June of 2023 was the hottest month on Earth since record-keeping began in the 1800s—that is, until July 2023 once again shattered the global record. Canada experienced its worst wildfire season in modern history, muffling New York City in an eerie orange fog. Meanwhile, Phoenix, Arizona, logged 31 consecutive days of temperatures over 110 degrees Fahrenheit, making access to air-conditioned shelter a matter of life and death. It seems timely, then, to collect seven recent articles dealing with links between housing and climate change in this issue of Housing Policy Debate.
We begin with “Climate Change, Aging, and Well-Being: How Residential Setting Matters,” in which Jennifer Molinsky and Ann Forsyth sift through the literature to understand how characteristics of urban form, neighborhoods, and housing affect older adults’ vulnerability to extreme weather and long-term environmental changes. They also draw on the concept of adaptive capacity to understand how older adults might face especially great challenges responding to climate risks, and how some residential settings might exacerbate or attenuate these challenges. Adaptive capacity also plays an important role in “Resident-Owned Resilience,” in which Zachary Lamb, Linda Shi, Stephanie Silva, and Jason Spicer ask whether manufactured housing communities (MHCs) in which residents collectively own their land are better equipped to face climate change. Using mixed methods, the authors find that resident-owned MHCs remain especially vulnerable to flooding and other hazards compared to other housing types, but that the collective ownership model builds financial and social capital needed to anticipate and respond to climate hazards.
Two more articles draw links between housing type and climate risk. In “Housing and Urban Heat: Assessing Risk Disparities,” C. J. Gabbe, Evan Mallen, and Alexander Varni use the case of San José, California, to assess which housing and neighborhood characteristics are associated with the greatest heat risk (measured using a composite index of parcel-level temperatures, tree canopy, and likelihood of a home having central air conditioning). Multifamily rentals and neighborhoods with larger proportions of Hispanic and Asian residents fare worst, with air conditioning availability playing a critical role in the disparity. Sarah McCarthy and Samantha Friedman, in “Disaster Preparedness and Housing Tenure: How Do Subsidized Renters Fare?” find that renters, and especially subsidized renters, are much less prepared for disasters in terms of resources (emergency supplies, evacuation funds, access to vehicles and electric generators) and planning (access to financial information and contact numbers, a communications plan, and an established evacuation meeting location).
Hurricanes have harshly tested how people and housing infrastructure respond to climate change. In “Perceptions of Local Leaders Regarding Postdisaster Relocation of Residents in the Face of Rising Seas,” Omur Damla Kuru, N. Emel Ganapati, and Matthew Marr harness Hurricane Irma to understand how imminent sea level rise (SLR) affects displaced Florida Keys residents’ location decisions. They find that, according to community leaders and local government officials, SLR played only a minor role in these decisions, with other challenges (such as the lack of affordable housing and low wages) taking center stage. For Deepak Lamba-Nieves and Raúl Santiago-Bartolomei, Hurricane María presented an opportunity to test whether poor and geographically vulnerable Puerto Rican households were given equitable access to home repair assistance through FEMA. In “Who Gets Emergency Housing Relief?,” the authors find that, despite FEMA’s “high level of administrative discretion and arbitrariness in determining eligibility,” in aggregate, the neediest households were not underserved. Yet renters and those without clear tenure status faced major barriers in accessing funds, and poor households were left with greater unaddressed needs after the relief had been allocated.
All of the above articles focus on how housing and housing policy affect our ability to adjust to increasing climate risks. Natalia Bliznina’s “nonsystematic” literature review, “What Is the Ideal Density for Environmentally Sustainable Urban Growth?,” returns to the essential question of how humans can house ourselves in a way that will prevent or slow climate change. Bliznina consults sources on sprawl measurement, changes in urban density over time, and the effects of urban form on greenhouse gas emissions to conclude that, to be sustainable, human settlement must be dense enough to support broad access to mass transit—and this density is usually not possible with detached housing.
Outside of our climate change focus, this issue also includes four articles on miscellaneous topics. Jerry Anthony, in “Housing Affordability and Economic Growth,” explores whether housing unaffordability operationalized as the share of housing cost-burdened households is dampening gross domestic product growth (the answer is “yes”). In “Shaping a Healthier LIHTC Housing Stock,” Sherry Ahrentzen, Lynne Dearborn, Ali Momen-Heravi, and Arezou Sadoughi review state-level policies and survey state agencies to determine whether and how healthy housing provisions are built into the U.S.’ largest housing production subsidy. Jacqueline Chattopadhyay, in “Public Opinion About Visitability Mandates in the United States,” suggests that there is a large, latent reservoir of support for policies that require housing to be usable by people with mobility limitations, but that there are also “politically impactful lines of disagreement.” And, finally, J. Claire Schuch and Tonderai Mushipe undertake a mammoth qualitative study of light rail expansions in Charlotte, North Carolina, to understand how planners’ and residents’ perceptions differ in terms of the potential impact on neighborhoods and housing affordability. These articles exemplify the rich texture of timely, highly relevant research we are proud to publish in Housing Policy Debate.