Charlotte Shows How to Beat Flooding
Long before Florence, the city’s buyout program was helping residents leave flood-prone areas.
Briar Creek runs through a neighborhood in Charlotte and frequently floods during heavy storms. Several houses in the flood plain have been purchased by the city and demolished.
Photographer: Jeremy M. Lange for Bloomberg Businessweek
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.