Doctoral Dissertation Research: Drivers of Residential Decisions After Disasters

About This Grant

Disasters alter the physical environment, destroy homes, and leave survivors with challenging decisions: should they return to their prior community or relocate to a new community? Past studies suggest that factors such as familial ties to an area, history in a community, age, employment opportunities, insurance coverage, and risk perceptions shape these residential decisions. Most of these studies, however, have focused on homeowners exclusively, ignoring renters, which make up 34 percent of U.S. households. Renters also encounter unique challenges in deciding where to live after disasters, since they do not decide whether to rebuild rental units after disasters. Understanding how renters make residential decisions after disasters, however, is paramount to ensuring communities recover after disasters. A wide range of businesses essential to community functioning rely heavily on renters, including restaurants, construction, farming, vegetation management, landscaping, and catering. This study addresses how renters make residential decisions after wildfires in two communities recently affected by major wildfires. Study findings support the development of disaster recovery plans that support the recovery of the housing market, the local economy, and renters after disasters. This project investigates how renters’ make residential decisions after wildfires using a modified Push-Pull Model of Migration. Previous literature, primarily focused on floods, suggests that residential decisions after disasters are shaped by several factors, including functional and emotional place attachments, hazard experiences, and risk perceptions. These factors can push individuals out of communities, pull them into others, or anchor them in place after disasters. This study uses photovoice interviews to examine how place attachment and risk perception shape the residential decisions of renters displaced by wildfires and compare how residential adjustment pathways vary between renters and homeowners. Study findings advance theory by applying a modified version of the Push Pull Model, accounting for the role of anchoring effects in residential adjustment decisions of renters and examining interdependencies between place attachments and risk perceptions among renters. Likewise, the study sheds light on the factors that shape renters’ residential adjustment decisions, supporting the development of recovery programs that account for the unique needs of renters. Study findings are relevant to other hazards as well. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.