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This paper aims to examine potential causes of bankruptcy as they relate to hurricane damage. Investigate whether hurricanes result in personal bankruptcy filings due to real property damages. Strengthen existing descriptive results by using fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS).

Lagged FMOLS model is used with data from states that suffered hurricane damage between 2000 through 2020. FMOLS controls for various financial distresses that can cause bankruptcy filings.

Bankruptcy is usually filed for within one year of a hurricane. Changes in house prices and hurricane severity were significant indicators of bankruptcy filings. However, the divorce rate, commonly thought of as a primary reason for bankruptcy, is insignificant.

Data was available on a state level for the independent variables. Hurricane damage needed to be financially significant enough for inland flooding to be measurable and influential.

Establishes that financial distress comes from several sources, not just home damage. Financial distress is highly correlated with whether a home was insured. Divorce does not cause bankruptcy filings.

Federal flood insurance programs should be reexamined. Having a broader all-risk homeowner policy could reduce the number of households that file for bankruptcy after a hurricane.

Existing research uses descriptive statistics and obtains mixed findings regarding the association between hurricane damage and bankruptcy filings. The FMOLS approach provides clarity about this association.

Many studies have shown that the intensity and the number of hurricanes are likely to increase. This paper aims to look at the immediate effects of hurricanes on the time on the market, share of houses sold and percentage of houses with price cuts in the housing market using the metropolitan statistical area-level data in Florida.

Using a difference-in-difference method, the authors estimate the impact that a hurricane has on the housing markets.

The authors find that a hurricane has a positive and significant effect on the time on the market. A hurricane leads to a delay of the sale of a typical house in Florida by five days. The authors test for within-year seasonality and show that these effects change with seasonality of the housing market. Markets with seasonal housing prices tend to be affected more by hurricanes than those where housing prices are not seasonal. The authors also show that effects of a hurricane are transient and fade away in a few months. The results remain significant as the hurricane intensity changes.

This is the first study to look at the short-term effects of the hurricanes and how their effects vary based on seasonality of the markets.

The intent of the work is to go beyond the conventional model of disaster risk prevention, where community residents are objects of risk communication initiatives, and develop and implement a relational model of risk communication wherein they are active agents of knowledge transfer.

The relational model of risk communication translates risk knowledge into narrative forms that community members can share. The article discusses the conceptual basis of the model and, then, describes how it has been pilot tested and implemented in the field. Evaluation of the pilot tests consist of pre- and post-surveys comparing control and test groups.

Encouraging results have been seen among vulnerable communities, such as residents in a refugee camp and schoolchildren in a storm surge vulnerable town. These outcomes support the idea that the relational approach can empower residents to be active agents of risk communication.

The relational model taps into the knowledge and agency of community.

This study aims to examine the determinants that influence housing prices in Dammam metropolitan area (DMA), Saudi Arabia, by using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) model. The study considers determinants such as building age (BLD AG), building size (BLD SZ), building condition (BLD CN), access to parking (ACC PK), proximity to transport infrastructure (PRX TRS), proximity to green areas (PRX GA) and proximity to amenities (PRX AM).

The AHP decision model was used to assess the determinants of housing prices in DMA, using a pair-wise comparison matrix to determine the influence of the investigated factors on housing prices.

The study’s results revealed that building size (BLD SZ) was the most critical determinant affecting housing prices in DMA, with a weight of 0.32, trailed by proximity to transport infrastructure (PRX TRS), with a weight of 0.24 as the second most influential housing price determinant in DMA. The third most important determinant was proximity to amenities (PRX AM), with a weight of 0.18.

This study addresses a research gap by using the AHP model to assess the spatial determinants of housing prices in DMA, Saudi Arabia. Few studies have used this model in examining housing price factors, particularly in the context of Saudi Arabia. Consequently, the findings of this study provide unique insights for policymakers, housing developers and other stakeholders in understanding the importance of building size, proximity to transport infrastructure and proximity to amenities in influencing housing prices in DMA. By considering these determinants, stakeholders can make informed decisions to improve housing quality and prices in the region.

The chapter aims to analyze an innovative intervention in the context of public housing in Italy. Over the past decade, in Italy, neighborhoods with a high concentration of public housing have increasingly become spaces of exclusion, where conflicts are rife, due to a multiplicity of factors (e.g., immigration, social deprivation, ageing, health problems). In particular, because of the global economic crisis and the impoverishment of Italian families, competition and quarrels between lower middle-class natives and migrants have been exacerbated, undermining the recent fragile pattern of social cohesion. However, housing and urban policies are still residual, especially in the political agenda of mid-sized towns, which witness an ungoverned urban growth not always accompanied by a concurrent complete recognition of citizenship. Moreover, policies tackling rising social tension to reduce or prevent it are lacking. Nonetheless, at a local level, some more dynamic municipalities are starting to promote original initiatives also thanks to the sharing of the best national and international practices. In particular we wish to focus on the social mediation processes implemented to prevent conflict and promote sustainable cohabitation, improving relationships between neighbors and fostering empowerment and participation. In this perspective, the chapter explores a two-year project of social mediation for households living in public housing which has been developed in the Marche region.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the political and economic objectives sought by the government of Chile to understand the characteristics of the reconstruction process for housing damaged by the earthquake and tsunami of 27 February 2010, contrasted with the opinions of the target communities, the instruments that were utilized and the generation of new vulnerabilities.

The governmental objectives have been compiled from speeches publicized by the press and obtained from interviews with players from the public and community sectors. The areas of reconstruction in the city of Constitución have been represented in a geographical information system. The opinions of the community have been gathered through a survey conducted amongst the new residents.

Case analysis shows that the political and economic efforts during the reconstruction process were focused on proving the success of the methods used: public-private alliances and consultation with the communities to precede reconstruction of housing and urban infrastructure. However, the results of the reconstruction process do neither reveal good governance nor functionality of the reconstructed areas.

The results cannot be applied to other localities devastated by the 2010 earthquake and tsunami in Chile, nor to other institutional or economic contexts. It is also necessary to observe the process of adaptation of the communities over a longer time period to verify the increase in vulnerability.

The paper constitutes a complete evaluation of the reconstruction process that prompts institutional changes.

A contrast is offered between the objectives and actions of the diverse social and political actors, and the contradictions in their speeches and actions are shown.

An unprecedented process is analysed in which a developing country uses its own resources to undertake a reconstruction under a political rhetoric that is not necessarily shared by the local society that must finally assume the additional costs.

Disaster management agencies are mandated to reduce risk for the populations that they serve. Yet, inequities in how they function may result in their activities creating disaster risk, particularly for already vulnerable and marginalized populations. In this article, how disaster management agencies create disaster risk for vulnerable and marginalized groups is examined, seeking to show the ways existing policies affect communities, and provide recommendations on policy and future research.

The authors undertook a systematic review of the US disaster management agency, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), examining its programs through a lens of equity to understand how they shape disaster risk.

Despite a growing commitment to equity within FEMA, procedural, distributive, and contextual inequities result in interventions that perpetuate and amplify disaster risk for vulnerable and marginalized populations. Some of these inequities could be remediated by shifting toward a more bottom-up approach to disaster management, such as community-based disaster risk reduction approaches.

Disaster management agencies and other organizations can use the results of this study to better understand how to devise interventions in ways that limit risk creation for vulnerable populations, including through community-based approaches.

This study is the first to examine disaster risk creation from an organizational perspective, and the first to focus explicitly on how disaster management agencies can shape risk creation. This helps understand the linkages between disaster risk creation, equity and organizations.

The purpose of this study is to examine people’s preferences for some of the key attributes of emergency shelters, including type, privacy level, location, spatial arrangement and pet-friendliness.

Choice experiment (CE) method was used in this study. A standard CE questionnaire was designed and completed by a sample of 293 residents of the Greater Toronto Area, Ontario (Canada), during the winter of 2015.

When using publicly provided shelters, people prefer to stay in hotels, places of worship and then community shelters, in that order. These findings correspond to the values that they place for various attributes through the CE survey. Findings show that responders place the highest values for emergency shelters that provide more privacy, located close to their home, and are pet friendly. Type of shelter and the “arrangement” attributes were not found to be as important and valuable.

This study uses a convenient sampling method as such may not fully represent the study population.

Emergency shelter provision by local, regional and national governments cost significant amount of money and thus it is important that the society get the maximum benefit from it. This will be possible when users’ preferences are considered in planning, design, and operation of emergency shelters. The findings enable emergency managers to perform cost-benefit analysis an increase the efficiency of emergency shelters.

While previous studies have examined emergency-shelter types, characteristics and user-satisfaction levels, this is a novel study because it uses a choice experiment method to extract monetary values for key emergency-shelter attributes.