This article and its companion, Federal Flood Policy & Maladaptation: A Story of Collective Forgetting, 34 S. Cal. J. Interdisciplinary L. (in print 2025), confront foundational assumptions about land use governance and community resilience, focusing on potential legal reforms that center justice, support community engagement and activism, and grapple with the entrenchment of certain classes of land use problems. Placing flood policy in the United States within its historical and legal context, Federal Flood Policy challenges the prevailing view that the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968 (NFIA) created a national program centered on the provision of flood insurance, demonstrating instead that Congress intended the operative core of the NFIA to be a set of regulatory eligibility criteria that require communities to adopt zoning restrictions limiting development in flood hazard areas.

Observing that climate maladaptation—like exclusionary zoning and environmental racism—is among a class of local governance problems that persistently defy solution, this article interrogates the nearly universal invocation of the communitarian values of localism to justify local autonomy over land management problems even in the face of overwhelm-ing evidence that most local governments have not been able to martial their land use authority to increase climate resilience at the community scale. The article argues that insufficient attention has been given to zoning law’s operative values, which center on protecting and preserving property rights and socio-economic status. By failing to account for ten-sions between these operative values and adaptation strategies that limit development in hazardous areas, the article urges that localism has operated paradoxically to forestall consideration and implementation of the NFIA and other collaborative vertical governance frameworks that could expand local capacity to effectively and equitably increase community resilience to climate disruptions. Recognizing this dynamic, current political realities, and that local land use laws both drive the maladaptation problem and offer an opportunity to address it, the article concludes with an analysis of opportunities for reform to support local climate action that increases communities’ resilience to extreme coastal storms, inland flooding, wildfires, and other manifestations of the climate emergency.