Search for: All records

We examine the utility of data on active and vacant residential addresses to inform local and timely monitoring and assessments of how areas impacted by wildfires and extreme weather events more broadly lose (or not) and subsequently recover (or not) their populations. Provided by the U.S. Postal Service to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and other users, these data are an underutilized and potentially valuable tool to study population change in disasteraffected areas for at least three reasons. First, as they are aggregated to the ZIP + 4 level, they permit highly local portraits of residential and, indirectly, of population change. Second, they are tabulated on a quarterly basis starting in 2010 through the most recent quarter, thereby allowing for timely assessments than other data sources. Third, one mechanism of population change—namely, underlying changes in residential occupancies and vacancies—is explicit in the data. Our findings show that these data are sufficient for detecting signals of residential and, indirectly, of population change during and after particularly damaging wildfires; however, there is also noticeable variation across cases that requires further investigations into, for example, the guidance the U.S. Postal Services provides its postal offices and carriers to classify addresses as vacant. 

Abstract The scale of wildfire impacts to the built environment is growing and will likely continue under rising average global temperatures. We investigate whether and at what destruction threshold wildfires have influenced human mobility patterns by examining the migration effects of the most destructive wildfires in the contiguous U.S. between 1999 and 2020. We find that only the most extreme wildfires (258+ structures destroyed) influenced migration patterns. In contrast, the majority of wildfires examined were less destructive and did not cause significant changes to out- or in-migration. These findings suggest that, for the past two decades, the influence of wildfire on population mobility was rare and operated primarily through destruction of the built environment. 

Abstract An environmental event that damages housing and the built environment may result in either a short‐ or long‐term out‐migration response, depending on residents' recovery decisions and hazard tolerance. If residents move only in the immediate disaster aftermath, then out‐migration will be elevated only in the short‐term. However, if disasters increase residents' concerns about future risk, heighten vulnerability, or harm the local economy, then out‐migration may be elevated for years after an event. The substantive aim of this research brief is to evaluate hypotheses about short‐ and long‐term out‐migration responses to the highly destructive 2005 hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico. The methodological aim is to demonstrate a difference‐in‐differences (DID) approach analysing time series data from Gulf Coast counties to compare short‐ and long‐differences in out‐migration probabilities in the treatment and control counties. We find a large short‐term out‐migration response and a smaller sustained increase for the disaster‐affected coastal counties. 

Abstract We introduce the consideration of human migration into research on economic losses from extreme weather disasters. Taking a comparative case study approach and using data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York/Equifax Consumer Credit Panel, we document the size of economic losses attributable to migration from 23 disaster-affected areas in the United States before, during, and after some of the most costly hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires on record. We then employ demographic standardization and decomposition to determine if these losses primarily reflect changes in out-migration or the economic resources that migrants take with them. Finally, we consider the implications of these losses for changing spatial inequality in the United States. While disaster-affected areas and their populations differ in their experiences of and responses to extreme weather disasters, we generally find that, relative to the year before an extreme weather disaster, economic losses via migration from disaster-affected areas increase the year of and after the disaster, these changes primarily reflect changes in out-migration (vs. the economic resources that migrants take with them), and these losses briefly disrupt the status quo by temporarily reducing spatial inequality.