When she answered the phone in late September, Jennifer Brewer was running on very little sleep. She’d been awake much of the night, she said, listening anxiously to the river.
Brewer lives in a cabin on the banks of the Rio Ruidoso, in midtown Ruidoso, New Mexico. The sleepy creek was part of what attracted her to the mountain town in 2017, when she retired from nearly three decades of teaching in Roswell. But in the past two years, it has become — quite literally — a nightmare. Soon after twin wildfires ripped through the surrounding pine forests in the summer of 2024, monsoon rains sent mud and debris careening down the burn-scarred mountainsides, forcing Brewer to evacuate as thick sludge from the river blanketed her patio. The following year was worse: The Rio swelled to a 20-foot wall of brown water that ripped whole houses from their foundations and swept three people to their deaths.
Though Brewer’s home survived, the cabin across from hers ended up wedged into a tree. She spent months wading through the bureaucracy of disaster aid while painstakingly working on her property — shoveling out mud, spraying bleach to prevent mold, raising a six-foot flood wall — only to see it all undone again by floodwaters. The pattern is likely to repeat for years, until the scorched soil recovers and new vegetation is able to hold it in place on the hillsides. Now, when it rains, Brewer is up all night.
“This morning, I heard it at 3:30,” Brewer said. “I laid there listening and thought, you know what? You’re not going back to sleep.” Eventually, she took a flashlight and went out to look at the water, which was running high and fast. She alternated between watching TV and checking on the river until she finally dozed off again. “That’s not a way to live,” she said. “That’s just crazy.”
With luck, though, this might be one of Brewer’s last sleepless nights. Just a week earlier, she’d become one of the first people in Ruidoso to benefit from a new program that offers a way out.
In spring 2026, with the help of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Lincoln County launched an emergency buyout program, meant to help them purchase hundreds of properties at risk of flooding following the fires. Run by the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, the voluntary initiative offers homeowners pre-fire values for their properties and then tears down or relocates the buildings, permanently converting the land into open space. Lincoln County has been approved for up to $220 million in buyout funds, with NRCS covering 75% of the costs.
“What we’re kind of betting on is that as we get some of these bought, we can manage this floodway and prevent further damage,” Lincoln County Manager Jason Burns told High Country News in March. “My hope is that as these floods continue, as we know they’re going to, that it’s not a dire emergency.”
Brewer applied as soon as she heard about the program. After an appraisal and a series of environmental and cultural assessments, she received an offer in September, far above what she thought her property could bring on the market post-flooding. Now, with the deal closed and her move-out date fast approaching, she described feeling “overwhelming relief.”
“Climate change is here,” she said. “I’m just tired of being worried.”
Brewer also felt extremely lucky. County officials identified more than 1,000 at-risk properties in and around Ruidoso last spring, and public meetings about the program were packed. Over 350 homeowners have applied, with more than 260 deemed eligible. But the county is reliant on state matching funds to unlock the full federal grant, and so far, they’ve received only the first round of funding — about $100 million. Burns estimated that would cover about 130 properties. (By mid-September, the county had made four offers.) Though he’s hopeful that the next legislative session will bring in the rest of the funding, he told state lawmakers in June that the county would have to “make strategic decisions on which properties will be of the most benefit.”
As communities across the West reckon with the growing threat of climate-related disasters, buyouts offer a rare opportunity to protect both people and land. And for rural communities, which often lack the resources to navigate the red tape involved, just getting approved for a buyout program is a major win. “Around the country, there’s a waiting list of people who want to be bought out, and there just isn’t funding,” said A.R. Siders, who studies buyouts at the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center.
But once a community clears that hurdle, other challenges emerge. In a town full of survivors, how do you decide who gets a fresh start? And how can you make the process as fair as possible?
“Climate change is here.”
SOME CLEAR LIMITATIONS are baked into the federal buyout system. NRCS requires buyout recipients to be U.S. citizens and clean title-holders, with permanent access to their property. That automatically excludes many of the people most vulnerable after a disaster: Renters can’t apply, for example, nor can non-citizens, including legal residents. And for multigenerational or multi-family households, the process can be complicated. Meanwhile, cost-benefit analyses required by other federal buyout programs, like the one run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, can lead to targeting low-value homes: Wealthier home-owners may receive support to stay while low-income neighborhoods get cleared out.
In Lincoln County, Burns said his team would not factor home value into their calculus. Their buyout program is first-come, first-served, and they’ve opted to prioritize homes that have seen significant damage. “What we’re going to do is try to take the highest risk first,” he said.
Among the properties hit hardest by flooding in Ruidoso are several mobile home and RV parks. The three people who lost their lives in the July 2025 flood — two children and an adult — had been camping at an RV park when the water arrived. Swiftwater rescues saved multiple people at a nearby mobile home park the following week, when the river surged again. The state has since deemed that park and another nearby one unlivable, a Village of Ruidoso spokesperson said; dozens of trailers have been red-tagged and the residents given deadlines to relocate. But at other parks, residents are still living in trailers impacted by the floods. Several park owners have applied for buyouts, Burns said, though as of mid-September, none had yet received an offer.
Despite the fact that mobile homes across the country face disproportionate flood risk, the federal buyout system wasn’t designed with them in mind. While park residents own their homes, they rent the land those homes sit on — which means the parks’ owners are the only ones eligible for a buyout. That puts residents in a tricky spot: They’re either forcibly displaced, or trapped without an exit strategy, since many mobile homes are difficult to relocate. Mobile home owners are “really kind of disadvantaged within the decision-making process,” said Andrew Rumbach, who researches housing and disaster recovery at the Urban Institute. “They’re kind of left in between.”
That’s what happened to Cristina Obregón. In 2024, flooding knocked out the cinder blocks below her trailer at Cherokee Mobile Village in Ruidoso. She spent six months in a hotel before returning home, only to evacuate some 15 times last year. “Every single time it rained from that point forward, I had anxiety to the point where I was physically shaking,” she said.
When Obregón attended a meeting about the buyout program, she learned she wasn’t eligible to apply. If the owners of her park take a buyout, she could be eligible for relocation assistance, which she’d need to afford to move her trailer. But Obregón has no control over that decision. “Unless they say yes,” she said, “there’s really nothing the buyout can do.”
Buyouts can be a hard sell for park owners. Federal programs classify don’t compensate for lost rent or the value of the business, just the land itself. What’s more, they classify mobile home parks as commercial properties, not residential ones, which in some cases means owners are offered post-disaster property values. A spokesperson for Endeavor Communities, the company that owns Cherokee Mobile Village, declined to comment on the buyout program.
Burns said New Mexico offers state disaster aid programs better suited to support Ruidoso’s mobile home residents. Elsewhere in the country, communities impacted by flooding have gotten creative in their efforts to prioritize park residents in buyouts, seeking out less restrictive funding sources to help them relocate to newer, safer homes.
According to Rumbach, building a more equitable buyout system would mean considering mobile home parks first and foremost as housing, rather than as businesses. Mobile homes comprise 15% of New Mexico’s housing stock and make up the country’s largest source of affordable housing. A successful buyout depends, he said, on “recognizing that residents need to have a voice.”
IF OBREGÓN COULD PARTICIPATE in the buyout, she’s not sure where she would go. “I love my little trailer. If there were land, I would move it in a heartbeat,” she said. But “unless you own land where it’s cleared and you can put it, there’s no options.”
Obregón recently moved in with her mother, just outside of town, and is in the process of selling her trailer to a friend more willing to take on the stress of flood risk. Both Obregón’s son and her ex-partner, Ralph Gonzales, still live at the park. Gonzales said he’d also like to move, but he’s struggled to find affordable housing elsewhere in Ruidoso, where many homes have been converted into vacation housing for people from Las Cruces and West Texas. “If you work here, you really can’t afford to own a home — a big, nice house like these retired people have,” Gonzales said. “You gotta live where you can.”
“I love my little trailer. If there were land, I would move it in a heartbeat.”
Disasters like fires and floods often contribute to housing shortages. Without planning, a buyout program can exacerbate the issue, said Kris Smith, who studies flood adaptation and rural communities at Headwaters Economics. “When you’re talking about a buyout, that is bringing up two fundamentally massive and complex challenges: Both how do we live with flood risk, and also, how do we maintain affordability in our communities?” she said. “Sometimes that solution can solve both of those, but often those two problems are in tension with each other.”
That dilemma has been on Jason Burns’ mind. “Unfortunately, Ruidoso and Lincoln County is not a cheap place to live,” he acknowledged in March. “That’s another nuance to the buyout: trying to make people as whole as possible, to keep them here.” He said the decision to offer pre-disaster home values was partly made to help homeowners afford to stay local. Multiple new affordable housing developments are also in progress in Ruidoso — a combination of workforce housing and mobile homes first built for families who lost their housing in the 2022 McBride Fire.
Local officials have good reason to make an effort on this front: When hundreds of property owners relocate, it can hurt the tax base. “For rural communities in particular, it doesn’t take many people to leave to have an impact,” Smith said.
Many of the most successful buyout programs have invested in helping homeowners plan their next steps. In Texas and New Jersey, long-standing programs have hired counselors who work one-on-one with buyout participants to troubleshoot challenges — securing debt forgiveness, say, or scrolling through Zillow together to find safe housing options that will keep them close to work or school. Unfortunately, support for that kind of wrap-around assistance isn’t built into most federal buyout programs. “We don’t have a lot of support systems about how to keep people and social fabrics together,” Smith said. In most places, local officials have little institutional knowledge to draw from. They’re trying to guide their communities through a massive change they’ve never experienced before.
In 2021, a group of researchers put together the Better Buyouts Working Group, which connects communities that have already been through buyouts with ones implementing them for the first time. Participants include local officials and academics, alongside residents who’ve taken buyouts themselves. “They want to pay it forward, so that their neighbors and whoever comes next don’t have to learn the same things that they had to from scratch,” Anna Weber, a co-convener of the group, told High Country News.
She hopes this kind of collaboration can help communities across the country navigate the aftermath of disasters as equitably as possible. Part of the goal is to get people thinking about buyouts as part of a long-term plan for adapting to climate change. The questions they raise about people’s relationships to land and each other, she said, are ones that “a lot of us around the country are going to need to grapple with more and more.”
To be successful, A.R. Siders said, buyouts have to be focused on the future as much as the past. “If the plan is all about leaving, then that’s harder to build community around,” she said. “If it’s about where are we going next, what do we do with the land, what kind of community do we want to be in 50 years? That’s different.”
In late September, Jennifer Brewer was getting ready to say goodbye to her cabin in Ruidoso. Soon, she’d be moving to Santa Fe, into the house where she lived as a child.
“I’m finally to a point where I don’t cry like every day,” she said, “because I love it here.” She’ll miss waking up to elk and wild horses wandering by her window, she said, and hosting parties around Ruidoso’s December Festival of Lights, held every year just up the road. She’ll miss living in a small town where she felt safe leaving her door unlocked.
But she feels good about her choice. “The purpose of the whole buyout is to make a healthy riverbed,” she said, “so I’m more grateful to have the opportunity to move and have gotten paid a fair amount than I am regretful.” Brewer hopes the land will be managed safely, with lots of signs to warn any visitors of its dangers. And she likes the idea that where her house stood, there could be wildflowers. “It doesn’t bother me a bit for it to be all grass and trees and open,” she said.
This reporting was supported by the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources.
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