THE FEMA TRAILER PARKS: NEGATIVE PERCEPTIONS AND THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF AVOIDANCE

Abstract

In recent years, negative media attention has fostered the impression that Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) parks are social wastelands filled with criminal elements and other undesirables. FEMA parks have subsequently come to be viewed by some as a major threat to the safety and quality of life of the local communities in which they are situated. This analysis addresses attitudes toward FEMA trailer parks in Baton Rouge after Hurricane Katrina among Baton Rouge residents. Drawing on the Locally Undesirable Land Use/Not in My Backyard (LULU/NIMBY) literature, the contact hypothesis, and a broad paradigm of social status and social control, we hypothesize that spatial proximity, contact, and social status will influence negative perceptions of the parks, while these same factors along with the negative perceptions will influence avoidance behaviors. The results indicate that living near a FEMA park is associated with less negative perceptions, while actually seeing trailer park residents is associated with more negative perceptions and a greater odds of avoidance, particularly changing driving routes. Whites are particularly concerned about crime associated with the parks, but interracial trust reduces negative perceptions of the parks and the likelihood of avoidance. Those who are likely to end up in a FEMA park if they were in the same situation are more friendly toward the parks and less likely to use avoidance techniques, and negative perceptions themselves are strong predictors of avoidance behaviors. We conclude with a discussion of directions for future research.

The data used in this article were collected under support from grant number SES–0554572 to the three authors from the National Science Foundation. The findings reported here do not represent the views, opinions, or policies of the National Science Foundation. A draft of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the Mid-South Sociological Association, October 2006 in Lafayette, LA. We appreciate helpful comments from several anonymous reviewers on a prior draft of this article.

Notes

¹At the time of this writing (February 2007), roughly two years after Hurricane Charlie, there are still twelve trailers occupied at the Punta Gorda site, but it is scheduled to close by the end of the month (Anderson 2007).

²It is notable that several authors call the phenomenon NIMBY syndrome (see Kraft and Clary 1991; Lake 1993; Smith and Marquez 2000).

³Luloff and colleagues (1998) argue that a major shortcoming of the NIMBY perspective is that it really is not able to explain why this is the case. That is, some people in close proximity to a nuclear reactor may be resistant because of concerns over their property value, while others in close proximity may be resistant to a nuclear reactor being sited in their or anyone else's community. Others would argue that this point is somewhat moot from a practical and planning perspective, and that in fact the distrust inherent in NIMBYism flows from both sides of the conflict (Smith and Marquez 2000).

⁴Other types of inaction include tolerance and exiting the situation altogether.

⁵It should be noted that some (Phillips 2003) have made it clear that Donald Black in his voluminous writings treats social control and the concept of “conflict management” interchangeably. Thus we issue the disclaimer that we do not take a literal translation of Blackian theory and utilize it to explain attitudes toward FEMA parks. This imputes more “conflict” that needs to be managed to the relationship between FEMA parks and the community than is probably the case. Rather, our utilization of many concepts drawn from this perspective should be construed in a manner that is more analogous than literal.

⁶One helpful reviewer was interested in our distinctions between the FEMA parks versus the residents of the parks themselves. While we are ostensibly focused on attitudes toward and behaviors regarding the parks, it is difficult to fully disentangle the two. The parks themselves should not necessarily be a problem for any community, if they have zero residents.

⁷The fifth dimension of social space is organizational status. It is not clear exactly how organizational status should be operationalized with individual-level attitudinal data, and so, following others, we omit it from our analysis below.

⁸Our initial extraction resulted in component loadings ranging from .734 to .841 on a single factor with an Eigenvalue of 1.876 and 62.5 percent of the variance explained.

⁹While we use an operationalization that is consistent with prior research, one reviewer pointed out that educational attainment could be construed as a measure of vertical status as well. We concur, and recognize both the status attainment and socialization aspects of formal education. We caution the reader on the potential dual interpretation of this variable, but also note that from our conceptual framework the directional association of this variable with the outcomes of interest should be the same.

∗p < .05.

∗∗p < .01.

∗p < .05.

∗∗p < .01.

∗p < .05.

∗∗p < .01.

∗p < .05.

∗∗p < .01.

¹⁰We also examined all of these models with the separate component items from the negative perceptions index entered into the models from Tables 4 and 5 one at a time. In this case, each of these variables was strongly and statistically significantly related to the avoidance index and to changing driving routes or selling homes. We do not report the results of these models in tabular form because they provide no new information beyond what is already captured in the tables.