IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for the calls to start flowing into Peabody City Hall. 

Just a week or two after the Federal Emergency Management Agency updated flood maps across the Charles, Nashua, and Merrimack watersheds this past July, residents who found their homes newly included in the updated flood zones complained to city officials that they would likely need to pay for flood insurance for the first time. 

Eventually, those concerns reached Curt Bellavance, Peabody’s director of planning and community development. For the 100 or so households in Peabody now in FEMA’s special flood hazard area and an untold number of others across the three watersheds, the bill for increased flooding in Massachusetts is literally coming due.  

“They all got a notice from their mortgage company that said, ‘Oh by the way, you owe this premium,’” Bellavance told CommonWealth Beacon in an interview. “People were like, ‘What? I’m not in the floodplain. Is this new?’” 

The frequency and severity of heavy precipitation events and flooding is increasing in Massachusetts and is projected to continue to grow over time. While coastal communities are particularly vulnerable to sea level rise, inland communities located near rivers and streams are also at risk and have experienced some of the most devastating flooding and corresponding property damage in recent years.  

In Massachusetts, where housing markets are already strained, FEMA’s recent expansion of its flood maps is butting up against the state’s drive to supercharge new construction. In February, the Healey administration released a plan to add 222,000 housing units by 2035, but the increase in flooding — and the fact that it’s not clear how many existing houses are now encompassed by the new maps — introduce more risk into the process, as more parcels fall into flood plains and require additional insurance to qualify for mortgages. 

When a home or business is placed in a FEMA flood zone a government-backed mortgage lender will have to require flood insurance for the property. About 55,000 homes in Massachusetts already have flood insurance, two-thirds of which have their flood insurance through the National Flood Insurance Program, according to the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs 

“When someone says, ‘I grew up in this house, and I bought it from my parents and we never had water in 65 years,’ it’s hard to argue with that and say, ‘Well, you’re in the floodplain now,’” Bellavance said. 

The financial impact of these new maps on Massachusetts property owners is far from clear.  

FEMA doesn’t track how many new households or properties are added to a flood zone when new maps are created, according to an agency spokesperson. The state doesn’t have that information, either.  

That leaves it up to municipalities to figure out how to translate FEMA’s maps into tangible, actionable information for their residents to know their risks and to identify which households could be required to purchase flood insurance — before their lender comes knocking on the door. 

Some communities, like Peabody, have calculated the new number. In Wellesley, an additional 150 parcels of land are now in the FEMA flood zone compared with the prior map, said Eric Arbeene, the town’s planning director. And in Brookline, there are 33 additional properties in the flood zone under FEMA’s new maps, with five properties previously in the flood zone removed from the map, according to Maria Rose, an environmental engineer at Brookline. 

Others, like Middleton and Boxford, don’t have a sense of the scale of how the new changes impact their municipality’s residents, though in general more people are at risk of flooding.  

“The process was broken, in terms of getting the information out to people that were impacted,” Bellavance said. 

Those data gaps and thorny flood risk questions involved in the map-making process are only bound to generate more scrutiny in Massachusetts.  

New FEMA flood maps for the Blackstone, Hudson-Hoosic, and Housatonic watersheds and in Worcester, Franklin, and Hampshire counties are all expected to move forward by the end of 2027, according to FEMA. The state estimates that some of those areas will be getting their first flood zone updates since the early 1980s. 

The new maps that FEMA rolled out for the Nashua, Merrimack, and Charles watersheds earlier this summer better incorporate data around inland flooding — a process that first started a decade ago, the agency said.  

Healey is using the new maps to further justify her environmental bond bill, which is sitting before the Legislature and would direct about $400 million to upgrading inland dams, flood control projects, and coastal infrastructure.  

“The legislation also ensures experts in disaster prevention and housing production shape the building code and requires flood risk disclosures to protect homeowners and renters,” said Maria Hardiman, a spokesperson for the state energy and environmental affairs office. “These changes will help prepare Massachusetts for the future.” 

Pricing in flood risk over time could lead to smarter decisions about where people choose to live, where the state should invest in new housing and spur property owners to protect themselves with flood insurance to minimize costly damages. The vast majority of U.S. homeowners aren’t prepared for that risk: Just 4 percent of homeowners nationwide have flood insurance despite 99 percent of counties being impacted by flooding since 1996. 

But policymakers, advocates, and homeowners are sifting through FEMA’s updates skeptical of how best to make use of the new federal data. By law, the agency only takes historical flood data into account when establishing the flood zones used to set insurance rates, not forward-looking projections that model future conditions and incorporate the effects of climate change. 

That’s created large disparities between FEMA’s flood maps and the actual risk experienced by residents. A 2023 report from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council found that 96 percent of flood damage claims filed after the historic 2010 downpours were in areas outside of FEMA’s special flood hazard areas. 

Meanwhile, an analysis by First Street, a climate risk financial modeling company that does incorporate future projections, says that there are tens of thousands more properties in flood zones in several Massachusetts counties than FEMA’s flood maps show. For example, there are 42,447 properties in the flood zone in Middlesex County compared to the 9,093 properties identified by FEMA, according to First Street’s estimates. 

“We don’t use FEMA maps that much, and we encourage communities to also not use them for planning purposes,” said Julie Wood, climate resilience director at the Charles River Watershed Association. “I know there’s a regulatory structure around the National Flood Insurance Program that these maps are central to, and that’s, of course, critically important. But our focus is on climate resilience planning and planning for the future that we know is coming, and these FEMA maps are not a good tool for that.” 

Massachusetts communities are navigating how best to build housing given their flood risks at a time in which the state is confronting a large-scale housing shortage.  

Peabody is preparing for a new 128-unit affordable housing building in its downtown section that’s fully permitted, Bellavance said. That section, near North River, has historically had flooding issues and the city has worked to improve stormwater management there. 

In Wellesley, where the median home sold for $2.4 millon in August, the town is weighing a proposal from a developer to knock down several office buildings in a flood plain on the bank of the Charles River to construct a 28-unit, four-story multi-family housing building with two parking spots per unit, Arbeene said.  

“There is a housing crisis. Everybody is aware of that,” Arbeene said. “I do think you can develop housing in a responsible manner. Development pressure in Wellesley is intense. But you don’t want to build in a risky area. That doesn’t work for anybody. I think there’s a way you can do both, and that’s why we have a flood plain bylaw and review process to ensure any development adheres to proper protocol.” 

In order for communities to participate in the National Flood Insurance Program, municipalities must adopt the new maps and minimum zoning and building code standards for structures within the flood zones, like adequate draining requirements and additional permitting for development in the floodplain, as the state model bylaw recommends.  

On the other side of town from the proposed housing project, Wellesley is confronting the fact that the town’s high school is now, according to FEMA’s new maps, in the flood zone. FEMA previously designated the high school in the flood zone during the agency’s last update of the town’s flood maps in 2012, Arbeene said, but the town successfully challenged that designation — a process any property owner can go through to contest FEMA’s determination.  

“I think most people find it burdensome,” to be newly placed in the flood zone, said Theresa Hatton, CEO of the Massachusetts Association of Realtors. “But we live in New England, and there’s so much land that is in the floodplain, therefore anyone buying a home should investigate the flood maps. If individuals opt not to buy flood insurance, if a flood event occurs and they have no insurance to help them rebuild, they’re very frustrated by that, as well.”  

The release of the latest maps put Wellesley’s high school right back in the flood zone. The town decided not to challenge that decision this time and instead pay the $3,200 annual flood insurance cost, Arbeene said. “Sometimes, it’s a cost-benefit decision to determine the cost of challenging the maps and hiring the engineers and consultants versus just paying the flood insurance,” he added. 

Those types of choices are likely playing out across the state, with more still to come as FEMA finalizes more maps. 

To better plan for a warmer and wetter world, state and local officials and nonprofit groups are building more predictive and comprehensive flood tools to inform development decisions. 

In Peabody, for instance, Bellavance said the city is reviewing a draft resiliency plan that includes models for projected conditions decades down the line. The city aims to adopt new zoning regulations around that plan early next year. 

The Charles River Watershed Association, in partnership with 20 municipalities, has developed its own flood modeling to support planning and necessary infrastructure upgrades along the river. The state, too, has developed its own coastal sea level rise projections and is working on similar efforts for inland flooding.  

“People are concerned,” Arbeene said. “They don’t want to be in a flood zone. We have been getting calls from people who said, ‘Hey, my mortgage lender said that I’m in the flood zone, can I get out of it? How do I get out of it?’”