The occurrence of extreme events, either natural or man-made, puts stress on both the physical infrastructure, causing damages and failures, and the financial system. The following recovery process requires a large amount of resources from financial agents, such as insurance companies. If the demand for funds overpasses their capacity, these financial agents cannot fulfill their obligations, thus defaulting, without being able to deliver the requested funds. However, agents can share risk among each other, according to specific agreements. Our goal is to investigate the relationship between these agreements and the
overall response of the physical/financial systems to extreme events and to identify the optimal set of agreements, according to some risk-based metrics.
We model the system as a directed and weighted graph, where nodes represent financial agents and links agreements among these. Each node faces an external demand of funds coming from the physical assets, modeled as a random variable, that can be transferred to other nodes, via the directed edges. For a given probabilistic model of demands and structure of the graph, we evaluate metrics such as the expected number of defaults, and we identify the graph configuration which optimizes the metric. The identified graph suggests to the agents a set of agreements to minimize global risk.
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Optimal Risk-Sharing Mechanism to Enhance Resilience of Communities
Resilience of urban communities hit by extreme events relies on the prompt access to financial resources needed for recovery. Therefore, the functioning of physical infrastructures is strongly related to that of the financial system, where agents operate in the markets of insurance contracts. When the financial capacity of an agent is lower than the requests for funds from the communities, it defaults and fails at providing these requests, slowing down the recovery process. In this work, we investigate how the resilience of urban communities depends on the reliability of the financial agents operating in the insurance markets, and how to optimize the mechanism adopted by these agents to share the requests for funds from the policyholders. We present results for a set of loss functions that reflect the costs borne by society due to the default of the financial agents.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1638327
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10161397
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 13th International Conference on Applications of Statistics and Probability in Civil Engineering, ICASP13
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Sociologists have shown how displacement reproduces inequality among U.S. renters. Less is known about the experiences of renters prior to displacement, or how the trade-offs that renters adopt to avoid moves also stratify families. This article addresses this gap by examining how renters with few housing alternatives manage landlord neglect in routine maintenance. Using interviews with 131 non-Hispanic white and Latina/o, low- and middle-income renters living in Los Angeles, I find that unaffordable rental markets embed disadvantaged families, particularly low-income Latina/o immigrants, into substandard indoor living environments. Unable or reluctant to move, renters endure a process that I call negotiating neglect, which encompasses decision making around repair requests, following up with repair delays, investing personal funds into maintenance, and managing the health consequences of disrepair. Negotiating neglect demands substantial time, cognitive labor, and, at times, financial resources, and for some families, it is a chronic stressor. Taken together, these findings advance prior research on how unaffordable rental markets widen inequalities among families.
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Post-disaster housing recovery models increase our understanding of recovery dynamics, vulnerable populations, and how people are affected by the direct losses that disasters create. Past recovery models have focused on single-family owner-occupied housing, while empirical evidence shows that rental units and multi-family housing are disadvantaged in post-disaster recovery. To fill this gap, this article presents an agent-based housing recovery model that includes the four common type–tenure combinations of single- and multi-family owner- and renter-occupied housing. The proposed model accounts for the different recovery processes, emphasizing funding sources available to each type–tenure. The outputs of our model include the timing of financing and recovery at building resolution across a community. We demonstrate the model with a case study of Alameda, California, recovering from a simulated M7.0 earthquake on the Hayward fault. The processes in the model replicate higher non-recovery of multi-family housing than single-family housing, as observed in past disasters, and a heavy reliance of single-family renter-occupied units on Small Business Administration funding, which is expected due to low earthquake insurance penetration. The simulation results indicate that multi-family housing would have the highest portion of unmet need remaining; however, some buildings with unmet needs are anticipated to be able to obtain a large portion of their funding. The remaining portion may be filled using personal financing or may be overcome with downsizing or downgrades. Multi-family housing would also benefit the most from Community Development Block Grants for Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR). This benefit is a result of modeling the financing sources, that CDBG-DR is available, and that many multi-family buildings do not qualify for other sources. Communities’ allocation of public funding is important for housing recovery. Our model can help inform and compare potential financing policies to allocate public funds.
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Nicewonger, Todd E. ; McNair, Lisa D. ; Fritz, Stacey (Ed.)https://pressbooks.lib.vt.edu/alaskanative/ At the start of the pandemic, the editors of this annotated bibliography initiated a remote (i.e., largely virtual) ethnographic research project that investigated how COVID-19 was impacting off-site modular construction practices in Alaska Native communities. Many of these communities are located off the road system and thus face not only dramatically higher costs but multiple logistical challenges in securing licensed tradesmen and construction crews and in shipping building supplies and equipment to their communities. These barriers, as well as the region’s long winters and short building seasons, complicate the construction of homes and related infrastructure projects. Historically, these communities have also grappled with inadequate housing, including severe overcrowding and poor-quality building stock that is rarely designed for northern Alaska’s climate (Marino 2015). Moreover, state and federal bureaucracies and their associated funding opportunities often further complicate home building by failing to accommodate the digital divide in rural Alaska and the cultural values and practices of Native communities.[1] It is not surprising, then, that as we were conducting fieldwork for this project, we began hearing stories about these issues and about how the restrictions caused by the pandemic were further exacerbating them. Amidst these stories, we learned about how modular home construction was being imagined as a possible means for addressing both the complications caused by the pandemic and the need for housing in the region (McKinstry 2021). As a result, we began to investigate how modular construction practices were figuring into emergent responses to housing needs in Alaska communities. We soon realized that we needed to broaden our focus to capture a variety of prefabricated building methods that are often colloquially or idiomatically referred to as “modular.” This included a range of prefabricated building systems (e.g., manufactured, volumetric modular, system-built, and Quonset huts and other reused military buildings[2]). Our further questions about prefabricated housing in the region became the basis for this annotated bibliography. Thus, while this bibliography is one of multiple methods used to investigate these issues, it played a significant role in guiding our research and helped us bring together the diverse perspectives we were hearing from our interviews with building experts in the region and the wider debates that were circulating in the media and, to a lesser degree, in academia. The actual research for each of three sections was carried out by graduate students Lauren Criss-Carboy and Laura Supple.[3] They worked with us to identify source materials and their hard work led to the team identifying three themes that cover intersecting topics related to housing security in Alaska during the pandemic. The source materials collected in these sections can be used in a variety of ways depending on what readers are interested in exploring, including insights into debates on housing security in the region as the pandemic was unfolding (2021-2022). The bibliography can also be used as a tool for thinking about the relational aspects of these themes or the diversity of ways in which information on housing was circulating during the pandemic (and the implications that may have had on community well-being and preparedness). That said, this bibliography is not a comprehensive analysis. Instead, by bringing these three sections together with one another to provide a snapshot of what was happening at that time, it provides a critical jumping off point for scholars working on these issues. The first section focuses on how modular housing figured into pandemic responses to housing needs. In exploring this issue, author Laura Supple attends to both state and national perspectives as part of a broader effort to situate Alaska issues with modular housing in relation to wider national trends. This led to the identification of multiple kinds of literature, ranging from published articles to publicly circulated memos, blog posts, and presentations. These materials are important source materials that will likely fade in the vastness of the Internet and thus may help provide researchers with specific insights into how off-site modular construction was used – and perhaps hyped – to address pandemic concerns over housing, which in turn may raise wider questions about how networks, institutions, and historical experiences with modular construction are organized and positioned to respond to major societal disruptions like the pandemic. As Supple pointed out, most of the material identified in this review speaks to national issues and only a scattering of examples was identified that reflect on the Alaskan context. The second section gathers a diverse set of communications exploring housing security and homelessness in the region. The lack of adequate, healthy housing in remote Alaska communities, often referred to as Alaska’s housing crisis, is well-documented and preceded the pandemic (Guy 2020). As the pandemic unfolded, journalists and other writers reported on the immense stress that was placed on already taxed housing resources in these communities (Smith 2020; Lerner 2021). The resulting picture led the editors to describe in their work how housing security in the region exists along a spectrum that includes poor quality housing as well as various forms of houselessness including, particularly relevant for the context, “hidden homelessness” (Hope 2020; Rogers 2020). The term houseless is a revised notion of homelessness because it captures a richer array of both permanent and temporary forms of housing precarity that people may experience in a region (Christensen et al. 2107). By identifying sources that reflect on the multiple forms of housing insecurity that people were facing, this section highlights the forms of disparity that complicated pandemic responses. Moreover, this section underscores ingenuity (Graham 2019; Smith 2020; Jason and Fashant 2021) that people on the ground used to address the needs of their communities. The third section provides a snapshot from the first year of the pandemic into how CARES Act funds were allocated to Native Alaska communities and used to address housing security. This subject was extremely complicated in Alaska due to the existence of for-profit Alaska Native Corporations and disputes over eligibility for the funds impacted disbursements nationwide. The resources in this section cover that dispute, impacts of the pandemic on housing security, and efforts to use the funds for housing as well as barriers Alaska communities faced trying to secure and use the funds. In summary, this annotated bibliography provides an overview of what was happening, in real time, during the pandemic around a specific topic: housing security in largely remote Alaska Native communities. The media used by housing specialists to communicate the issues discussed here are diverse, ranging from news reports to podcasts and from blogs to journal articles. This diversity speaks to the multiple ways in which information was circulating on housing at a time when the nightly news and radio broadcasts focused heavily on national and state health updates and policy developments. Finding these materials took time, and we share them here because they illustrate why attention to housing security issues is critical for addressing crises like the pandemic. For instance, one theme that emerged out of a recent National Science Foundation workshop on COVID research in the North NSF Conference[4] was that Indigenous communities are not only recovering from the pandemic but also evaluating lessons learned to better prepare for the next one, and resilience will depend significantly on more—and more adaptable—infrastructure and greater housing security.more » « less
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Abstract Local food systems can have economic and social benefits by providing income for producers and improving community connections. Ongoing global climate change and the acute COVID-19 pandemic crisis have shown the importance of building equity and resilience in local food systems. We interviewed ten stakeholders from organizations and institutions in a U.S. midwestern city exploring views on past, current, and future conditions to address the following two objectives: 1) Assess how local food system equity and resilience were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and 2) Examine how policy and behavior changes could support greater equity and resilience within urban local food systems. We used the Community Capitals Framework to organize interviewees’ responses for qualitative analyses of equity and resilience. Four types of community capital were emphasized by stakeholders: cultural and social, natural, and political capital. Participants stated that the local food system in this city is small; more weaknesses in food access, land access, and governance were described than were strengths in both pre- and post-pandemic conditions. Stakeholder responses also reflected lack of equity and resilience in the local food system, which was most pronounced for cultural and social, natural and political capitals. However, local producers’ resilience during the pandemic, which we categorized as human capital, was a notable strength. An improved future food system could incorporate changes in infrastructure (e.g., food processing), markets (e.g., values-based markets) and cultural values (e.g., valuing local food through connections between local producers and consumers). These insights could inform policy and enhance community initiatives and behavior changes to build more equitable and resilient local food systems in urban areas throughout the U.S. Midwest.
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/doi.org/10.22725/ICASP13.302
