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

学者和政策制定者预测，移民模式的大规模变化将对人类社区产生重大影响。虽然移民研究激增，试图更好地了解这些动态，但该领域忽视了重塑景观的主要因素之一：野火。这个项目的第一个目标是描述野火如何影响美国的移民模式。第二个目标是考察建筑环境在调节野火破坏是否影响迁徙模式以及如何影响迁徙模式方面的作用。众所周知，住房的可获得性在确定灾后恢复方面发挥着至关重要的作用；对住房的初步破坏影响着一个家庭是否流离失所，而重建或是否有替代住房是影响长期回返移徙的一个主要因素。因此，对建筑环境的更多关注可以提高学者们对火灾是否会影响迁徙，以及它们可能如何影响迁徙的理解。这项研究调查的核心专题--灾害流离失所和灾后住房准入--与在应急管理环境中工作的政策制定者以及在火灾风险高的地区工作的市和州官员直接相关，从而为这些司法管辖区的政策和准备工作提供了重要的投入。这项研究利用混合方法在多个尺度上审查野火的备灾问题，并将涉及三个主要组成部分。首先，将使用差值计量经济学和网络方法来分析全国范围内火灾破坏与流动模式之间的关系。数据来源包括美国国税局的县对县迁移数据、亚利桑那州立大学的美国空间灾害事件和损失数据库以及美国国家事件管理系统。其次，将使用加利福尼亚州巴特县的定性实地考察-包括50次半结构化访谈和参与者观察-从地面层面说明2018年营地大火后个人和家庭如何导航灾后住房通道。这项实地工作将进一步审查哪些因素促进了回返、移徙和战后重建，哪些因素妨碍了这些因素。第三，将利用卫星图像的地理空间分析来描述和量化火灾后建筑物的重建速度，并对四个主要火灾地点的重建速度进行比较。数据来源包括微软的美国建筑足迹数据、烧伤严重程度多机构监测趋势数据库和来自DigitalGlobe的遥感图像。这项研究将通过融合社会和环境数据，结合空间方法，并借鉴关于移民和城市环境的文献，为日益增长的关于建筑环境威胁的社会学理论做出贡献。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.