Toronto completed a similar initiative after Hurricane Hazel in 1954. A number of neighbourhoods in valleys were not rebuilt after devastating flooding, and the city was left with wonderful green space, especially in the Don Valley. For me, it’s a “top 10” biking experience, to cross Toronto by bicycle along the trail system.
As an aside, it took a minute for me to parse the OP as I initially took it to mean some sort of infrastructure resiliency project (buying outhouses vs buying out houses).
MD has some replace-felled-trees law, but it’s kinda crappy cause trees can be planted somewhere else entirely. So a big development can be treeless.
Because we had to move to new sites further south every 3-4 weeks on average, we all had camper trailers and just hopped from campground to campground as we went. Towards the end we ended up staying at a campground near Mooresville NC and every day since we left that place I've wanted to go back.
It was so beautiful and quiet with so much history to explore and it left a huge impression on me. Might be time for me to actually pick up and go visit again.
Unrelated but there needs to be a guide given out to southerners visiting Maryland warning them to not call anyone under the age of 100 sir/ma'am... Might have just been bad luck with my encounters but I had a couple of people get very angry for calling them ma'am and it was so hard to undo a lifetime of defaulting to using those terms when talking to people I don't know lol.
This is probably the one area that most cities in North Carolina excel at. We don't have great sidewalks or transit, but we have a ton a trees. Less than we used to though. But from my current apartment, I'm closer to seeing 300 trees than 3. The post-hurricane-Hugo effort to buy out houses in flood prone zones and turn them into greenways was probably the single smartest thing Charlotte and the surrounding towns have done (though I'm glad we got our light rail too - too bad for Raleigh). It's a good pattern - protects the natural watershed, gives wildlife a safe place to live, makes flooding less impactful, and creates pleasant away-from-road paths for walking and biking.