Wren Okafor-Sadowski manages the Retreat Program Review desk at the Missouri Division of Emergency Management, where she evaluates community relocation applications using frameworks she helped pioneer and has lately started to distrust. Before that, she ran the Millbrook Managed Retreat Program, which relocated 214 households from a Missouri River floodplain community to higher ground between 2028 and 2031. The program has been cited in federal guidance documents as a model. Its final report, laminated, hangs on the wall behind her desk next to a framed aerial photo of the old site, now a managed meadow bisected by cracked roads that lead to nothing. She agreed to this conversation on the condition that we not ask her to evaluate her own program on a scale of one to five.
The afternoon heat advisory had pushed St. Louis to its eleventh consecutive day above 108°F. Okafor-Sadowski's office AC unit was doing its best. She had a desk fan aimed at a second desk fan, which she described, without irony, as "redundant cooling infrastructure."
You ran what's widely considered one of the more successful managed-retreat programs in the country. What does "successful" mean in this context?
Wren: It means we hit our numbers. Two hundred fourteen households relocated. All structures on the acquired parcels demolished. Deed restrictions filed. Utilities capped. The land is back in the floodplain doing what floodplains do. Exposure reduction across the modeled hundred-year event was something like 94 percent for the relocated population. Satisfaction surveys at twelve months showed 81 percent of respondents rating the decision to participate as "positive" or "very positive." Those are real numbers. I'm proud of those numbers.
But?
Wren: No but. Those numbers are true. I've started paying attention to what's also true at the same time.
What do you mean?
Wren: There's this finding that keeps showing up in the literature. Households in buyout programs generally express satisfaction with having participated, but they also report frustration with the process and grief over loss of place and community.1 The operative word is "also." Both things live in the same person. Our survey instrument was not built to hold both things at once. You get a number. The number is the first thing. The second thing doesn't have a box.
Could you have designed a better survey?
Wren: Maybe. Probably. I don't know. A 2026 paper literally called for a whole new research agenda around measuring relocation outcomes, because the existing frameworks can't establish whether you actually improved human wellbeing.2 So I didn't miss something obvious. The whole field was measuring the same way. But "everyone was wrong" is not the defense you think it is when you're the one who filed the final report.
What were the satisfaction surveys capturing, and what were they missing?
Wren: They captured housing quality, perceived safety, proximity to services. Good things. Real things. The new homes are better built. People aren't sandbagging every spring. Kids aren't missing school for flood cleanup. That matters enormously, and I refuse to let anyone, including myself, minimize it.
What they missed. Okay. There's a resident, I won't use her name. She checked "very satisfied" on every annual survey we sent. Every single one. She also drives to the old site on the anniversary of the flood every year and sits on the concrete pad where her foundation was. The pad is still there because we didn't have the budget to grind them all.
She sits there for an hour. She told me this at a grocery store, not on a survey. On paper she is a success metric. In the grocery store she is a person who lost a place and has nowhere to put that.
A study of a planned relocation in Ghana found that relocated residents reported lower overall wellbeing, higher anxiety, and lower sense of safety compared to those who stayed, despite the physical risk reduction being real.3
Wren: Yeah. I've read that one several times. "Not straightforwardly related to risk reduction." That sentence lives in my head rent-free.
You've described the satisfaction data. What about the population data? Who lives in the new Millbrook now?
Wren: [long pause]
This is the part I think about most. We relocated 214 households. That was the program. But Millbrook-on-the-bluff, the new site, it's a real place now. School, post office, community center we built with FEMA mitigation funds. And about 40 percent of the current residents are people who moved in after the relocation was complete. They came for the new housing stock, the low flood risk, the good school. Great neighbors. No memory of the old place.
So when I say "the community was preserved," I need to be specific about which community. The charter? Yes. The name? Yes. The zip code? Yes. The network of people who knew each other's kids and brought each other soup and argued about the same potholes for thirty years? That's a different question.4
That sounds like a Ship of Theseus problem.
Wren: It is exactly a Ship of Theseus problem, and I wish someone had mentioned that in planning school instead of making me take another GIS course.
Valmeyer, Illinois, the original poster child for managed retreat. Village officials estimated that about half the residents twenty years after the move had lived there during the original flood.5 Half. And that's the success story. I used Valmeyer as my case study in grad school. I wrote "community preserved" in my thesis. I didn't ask: preserved for whom? Preserved in what sense? I took the town's continued existence as evidence. It's like saying a person survived surgery without asking if they can taste food.
You currently review other communities' retreat applications for the state. You evaluate them using metrics similar to the ones you're questioning. How do you hold that?
Wren: Badly. [laughs]
The metrics aren't wrong. Exposure reduction is real. Structural safety is real. Fair-market compensation matters. I'm not going to reject a community's application because I've had a professional crisis of meaning. People are flooding. The applications need to be processed.
But I've started adding a section to my review notes, unofficial, just for internal use, where I flag what I call "unmeasured continuity risk." Which is not a real term. I made it up. It means: this program will probably succeed by every metric we have, and there are things it will cost that we don't have metrics for, and someone should know that going in.
Does anyone read those notes?
Wren: My supervisor read one once and said, "This is very thoughtful, Wren," in the tone of voice people use when they mean please stop.
What would a better definition of success look like?
Wren: It would have to include time. Not just "were people satisfied at twelve months" but "what does this place feel like at five years, ten years, twenty." It would have to count people, not parcels. We count parcels because that's what the grant tracks. A parcel is not a household. A household is not a community.6
And it would have to make room for the fact that some of what's lost was never within program design scope. The angle of light on the river from a particular porch. The sound of a neighbor's screen door. You can't design for that. You can't mitigate it. You can maybe acknowledge it.
We didn't even do that.
Do you think the Millbrook program was a success?
Wren: I think 214 families are safer. I think the land floods without hurting anyone now. I think those things are worth what they cost, and I think what they cost was more than we invoiced.
That's not a yes or no.
No. It's not.
Wren Okafor-Sadowski is a fictional character. The research she references is real. The denominator problem is real. The concrete pads are, in many buyout communities, also real. If you are a managed-retreat project manager experiencing a professional crisis of meaning, The Docket cannot help you, but we see you.
Footnotes
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Baker, Barile, & Binder (2021). Research on Hurricane Sandy buyout participants found coexisting satisfaction and grief. ResearchGate summary ↩
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"Unpacking 'success' in climate-related planned relocation: A new research agenda for assessing and measuring outcomes." ScienceDirect (March 2026). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2949790626000261 ↩
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Reese, G., et al. "Social consequences of planned relocation in response to sea level rise." Scientific Reports (2024). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-53277-9 ↩
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Ajibade, I., et al. "Are managed retreat programs successful and just? A global mapping of success typologies." Global Environmental Change 76 (2022). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378022001145 ↩
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St. Louis Public Radio. "After Great Flood of '93, Valmeyer, Ill., retreated to the bluffs and found its future." (July 2013). https://www.stlpr.org/government-politics-issues/2013-07-30/after-great-flood-of-93-valmeyer-ill-retreated-to-the-bluffs-and-found-its-future ↩
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Binder, S.B., et al. "Managed retreat and coastal climate change adaptation." Land Use Policy (2022). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264837721006839 ↩