Lindsay Sexton and her husband, Corey, spent years planning their move to Ruidoso, New Mexico. The tiny mountain town had long been a weekend refuge for the couple and their young son, its pine forests a quiet place to hunt, ski and escape the desert heat. In 2024, they found their dream home: a sprawling ranch house on the meandering Rio Ruidoso.
On the summer day they planned to close on it, two wildfires broke out just outside of town. Though the Salt and South Fork fires destroyed 1,400 structures, the Sextons’ new home was spared. But the morning after the family moved in, a firefighter knocked on the door. “He was like, ‘Y’all need to go,’” Lindsey recalled. After just a few inches of rain, the normally sleepy creek had jumped its banks, and a flash flood was headed their way.
The fires had torched vegetation and seared the soil that typically absorb rainfall, turning the mountain slopes around Ruidoso into dangerous runways for mud and debris. As monsoon season hit full swing, the floods kept coming. The Sextons built an 8-foot sandbag barrier between the river and their home. Then, last July, a record-setting 20-foot wall of brown water rounded the riverbend. Corey helped rescue two people trapped in the water. But as the river rushed by, he saw a small child pulled under and swept away.
That 4-year-old girl was one of three people lost to the July 8 flood, which damaged hundreds of homes and upended lives throughout a community already struggling to recover from disaster. Experts warn that more danger lies ahead: Flood risk can intensify for several years after a blaze, and heavier rains could be even more devastating. Now, the Sextons want out. But they don’t feel good about selling their house to another family. “Somebody else buys it, and then they’re in the same predicament,” Corey said, looking around the living room they’ve given up decorating. “I don’t think that anybody, honestly, should be on the river.”
LOCAL OFFICIALS share his concern. This spring, they announced a plan: With help from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Lincoln County is offering to purchase at-risk properties at pre-damage rates and demolish or relocate the houses, permanently converting the land into open space to act as a buffer against future floods. With $235 million in funding secured, officials hope to buy some 400 properties from willing sellers — a proposal that could dramatically reshape the 8,000-person town.
Since the late 1980s, voluntary buyouts like these have helped tens of thousands of U.S. homeowners across all 50 states escape flood-prone homes on riverbanks and coastlines, including after catastrophic hurricanes like Sandy and Harvey. But Lincoln County is among the first places in the country to use buyouts specifically to address post-fire flooding. As climate change exacerbates these compounding disasters across the Western U.S., the community’s new effort offers one path forward for mountain towns fighting to survive.
Ruidoso is a conservative place, not one where you’d expect leaders to welcome what some Facebook commenters have deemed a government “land grab.” Harlan Vincent, the region’s Republican state representative, was initially skeptical of buyouts. A hard look at the economics helped convince him. Before last summer’s flood, New Mexico had already allocated $100 million toward recovery from the South Fork and Salt fires. Now, Ruidoso’s mayor estimates that recovery could cost a billion dollars. Even with tens of millions promised in federal aid, it didn’t seem responsible, fiscally or otherwise, to keep rebuilding in areas that would flood again and again.
Lincoln County was already working with the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) on mitigation strategies like debris removal and aerial seeding. The agency also offers a buyout program, though it had never been used following a fire. But Lincoln County met the criteria: It urgently needed to restore its watershed and protect life and property still in imminent danger after a disaster. NRCS accepted the county’s buyout proposal and agreed to pay up to 75% of the costs.
Local officials hope a new state fund can help make up the rest. This spring, Vincent and other lawmakers convinced the New Mexico Legislature to set aside $70 million for land acquisition, restoration and disaster recovery including potential state matches for local governments that have received federal emergency grants. “When you go up against Mother Nature, it’s not going to work out so good for you,” Vincent told me. “We’re trying to get along with her.”
“Somebody else buys it, and then they’re in the same predicament. I don’t think that anybody, honestly, should be on the river.”
That doesn’t mean giving up on flood-prone areas. Instead, Lincoln County officials say buyouts could help Ruidoso recover its outdoor economy — by designating new public land. Vincent estimates that the community has lost more than $100 million in tourism revenue following the floods. Creating a new riverside park equipped with water retention and safety features like dams and detention ponds could help draw visitors back to town. “Think of the opportunities we can build around that,” Vincent wrote in a January op-ed in the Ruidoso News. “(M)ore places for people to walk and picnic with their families, fish in the river, and see healthy wildlife populations.”
While buyout programs in other states have created trails, wetlands and parks in floodplains, that kind of proactive planning is still atypical, said Liz Koslov, a University of California-Los Angeles sociologist who studies buyouts. “A lot of the time, it just looks abandoned,” she said. “What happens to land has totally been an afterthought.”
Thoughtful landscape design is especially important in wildfire country, Koslov said. Open space helps protect against flood damage, but if it’s left unmanaged, overgrown vegetation could pose new fire risks. In a community facing multiple hazards, simply abandoning land is not an option.
ONE AFTERNOON in early March, Lincoln County Manager Jason Burns drove me around the back roads of Ruidoso, pointing to homes with broken windows that sagged toward the water. “We’re gonna open this all up,” he said, to make sure “we don’t have more homes floating down the river.”
To be eligible for a buyout, applicants have to meet NRCS requirements — including U.S. citizenship and permanent access to at-risk property. From there, it’s up to the county to decide who to prioritize. Burns and his colleagues have categorized more than a thousand vulnerable properties into five tiers based on existing damage and future risk. The county plans to focus on applicants in the first two tiers — people whose homes have been completely destroyed or severely damaged.
This is where buyouts inevitably get messy. At a packed public meeting in late March, residents peppered Burns with questions: How would an appraiser assess the value of homes that have washed away? Would second homes be eligible? What about the mobile home parks whose displaced residents did not own the land they lived on?
“When you go up against Mother Nature, it’s not going to work out so good for you. We’re trying to get along with her.”
By early May, the county had received more than 300 applications from property owners, Burns said. Just over 150 had been deemed preliminarily eligible, and appraisers had begun visiting properties. But how many people would end up participating in the program was still unclear.
Residents have their own complex calculus to consider. Just across the river from the Sextons, a man named Mike Abraham showed me around his backyard, which was buried beneath silt and debris. The floodwater line came up nearly 3 feet on his house. “I’ve been through four disasters, each time trying to rebuild,” he told me. “This last time has decimated me completely.”
Abraham spent months after the July flood bouncing between hotels and friends’ places. Now, he’s camped out in the two undamaged rooms in his house, without heat or running water. Still, he’s not ready to leave. The property has been in his family for 45 years, and he’s lived here for two decades. With more mitigation infrastructure, he thinks the worst impacts of future flooding could be avoided. And he worries that a buyout wouldn’t cover the cost of a new home in the area, where housing stock is limited.
That concern is real and common, said Miyuki Hino, who studies climate adaptation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Especially for lower-resourced households, just being handed a check is not enough to really make the move a success,” she said. Without careful consideration of what comes next, a buyout can end up exacerbating inequality and fracturing the community it aims to preserve.
Abraham wasn’t sure what it would take to convince him to leave this home. As we stood talking in the yard, two elk wandered over, just across the river. We watched as the animals folded their legs and lay down in the sun. “What price do you put on that?” Abraham asked. “What price do you put on waking up every day and seeing nothing but beautiful life?”
This is the first in a series of stories about the Ruidoso buyouts. Next, we’ll explore what equity and fairness might look like during a buyout process.
This reporting was supported by the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources.
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This article appeared in the June 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Managed retreat in a mountain town.”
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