Case Study

Home Elevation Program Helps Demystify The Process

Year

2022

Details

Hazards Addressed

Flooding – Coastal

Flooding – Rainfall-induced

Assets

Property

Click the link below to read the Peer-to-Peer Case Study by NOAA's Digital Coast:

Home Elevation Program Helps Demystify The Process»

Equity Insights

This project to address flooding risks through increased home elevation in flood-vulnerable communities prioritizes fairness, inclusivity, and accessibility, embodying a commitment to procedural, distributional, and structural equity. Procedural equity is demonstrated through efforts to provide home elevation training and funding support for homeowners and contractors; this fosters broad access to education and resources irrespective of socio-economic status. By tailoring accessible training and resources to local conditions and ordinances, with a focus on reaching low-income homeowners, the initiative ensures fair distribution of benefits and dismantles traditional barriers to participation, reflecting a commitment to distributional and structural equity. Additionally, ongoing efforts to explore funding options and develop cost estimation tools aim to further reduce economic barriers, enhancing distributional and structural equity in the project's approach.

Lessons Learned

Engage experts: When introducing novel resilience approaches unfamiliar to the community, rely on experts to offer straightforward explanations of essential technical details, benefits, and real-life examples. Educating the public in this fashion fosters interest and backing, crucial for project success. Emphasize local examples and pertinent information, leveraging firsthand experiences whenever feasible, to promote deeper comprehension and community endorsement.
Bring everyone to the table: Inclusive engagement is essential for effective climate resilience. With home elevation initiatives, it's crucial to explore various avenues for involving contractors and homeowners, offering a spectrum of engagement options to enhance participation and optimize the distribution of critical information.
Implement incentive-based programs: Within educational initiatives, offering participation incentives, such as financial support for attendance or project-specific rewards (e.g., providing continuing education credits for contractors), can significantly boost participation rates, enhance enthusiasm, and amplify overall impact.
Comprehensive Outreach and Knowledge Cultivation: Employing a variety of outreach strategies (e.g., press releases, radio broadcasts, social media campaigns, professional referrals, lecture series) facilitates the convergence of diverse stakeholders and deepens their understanding of critical climate resilience skills and information.
Sharing is caring: Guarantee accessibility of project materials to the public. In this project, educational training featuring essential home elevation information are accessible on YouTube, while online summaries spotlight local elevation examples. This wealth of information serves as a valuable asset not only to the project community but also to other flood-affected communities contemplating home elevation. Making this information readily available diminishes existing capacity and financial hurdles, thus smoothing the elevation process and greatly expediting future home elevation endeavors.
Get by with a little help from your friends: Establishing an internal support group, such as a platform where municipalities can gather, openly exchange ideas, and collaborate on addressing identified challenges, can be a valuable resource.
Don’t hesitate to personalize: When introducing innovative resilience approaches unfamiliar to the community, you can become a crucial resource by gaining firsthand experience and sharing that knowledge. In this project, one of the coordinators intends to elevate her own home, documenting the process to address homeowners' questions and concerns more effectively, leveraging personal experience for community benefit.
Foster progress: Bureaucratic or time-consuming processes can impede progress. In projects that involve grant funding, support municipalities with funding applications to facilitate ongoing advancement.