AROUND 50 PEOPLE in the seaside enclave of Hull ventured out on a freezing January night to hear from town officials and a consulting firm about a plan that’s in the works to deal with a problem that’s become increasingly impossible to ignore: flooding.

The community meeting centered on a proposal under development that could mitigate flooding in the Hampton Circle neighborhood, a section of the slim peninsula town that’s ground zero for flooding. Over sliders and other finger foods on the second floor of a restaurant across the street from the ocean, officials presented ideas for new infrastructure like a tidal gate and pedestrian bridge as skeptical residents peppered them with pressing questions and anecdotes.

Before consultants from Weston & Sampson got too far along with their design pitch, though, Chris Krahforst, director of climate adaptation and conservation in Hull, stood up and added something into the mix.

Speaking gingerly, he raised the idea of addressing flooding by leaving, or “retreating” from, Hull altogether.

“Part of this is to put in the back of the minds of everyone here, that as we move into the future and into the distant future, what is this place going to be like?” Khrahforst said to a hushed room. “At the end of that road is a plan, and maybe part of that plan is a retreat.”

They were just bread crumbs, really. It was a way to get the idea into the conversation, but then move on, not wanting to linger too long on an obviously uncomfortable topic, at a meeting that had already turned contentious. But Krahforst didn’t want to pass up the chance to bring up the possibility of relocating from harm’s way at a gathering of residents in one of the most at-risk communities in the state. About two-thirds of Hull is located in a 100-year floodplain, meaning the area has a 1 percent chance of seeing a significant flood in a given year.

“What exactly do you mean by retreat?” one attendee piped in, unable to let the notion go. “Like moving our homes? Or temporarily evacuating during a storm?”

No, not quite, Krahforst explained. Retreat, more than likely, means picking up and moving altogether away from encroaching water.

As uneasy as the conversation became, that interaction is, in some ways, exactly the point.

Massachusetts is right now engaging in the most robust dialogue in state history around the concept of relocating people, homes, and communities away from places prone to flooding. In November, the Healey administration ripped the Band-Aid off and formally called on the state to establish a voluntary buyout program within three to five years once a study currently underway is completed.

Momentum has started in other ways, too. The Nature Conservancy won $266,000 in state grant money in 2024 for the entire purpose of talking about retreat, partnering with UMass Boston and the nonprofit Communities Responding to Extreme Weather to launch a peer learning network, organize a database of resources, and host events up and down the coast to tiptoe into the retreat conversation in communities on the front lines.

To move back from the coast is no small endeavor. Retreat is an incredibly sensitive issue, involving the uprooting of families and livelihoods and entire local economies from fishing villages and historic coastal towns that have been home to Bay Staters for generations. But it also is a way of reckoning with an environmental and economic reality as rebuilding year after year following devastating storms drains household incomes, increases the costs of insurance, and hits small towns’ strained budgets as they raise roads, protect infrastructure, and expand storm drainage in the face of rising seas and more severe floods.

Retreat is the ultimate tradeoff — a last resort — as Massachusetts tries both to limit the disastrous consequences of climate change and adapt to it.

That tradeoff is especially acute here. The Massachusetts marine economy contributes $7.4 billion annually to the gross domestic product — but there have also been more than a dozen billion-dollar disasters in the state since 2018, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Just last month, coastal communities in the Bay State were battered by a record-breaking blizzard that sent water buoyed by high winds spilling into streets across the region. The Gulf of Maine, meanwhile, which includes Massachusetts Bay, is warming faster than 99 percent of the world’s oceans.

State modeling supports planning for a rise in the mean sea level of more than 4 feet along the coast by 2070. Coastal property damage could reach over $1 billion a year, on average, by the 2070s with over 70 percent of the damage in the Boston Harbor region, an area that extends roughly from Winthrop to Hull.

One thing is clear: Local budgets won’t be able to shoulder that burden alone.

State-led flood mitigation efforts are ramping up, even as federal support has dried up under the Trump administration. Home elevation grants through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which can defray the costs for a homeowner to elevate their property, for instance, are not currently available.

Part of the point of Gov. Maura Healey’s $3 billion environmental bond bill, which is awaiting legislative approval, is to improve the state’s dams and coastal and inland resilience in order to withstand greater precipitation and more ferocious storms to minimize the severity of future flooding that could one day force people to leave their homes. The total price tag for that resilience work, however, stretches up to $130 billion through 2050, according to a state report, a number that dwarfs Healey’s proposed down payment.

There’s a growing recognition, though, that those infrastructure improvements won’t be enough to completely avert the need for buyouts in the future. There are few answers right now to a host of thorny questions, including who would be eligible for a buyout, how the state would raise the necessary funds for buyouts, how local tax bases would be impacted and, in a state crunched for homes, where people would go.

But the idea is garnering interest.

“There’s this general consensus when it comes to talking about managed retreat that people aren’t going to be interested, and so then planners and other municipal staff should avoid it,” said Lexi Lafferty, who works on community engagement for The Nature Conservancy-led project and attended a recent workshop the state convened as part of the buyout study. “But when we’re actually talking to people, they’re a lot more on board than we would have expected because they see the flooding. It’s constantly impacting their lives, and they know that it’s only going to get worse, so they’re looking for support and they’re looking for solutions.”

As Healey races to build homes to address a huge shortage in the state, the idea of taking existing houses out of that inventory is not on anyone’s wish list. But if a community is sandwiched between ocean and bay, or if marsh acts as a backyard, it’s unlikely for many seaside residents that simply moving their house back 50 feet will suffice. That further complicates the state’s housing jigsaw puzzle.

That dynamic is especially true in Hull, a narrow strip of land that extends out to the sea where occasional storms like one in 2018 submerge the town when the surrounding water spills over from all sides, damaging homes, cars, and businesses.

“Most of the homes in Hull are on a postage-stamp-size site,” Krahforst said in an interview. “There’s just nowhere to move. The community is pretty much built out. There is no other place.”

There’s a fear that if not handled right, the very municipalities trying to be proactive could be hurt. Residents who choose to relocate may retreat to other towns, either for a physical lack of space like in Hull or because of a lack of affordable housing options, taking their property taxes with them and leaving communities concerned about a looming budget hole and how to make it all pencil out.

Kristin Uiterwyk, director of the Urban Harbors Institute at UMass Boston, said patching that hole will require “innovative” thinking. That includes so-called betterment districts where certain property owners pay a higher tax or waste and sewer bill to fund road and stormwater improvements.

“This is one of the concerns we hear most from municipalities,” Uiterwyk said of the fiscal pressures the issue puts on local government.

That tension is poised to be revealed in the state’s most vulnerable communities with properties that have had multiple claims for storm damage.

There were 3,529 repetitive loss properties in Massachusetts as of July 2022, the most recent available data, according to a state climate adaptation report released in 2023. More of them are located in Scituate, home to 553 such properties, than anywhere else in the state, followed by Revere, Hull, Marshfield, Quincy, Winthrop, and Nantucket.

“Repetitive loss areas are a financial risk for everyone,” said Chris Stark, executive director of the Massachusetts Insurance Federation. “The homeowner is on the hook for their deductible. The insurer will step in to rebuild, provided that it was a covered claim. And then you have FEMA and tax dollars that also go, oftentimes, to these repetitive flood areas. Our focus has to be on reducing these repetitive losses for everyone involved.”

It’s in some of these communities where the conversation is delicately starting, but it’s also where the issue is most visceral.

Hidden in those repetitive loss numbers is an untold financial burden on households, who face rising insurance and rebuilding costs, cars and electrical systems in need of repair or replacement, and an ongoing cycle of watching tidal charts and storm forecasts. More and more homes in coastal areas in Massachusetts receive home insurance through the FAIR Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort. And part of Healey’s bond bill is to require flood risk disclosure – Massachusetts is one of just 14 without such a requirement – to nudge people away from buying homes in risky areas in the first place.

“This is a strategy within our toolkit,” Lafferty said of retreat. “This cannot be the only solution we have to manage it. But it’s also a really great tool that we can use where it’s applicable, where it makes sense.”

There are currently no communities engaging in any form of organized buyouts at scale in Massachusetts. So if state and local officials want some indication as to how these sorts of situations may unfold in the future, they may, ironically, want to look inland and away from the coast for insights.

Ten years ago, in the northwest corner of the state, Williamstown officials bought 115 acres of land along the Hoosic River that consistently flooded and endangered 225 mobile homes. Using funds from FEMA’s hazard mitigation grant program in coordination with the state emergency management agency, the town purchased the land and turned it into open space while many displaced residents moved into affordable housing units elsewhere in the community at a total cost of just over $8 million.

Another one of the largest planned retreats in Massachusetts occurred in 2003 in Lawrence, a heavily Hispanic Gateway City in the northeastern part of the state.

Known as the Spicket River Floodplain Acquisition, it involved the relocation of 22 homeowners and tenants after repeated severe river flooding. FEMA bought the properties from the residents, supported their move, and converted the land into green space where a city park now sits, for a total of $1.4 million.

Lesly Melendez, executive director of the nonprofit Groundwork Lawrence and a lifelong resident of the city, recalled that while renters were generally amenable to the move, owners weren’t so quick to throw in the towel.

“There was a lot of public outcry on both sides of it,” she said. “People were like, ‘You’re being dumb. Do you want your house to continue to flood?’ And then, of course, on the other side, in a heavily immigrant community, this was a big deal to own their own home. If I put myself in that position, I wouldn’t want to give up my home.”

That division is a cautionary tale for an issue that’s bedeviling state and local officials who recognize the economic costs for households and public entities posed by increased flooding but balk at the political and logistical hurdles of roping off sections of shoreline property for human living.

Talk of retreat looks different depending on where on the state’s 1,519-mile coastline you call home. Just last month, Nantucket launched a Strategic Retreat and Relocation Program, through which the town will identify parts of the island where, according to the program’s goals, retreat may be more of an inevitability due to “extreme coastal risk” and where other adaptation strategies “may no longer be feasible, effective or desirable.”

The initiative is set to formalize what the retreat process tangibly means for a homeowner, down to when a household is eligible for relocation and what applications need to be filled out through which parts of town government.

“The program is really intended to create a roadmap for the municipality and private property owners that are in these high risk areas to start thinking about proactively retreating or relocating to areas on the island that are at lower risk,” said Leah Hill, Nantucket’s coastal resilience coordinator. “Right now, it’s sort of an ad hoc method — we do it on an emergency basis. This program is really about being transparent, giving procedures, and developing trigger points.”

Other communities are treating retreat as something that’s loitering in the background, kept at bay by a rush of other interventions that officials hope will delay or maybe fully eliminate the need to relocate people away from an eroding shore.

Salem received more than $400,000 over four years in state grants from the Office of Coastal Zone Management to construct a salt marsh project to provide a natural buffer for homes and other critical infrastructure from erosion and flooding. The city received another $500,000 from the state in 2024 to study ways to address coastal and stormwater flooding in the Collins Cove Park neighborhood.

The city looked at elevating flood walls and expanding drainage pipes to alleviate “pinch points” in the stormwater management system where there’s “nowhere for the water to go,” said Neal Duffy, Salem’s sustainability and resilience director.

Duffy said the situation demands a both-and response for a city that’s experienced more flooding events in the last 25 years than in the prior 60 and is home to roughly 1,311 structures in the flood zone: working to preserve as much of the city’s suitability for living as possible while thinking about the role for retreat.

“It’s helpful that the state is trying to regionalize these efforts,” he said, referencing the state’s ResilientCoasts plan that laid out the goal of establishing the buyout program. “It’s an important conversation to have, but one that needs to be done on a more regional level than just community by community. It’s challenging no matter how you look at it, but it’s even more challenging if one community is taking on a certain strategy and another one isn’t. That can be a really hard thing to navigate.”

Still others are wary of exploring such a dramatic change. Provincetown, for instance, at the beloved tip of Cape Cod, is thinking of its adaptation strategy in terms of up, not out. The town is projecting sea level rise of 15 inches by 2030, leading to “widespread flooding of waterfront properties” that will extend inland in some areas from just a 1-in-5-year storm, according to its coastal resilience plan released last year.

“We’re not really actively looking at buyouts,” said Tim Famulare, Provincetown’s community development director. “One of the challenges Provincetown has with respect to retreat is that we have very small lots and are very densely developed. Horizontal retreat is not really much of an option. So our coastal resilience plan contemplates a vertical retreat by elevating buildings.”

Those elevations, he added, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars, are financed entirely by the property owner at this point. They are either being done voluntarily or when triggered as a requirement, like rebuilding after substantial damage has occurred or if the owner is seeking to renovate the property in a way that would significantly increase the appraisal value.

In Scituate, home to the most repetitive loss properties, town officials aren’t considering a managed retreat plan because there just doesn’t seem to be the demand. The town is littered with both dramatic low-lying spots where water crawls up to the edge of homes and places where waves pound the sea walls of homes that tempt fate with Mother Nature.

Instead, town administrator Jim Boudreau is juggling a daunting list of projects in the coastal community roughly 25 miles south of Boston known as “America’s most Irish town.”

There’s the $6 million project to tear down a community center at the water’s edge and turn it into a public park that’s set to be voted on this year. The sea wall tenuously separating elevated homes on Oceanside Drive from the encroaching sea is being raised to the tune of $16 million. A $2 million beach nourishment project is underway in order to decrease erosion and force waves to break farther out from shore. The town also added new stone on top of the dunes at Egypt Beach on the north side of town.

Twice in his seven years on the job, Boudreau has had to deploy a paramedic to be stationed in an area known as at Fourth Cliff in order to reach residents near Humarock Beach in case the road connecting the neighborhood to the rest of the town became impassable for authorities, like in March 2018 when 14 feet of debris cut off that section after a major storm.

On top of all that, Boudreau has his eyes on the wastewater treatment plant. It’s fine for now, he says, knocking on his steering wheel for effect during a tour of town, but rising seas have it in its path that could require the plant be moved at some point.

Sea walls. Berms. Dredging. Elevations. It’s the cost of keeping Scituate habitable.

“We have the same budget issues that everyone else does,” said Boudreau, waving to police cruisers as he whisks around town. “We’ve got increased health care costs, pensions, and energy. But this is just one more thing for us, and it pinches our budget.”

Changes in the way the coast looks in Scituate are just part of life. FEMA bought out about a dozen homes on Peggotty Beach in the 1990s, and the town later moved a road that provided access to the remaining homes from in front of the properties on the ocean side to the back.

A 2020 report from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council also presented additional buyout and land swap options for the community, though Scituate hasn’t acted on those recommendations and the report found that the town would confront “many and complex” regulatory challenges

“It’s an absolutely gorgeous place to live. It’s amazing. But sometimes it’s not so amazing,” Boudreau said. “Still, I don’t know how you convince people to move off of the ocean.”

If anything, more people want to live in Scituate, not fewer. The town grew by roughly 3 percent between 2020 and 2024, according to the US Census Bureau.

A 19,598-person community that can swell to 30,000 in the summer, Scituate boasts public transit access into Boston, sitting at the terminus of the Greenbush commuter rail line. That makes it more attractive to young families and professionals, said Jim Kenneway, who owns a local carpentry business.

Despite the hefty costs of home elevations, Kenneway said that he’s hearing more about people trying to figure out how to live in Scituate than those deciding it’s not worth it.

“Demand is high here,” Kenneway said while dining at T.K. O’Malley’s, an Irish pub located downtown near the working harbor. “People are buying up summer cottages and turning them into full year-round homes.”

Even when flashing red lights do emerge that could steer residents away, persistence beats them back.

Steve Bohn, a retired screen printer who moved to a cliff-side home in Scituate 12 years ago from Dover with his wife, had to “scramble” when he learned his prior home insurer, Amica, declined to provide coverage for his new property. Needing insurance to secure the mortgage, Bohn was forced to turn to the state’s insurer of last resort for coverage — which charged him roughly double what he had been paying — before finding insurance through a local agent two years later.

“As long as I’m alive, I can’t imagine people leaving,” Bohn said, knocking on wood — a telling theme in the town. “I love it here. It’s a special neighborhood.”

Sarah Keith, a lifelong Scituate resident currently living along the water near the town’s lighthouse, lamented the rising flood insurance costs and “storms, flooding, rocks” that characterize her lifestyle. Ten years ago, Keith’s sump pump failed in a storm, flooding her entire basement.

But her small children get to walk out of the house and right onto the beach.

“We love it here,” Keith said. “It’s such a sweet town.”