By Carla Astudillo | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

More than 3,300 homes and business in New Jersey have been repeatedly flooded and rebuilt at taxpayer expense — some as many as 20 or more times — since the 1970s, raising questions about whether the government should force more people to elevate or relocate.

Repairs to the properties — covered under the National Flood Insurance Program, which provides low-cost flood insurance to a quarter-million New Jersey property owners — cost a total of about $700 million, according to new data published this month.

About 70 percent of the New Jersey properties have been repaired five or more times, with the median payment for each flood claim topping $25,000, according to the data.

New Jersey has the third-highest number of repetitive loss properties under the federal program, behind Louisiana and Texas.

The statistics were published this month as part of Flood Games, an investigation by the Houston Chronicle that found damage assessments were too low or not enforced, preventing repair costs from exceeding a key benchmark that would require demolition or elevation.

The Chronicle investigation also found that none of the potential reforms put forward to change the deeply-indebted federal flood insurance program, set to lapse July 31 without congressional reauthorization, addresses the problem of poorly enforced elevation requirements.

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Ed Murray | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

'A cycle of flooding'

Part of the problem with the program is the way it’s set up, said Joel Scata, an attorney for Healthy People Thriving Communities program at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“It places a great deal of emphasis in rebuilding in place and not mitigating flood risks,” Scata said. Alternatives include buying out the property so that property owners can move higher ground or elevating the property, he said.

In addition, unlike private insurance, there’s no limit on the amount of claims property owners can make on the same property in the same location, Scata said.

“And so they’re trapped in a cycle of flooding and rebuilding,” he said.

For example, one business in Pleasantville is located in a building that has flooded and received payments to rebuild 32 different times since the 90’s. There’s a single-family home in North Wildwood that has been flooded and rebuilt 23 times.

One factor that makes New Jersey homes prone to high-cost flood damage is its old housing stock, according to Thomas Herrington, associate director of the Monmouth University Urban Coast Institute.

“Most of these homes were built before the federal insurance program existed [in 1968],” said Herrington. “They were not build to modern-day floodplain specification.”

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Rob Spahr | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Flooding hot spots

Many of the repetitive loss properties are found in low-lying, flood-prone communities along the Passaic River. Wayne Township is home to 429 such properties with the federal government paying a grand total of $84 million over 40 years, according to the data.

The neighboring communities of Lincoln Park, Pompton Lakes and Little Falls have a combined total of 483 repetitive loss properties.

The Jersey Shore’s also a hot spot. The zip code with the second-largest amount of repetitive loss properties is 08260, which includes the beachside communities of Wildwood, Wildwood Crest, North Wildwood and West Wildwood.

However, beachside homes have the added phenomenon of many times being assessed too low compared to their high property value, Herrington said. The federal guidelines require demolition or elevation if damage is estimated at 50 percent or more of the home’s value.

“Because the homes are so highly valued and the cost to repair and rebuild is much lower, it takes a lot to hit that 50 percent damage value,” he said. “The numbers need to reflect the inflated value of real estate price.”

As a fix, the federal and state government have been buying and demolishing homes within flood zones.

Since 2008, Wayne has secured a total of over $90 million to purchase about 400 homes in the township from FEMA through the Severe Repeated Loss and Hazard Mitigation Grant Program and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection's Blue Acres program.

Little Falls is nearly done with 70 home buyouts along the Passaic River funded by a combination of Blue Acres and local organization funds.

However, the process of buying homes and moving residents moved is slow, often taking years to occur after a particular disaster strikes.

Use the database below to search or sort every severe repetitive loss property in New Jersey and see how many times the property claimed a loss due to flooding.

A note about the data: From the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which administers the program; was obtained, cleaned and made available by the Houston Chronicle. The data does not include address or coordinates for every property location.

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Ed Murray | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Read more N.J. data reporting

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