The wooden cabinets and gray walls, still smelling of fresh paint, could be found in the kitchen of any suburban home. From the window, the neat row of houses in soft blues, reds and greens could unspool along any gravel road.
But stepping onto the back porch, things change. The wind gusts in. The yard is hard-packed, rocky and treeless. The lawn of struggling grass seed suddenly drops off at the edge of a narrow plateau. The land then spills precipitously down into a valley hundreds of feet below before rising back up to another island in the sky.
Decades ago, a cheap form of extraction called mountaintop removal coal mining leveled mountains and shoved the detritus — sugar maples, salamanders, song birds — down hill. While federal law required these moonscapes to be leveled and replanted, reclaimed strip mines no longer resemble mountains. Instead of lush eastern woodlands, they look more like dry western plains.
But in a region defined by steep slopes, these ecological graveyards also provide a startling solution to a problem plaguing residents in the narrow valleys below: the floods.
In 2022, apocalyptic flooding swept across eastern Kentucky, killing 45 people, destroying 542 homes and damaging thousands more. Now, instead of rebuilding in the floodplain, the state is permanently lifting residents onto safer land. Officials are more than two years into a nearly $800 million plan to reclaim these landscapes again, turning them from deserts into developments.
“Climate change is real,” Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky, said in an interview last month. “It’s hard to say which natural disaster would or would not have occurred without climate change, because we’ve had some big ones in the past. But what we know is that we see them more often, and sadly, we see them hit a lot of the same places.”
Seven communities across four counties, with aspirational names like Skyview and Olive Branch, have been designed for 665 brand-new properties, some of which will run on solar. Fourteen houses have been completed and about a dozen people have moved in to two communities called Thompson Branch and Wayland, according to the state.
As greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels, including coal, continue to heat the atmosphere, contributing to bigger fires, more severe floods and rising sea levels, people have been forced to abandon places they once called home. Climate migration has already reached places like Louisiana, where low-lying communities like the Isle de Jean Charles are being forcibly abandoned.
But relocation is complicated by the shifting dynamics of where people want to live. In other vulnerable parts of the country, like Florida’s Gulf Coast, which got pummeled by two climate-driven hurricanes within two weeks last year, millions of new residents moved to the state between 2000 and 2023.
Kentucky’s innovative approach to climate migration is the largest known housing project on reclaimed mine sites in the country, according to experts. The rebuilding initiative could help vulnerable families relocate, work to solve affordable housing issues in eastern Kentucky, and slow or even reverse depopulation in the region.
In doing so, it could also expand the meaning of home.
The Flood of 2022
Kathy Thomas was shucking ears of corn to freeze for winter when heavy rain started plunking down on the roof of her cinder block house sheathed in tan vinyl siding.
She’d lived for 52 years along Rockhouse Creek without ever experiencing a flood. But around 1 a.m. on July 28, 2022, she noticed water pooling on the kitchen floor. When she peered out her carport, an ocean appeared to engulf her house.
Minutes later, water burst through her vents, quickly rising up to her chest. She scrambled onto her dryer and perched on a small oak chair, but cold water still lapped around her knees. The power went out. She lost her cellphone signal. She could hear her neighbors crying for help.
After a sleepless night, she emerged at the front door to see her parents, who were searching the neighborhood for her on a four-wheeler. They didn’t realize she could survive inside the house. When the Federal Emergency Management Agency came to assess the damage, they measured the water line at 5 feet 2 inches. Ms. Thomas is 5 foot 4 inches tall.
She had to move in with her parents for two and a half years before finding a new home. By spring, Ms. Thomas will escape the floodplain, traveling 13 miles down the state highway before ascending to Thompson Branch.
“The dirt where we’re from is pretty important to us,” Gov. Beshear said, “but the thing that makes people willing to move is the safety of their families.”
‘You Can’t Go Back’
Strip-mined mountains could now be considered safer than the valleys, where people long congregated near fertile farmland beside the riverbanks. In a region where flat property has always been scarce, and many residents suffer from persistent poverty often blamed on the boom and bust of coal extraction, moving out of the floodplain has been cost-prohibitive.
“When you live in this part of the country, there’s good and bad that comes with mining,” said Seth Long, the executive director of HOMES, Inc., a nonprofit housing developer responsible for the 10 homes at Thompson Branch. “You take what it is, and you redeem it. You can’t go back.”
Mark Arnold, a landscape architect who designed five of the high ground sites where more than 600 homes are planned, including Thompson Branch, plans to incorporate the place-based culture of floodplain communities. His vision — small clusters of houses, eventually enveloped by reforested land — would emphasize the importance of family and neighborliness.
While embracing the past, developers are also designing for the future. All 10 homes at Thompson Branch will have solar panels installed and in an area where electricity can cost hundreds of dollars, homeowners should pay just $21.50 per month, according to Mr. Long. While there’s a history of heavy sports facilities, schools and hotels that become structurally unsound as the strip mine settles, lighter construction shouldn’t face the same problems, according to Scott McReynolds, the executive director of the Housing Development Alliance, a nonprofit developer based in eastern Kentucky.
“There’s been a lot of single family homes developed on strip mines and when they’re done correctly and thoughtfully, it’s a reasonable risk,” Mr. McReynolds said. “Nothing around here is foolproof.”
The high ground subdivisions underwent geotechnical surveys before they were approved for development. Some structural reinforcements were required, and engineers bored holes into the ground to analyze soil composition, designating some patches too unstable for construction.
In these open spaces, Mr. Arnold instead planned parks, playgrounds, and trail systems to help connect the community to their neighbors and to the second-life of the land.
A Crisis Decades in the Making
Eastern Kentucky’s housing crisis predated the flood by decades. The shortage of buildable land, plus properties held by out-of-state state coal companies, meant there were few places to build. High costs and low appraisals also made for-profit development prohibitively expensive.
“I’ve heard it said that the flood was the worst, best thing that ever happened to us,” said Mr. Long of HOMES, Inc. Federal programs provided 9 out of every 10 dollars the state planned on investing in high ground housing.
But that investment has taken time to arrive. Nonprofits have waited almost three years for payments to come through. Infrastructure like sewer and water lines at these tucked away sites is expensive, according to developers and the state. Plus, the destruction was so widespread, a 2024 study estimated $600 million more is needed to provide new, safe homes for 3,000 families.
“The state is really committed, but some of us wonder whether there will actually be enough money,” Mr. McReynolds said.
A three bedroom, two bathroom home in the region typically appraises around $180,000 — $200,000 and most homeowners require a combination of assistance programs and personal financing. Ms. Thomas purchased her new house with two federal buyouts (for her home and her father’s, which was also destroyed in the flood) as well as loans.
“People will say, why don’t you just move?” said Sherry Mullins, who retired from a career with the United States Department of Agriculture a month before the flood destroyed her home in a hollow called River Caney. “You could go to these higher ground communities, but here’s the thing, you got to be able to afford to do that.”
Even if all the homes are built and people can afford them, there’s still a question of whether people will move.
In January, a regional housing network called FAHE, in conjunction with the state, opened a program to match flood survivors and residents with a case manager. Within the first month 99 people applied.
But some residents won’t want to leave generational land and for those who have, it can be difficult to adjust to life on higher ground. After Ms. Mullins lost her double-wide trailer, she moved onto another strip mine development that predated the 2022 flood called Blue Sky.
There she suffered another loss when her husband of 37 years, George, died after breaking his hip and struggling with his mental health. “He just could not adapt, and he regressed every day after the flood,” Ms. Mullins said.
But residents want to escape future floods and keep their families safe.
For developers, that means keeping long-term adaptation under climate change at the forefront of creating these new communities.
“We’re trying to figure out how to make sure our housing is resilient housing, and that it’s going to stand the test of time,” said Mindy Miller, communications and development director at the Housing Development Alliance. “We’re not just rebuilding for the next year, we’re trying to rebuild forever.”
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