CAREER: Affordable Versus Vacation Housing Resilience: Mechanisms that Shape Housing Vulnerability and Recovery in Coastal Communities

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant will yield improved understanding of the mechanisms that cause disparities in vulnerability between affordable primary housing and second homes-vacation rentals in United States coastal areas. Growing population and development in many coastal areas, combined with rising sea levels, more intense and frequent storms and flooding under climate change, mounting economic inequalities, and aging infrastructure all pose increased risks to coastal housing stocks and, in turn, economies.

In many coastal areas of the United States, affordable primary housing is shrinking, aging, and deteriorating while seasonal vacation housing is growing and improving. Affordable housing is disproportionately damaged by storms, displacing residents who are more likely to be poor, elderly, racial and ethnic minorities, and service industry workers. While disparate patterns of vulnerability are visible, the mechanisms underlying them are little understood, which hinders improvements to housing policies.

This project will integrate theories and techniques from multiple fields to explain how development policies and funding mechanisms within the context of tourism economies create and exacerbate disparities in housing vulnerability. This project will engage students from underrepresented groups as well as students drawn from affected local communities in disaster research, outreach, and policy development.

It will also assist planners and policy makers by exploring the potential effectiveness of alternative housing programs and policies.

Housing and disaster studies have rarely identified or explained disparities between affordable primary housing and second homes/vacation rentals as two distinct housing submarkets in tourist-based communities. This CAREER project adopts a convergence approach by integrating theories and techniques from housing and disaster studies in urban planning, sociology, economics, and structural engineering to understand the drivers of housing vulnerability patterns, considering both markets.

It also examines the likely effects of potential program or policies changes. The project will first examine planning and funding mechanisms that shape housing vulnerabilities, including disaster recovery programs and policies. It will then analyze relevant patterns and explore interactions between housing and tourism and the consequences of those interactions for housing vulnerability.

Although housing vulnerability is a multidimensional phenomenon, disaster studies often consider housing solely in terms of physical structures. This study will develop and apply a holistic multidisciplinary vulnerability metrics framework to combine physical, sociological, and economic assessment of housing vulnerability.

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.