Residential taxable value recovery in coastal Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina

ABSTRACT

The resilience of local fiscal resources is an important missing component of community recovery after disasters. We know little about how  quickly or fairly broad-based taxable economic activities return to pre-disaster levels. For example, property tax revenue, typically heavily dependent on residential properties, is commonly the largest source of General Fund revenue for local governments in the United States. Because residential properties are frequently impacted by natural hazards, understanding the linkage between housing and fiscal resilience is critical. Yet there exist very few broad-based studies of housing recovery. This paper helps fill that gap by evaluating housing recovery in a coastal portion of the U.S. state of Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. We find that while the influence on housing values of Hurricane Katrina’s flood and wind damage dwindled over time, race and income remained salient factors in the level of recovery of single-family homes and their taxable values.

KEYWORDS:

• Housing recovery
• property tax revenue
• disaster finance
• hedonic
• resilience
• social vulnerability
• local government

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The Hispanic population in Harrison County was 5.3 percent of the population, while the Asian population was 2.8 percent, based on the 2010 U.S. Census.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. National Science Foundation through a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant, award #1301830. The authors also thank Dusty Reed (Harrison County GIS Office) and Robert Stinziano (Harrison County Tax Assessor’s Office) for their assistance in data collection. Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences [#1301830].

Notes on contributors

Skip Krueger

Skip Krueger, associate professor, is assistant chair and coordinator of the MPA and PhD programs in the Department of Public Administration at the University of North Texas, USA. His research interests include disaster finance, regional cooperation among local governments, and state and local budgeting.

Julie Winkler

Julie Winkler is a doctoral student in the Department of Public Administration at the University of North Texas, USA. Her research interests center on disaster finance, communication processes during disaster response, and state and local budgeting.

Ronald L. Schumann

Ronald L. Schumann, III is an assistant professor in the Department of Emergency Management and Disaster Science at the University of North Texas, USA. His research interests include long-term community recovery, risk perception, and social memory in disasters.