's not necessarily a reason for despair.
Vegetation encroaches on a manhole cover for an abandoned sewer in the former Bridge Pointe neighborhood in Charleston on Sept. 20, 2023.
“I still think we were the luckiest people on earth," said Buckley, the gardener who took a buyout. She embraces the term "climate migration" because she thinks it's important that people make the connection between rampant urban development, people's safety and a changing climate.
Buckley said buyout money is the lubricant that gets people out of harm's way in these "scary times." And she said she would do it again.
In fact, that was the only thing that 100 percent of the survey participants agreed on: Given a chance to do it all over again, they all would still take the buyout.
