Here, There and Everywhere: Residential Relocation Following a Natural Disaster
摘要
Residential relocation has become an ascendant form of climate adaptation as households and communities across the United States grapple with the effects of environmental hazards intensified by climate change. However, research on relocation often relies on county-level measures of net population change, overlooking crucial spatial and temporal nuances in how racial privilege and inequality shape residential relocation patterns at a local level. For these reasons, recent reviews of the literature have called for innovative, spatially, and temporally granular research on relocation as climate adaptation. To address this gap, I leverage restricted, longitudinal consumer reference data to track 832,212 unique households' annual address-to-address residential movements before and after the impact of Hurricane Harvey on Harris County, Texas. Using 3 × 3 meter flood data aggregated to the block-group level, I examine how the severity of flooding affects averaged, yearly block-group rates of residential relocation, how those effects persist over time, and how these processes are moderated by climate apartheid. I find that extreme flooding within majority Black, Hispanic, or Asian block groups results in increases in residential relocation for up to two years following Hurricane Harvey. Lower levels of flooding and flooding within majority-White and no-majority block groups does not affect residential relocation. These results provide insight into how, even when inundated with similar levels of flooding, racialized socio-spatial environmental inequalities, indicative of climate apartheid, produce divergent relocation outcomes between majority White, no-majority, and majority Black, Hispanic, or Asian spaces.