AFTER RETREAT, REHABILITATION

While members of Congress from both parties continue to avoid talking about the possibility of managed retreat, it’s quietly happening. In New Jersey alone, at least 1,000 families have accepted buyouts since 1995 through the state’s Blue Acres program: The houses have been demolished and the lots returned to the floodplain. More than 170 of those buyouts have been concentrated in a single neighborhood in Woodbridge Township, just across Arthur Kill from Staten Island, New York. For the past nine years, a partnership with ecologists and landscape architects at Rutgers University Cooperative Extension has explored the ecological potential of the relinquished properties. Now, the lessons from that collaboration and similar efforts have informed a guide intended to help other communities chart a similar path. The exodus from Woodbridge’s Watson-Crampton neighborhood began in…