RAPID: Building Community Resilience: Understanding Homeowner Response to Extreme Events

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Strengthening community resilience to natural disasters is important in all communities, including in the residential sector. In some instances, homeowners may survive a hazard event yet still experience significant direct and indirect losses that, when aggregated over entire communities, can impede recovery following major disasters. Reduction of future losses may require homeowners to undertake voluntary actions to reduce risks to their residences. This research will focus on the role of social and cultural factors, including religiosity, in motivating homeowners to be proactive. This research will conduct homeowner surveys in two Haitian communities whose residential sectors were respectively devastated by 2016's Hurricane Matthew and the 2010 Earthquake. Understanding the attitudes and behaviors of these extremely vulnerable homeowners can in turn inform efforts to encourage proactive risk reduction among similar communities in the United States. Such findings will inform the development of programming enabling cultural and social institutions to move beyond their historical roles as key actors in response and recovery and become drivers of proactive risk reduction.Homeowner decisions to reduce risk to natural hazards like hurricanes and earthquakes are likely constrained by complex social, economic, and political forces, including the role of important social and cultural institutions. The specific practices of these institutions may vary considerably even within those of a particular type, and may be associated with corresponding differences in the posture of adherents towards various hazards. The recent (e.g., Hurricane Katrina) and more distant history of US disasters has shown, for example, that institutional affiliation may inform risk seeking/avoidance behavior. This study pays particular attention to the role of religiosity in determining homeowner agency to rebuild for resiliency. Other variables tested for their effects on risk-reducing homeowner behavior include the severity of prior disaster damage (quantified by engineering forensic assessments), perceptions of future natural hazard risk, and time elapsed since prior disaster experience. Data used in this investigation will be generated from face-to-face homeowner surveys distributed to 500 primary decision makers of single family residences in each of the two demographically similar communities in Haiti, Les Cayes and Leogane. Residents of Les Cayes are in the early stages of recovery following 2016's Hurricane Matthew, where intent toward risk reducing construction can be documented. By contrast, respondents in Leogane, the epicenter of the 2010 Earthquake, have had six years to navigate the steps of rebuilding and demonstrate actions toward risk reduction, allowing a comparative evaluation between intent and action in household recovery. Given the lack of accurate census data for random sampling, respondents are selected through modified random walk protocols. Data analysis includes basic descriptive statistics (frequencies and cross-tabs) for the two communities and multivariate analysis on the Structural Risk Mitigation Index, a quantitative indicator of the homeowner's proactive response toward resilience-enhancing construction.