Risk and Recovery: Understanding Flood Risk Perceptions in a Postdisaster City—The Case of New Orleans

ABSTRACT

Flood hazards are a serious and growing threat to the health and welfare of residents in cities and rural areas around the world. This cross-sectional study uses a sample of 383 residents living in seven New Orleans, Louisiana, neighborhoods to examine the effect of experiential, sociodemographic, and socioeconomic factors on flood risk perceptions. Findings suggest that respondents judge the level of flood risk to be lower than other types of risk. Results from ordinal logistic regression analyses show that flood risk perception is influenced by flood experience, income, race, gender, homeownership status, and years residing in New Orleans. Our findings support extant scholarship showing that African Americans tend to have higher perceptions of risk than whites and that low-income people and women have higher risk perceptions than higher income residents and men. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for risk management planning in coastal cities like New Orleans that face omnipresent flood threats associated with climate-change-driven sea level rise and increased frequency and destructiveness of storms.

Acknowledgments

This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant CNH-1313703. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. The survey met national standards for the ethical treatment of human subjects, as reviewed by Tulane University’s Institutional Review Board.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences [Grant Number 1313703].

Notes on contributors

Kevin Fox Gotham

Kevin Fox Gotham is Associate Dean of Graduate Programs, Grants, and Research in the School of Liberal Arts and Professor of Sociology at Tulane University. He has research interests in real estate and mortgage markets, the political economy of tourism, and postdisaster redevelopment. He is author of Crisis Cities: Disaster and Redevelopment in New York and New Orleans (with Miriam Greenberg; Oxford University Press, 2014), Race, Real Estate and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900–2010 (2nd ed.; SUNY Press, 2014), Authentic New Orleans: Race, Culture, and Tourism in the Big Easy (NYU Press, 2007), and Critical Perspectives on Urban Redevelopment (Elsevier, 2001). He has authored over 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on housing policy, racial segregation, urban redevelopment, and tourism.

Katie Lauve-Moon

Katie Lauve-Moon is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Work at Texas Christian University where she is a Women and Gender Studies faculty affiliate.

Bradford Powers

Bradford Powers JD, LLM is a graduate student in Tulane University’s interdisciplinary Ph.D. program “City, Culture and Community.” He has research interests in post-disaster redevelopment, disaster risk reduction and the urban coast.