Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Effects of Wildfire Damage on Housing Access and Migration

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Scholars and policy-makers have predicted that large-scale changes to migration patterns will significantly impact human communities. While migration scholarship has proliferated in attempt to better understand these dynamics, the field has overlooked one of the major factors reshaping landscapes: wildfires. The first aim of this project is to describe how wildfires affect migration patterns in the United States. The second aim is to examine the role of the built environment in mediating whether and how wildfire damage impacts migration patterns. It is well-established that housing access plays a crucial role in determining disaster recovery; initial damage to homes influences whether or not a household is displaced, and reconstruction or the availability of alternative housing is a major factor that affects longer-term return migration. Greater attention to the built environment can therefore improve scholars’ understanding of not just whether fires may influence migration, but how they may do so. The core topics investigated by this research – disaster displacement and post-disaster housing access - are immediately relevant to policymakers working in emergency management settings and to municipal and state officials working in regions at high fire risk, thus providing important input into policy and preparedness in these jurisdictions. This study utilizes mixed-methods to examine questions of disaster preparedness from wildfires at multiple scales, and will involve three primary components. First, difference-in-difference econometric and network approaches will be used to analyze the relationships between fire damage and mobility patterns at a national scale. Data sources include the Internal Revenue Service’s County-to-County Migration Data, Arizona State University’s Spatial Hazards Events and Losses Database for the United States, and the U.S. National Incident Management System. Second, qualitative fieldwork in Butte County, California - including 50 semi-structured interviews and participant observation - will be used to illustrate from the ground-level how individuals and families navigated post-disaster housing access in the aftermath of the 2018 Camp Fire. This fieldwork will further examine what factors facilitated and what factors prevented return migration and post-fire reconstruction. Third, geospatial analysis of satellite imagery will be used to describe and quantify post-fire building reconstruction rates, which will in turn be compared between four major fire sites. Data sources include Microsoft’s U.S. Building Footprint Data, the multi-agency Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity database, and remote sensing images from DigitalGlobe. This research will contribute to a growing body of sociological theory on threats to the built environment by blending social and environmental data, incorporating spatial methods, and drawing from literatures on migration and urban environments.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.