Adaptive Mobility: The Case of Property Buyouts and Resettlement Pathways in Urban Flood Zones

• In Event: 1451 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 9. Neighborhood Choice

Abstract

This study examines the social and spatial pathways opened up via government buyouts of flood-prone residential properties. Using the case of federally funded buyouts – increasingly the dominant strategy of flood hazard mitigation in the time of climate change – we investigate not only where buyouts take place, but where people relocate after receiving public funds for their home. We offer the concept of “adaptive mobility” – defined as local moves undertaken via government policies explicitly deployed and funded to reduce future vulnerability to climate-related hazards – to demarcate such moves from the wider flows of residential mobility that are always in motion at the local level. Drawing on the case of Houston/Harris County, Texas, site of more than 3000 federal buyouts between 2000 and 2017, we find that individuals who take buyouts (1) make predominantly local moves to (2) whiter and (3) more economically advantaged areas; (4) additionally, when adaptive movers are able to satisfy these racial and socioeconomic conditions, they will resettle in areas that have also been home to buyout sites, indicating how social factors influence adaptive mobility decisions even in the face of a government program that aims to remove people and property from flood zones. Implications for an environmentally attuned urban sociology are discussed.

Authors

• James R. Elliott, Rice University

• Kevin Loughran, Rice University

• S. Wright Kennedy, Columbia University