Subsidized Households and Wildfire Hazards in California
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Subsidized Households and Wildfire Hazards in California C. J. Gabbe
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Gregory Pierce2 Efren Oxlaj1 ●
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Received: 20 November 2019 / Accepted: 17 July 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract As deadly and destructive wildfires become increasingly common in the western United States due to climate change, lowincome households face particular difficulties recovering from these disasters. Despite this threat, surprisingly little empirical evidence exists about the exposure and vulnerability to wildfire hazards of residents of subsidized housing. This study focuses on the subsidized housing population for several reasons: residents generally have less adaptive capacity to respond to wildfires; the locations of subsidized housing units reflect relatively stable locations of low-income households for decades; and policymakers can intervene to retrofit existing housing as well as shape future housing siting and design. The dataset created for this study includes all Census tracts in California with housing units by type, wildland-urban interface (WUI) coverage, and an index of social vulnerability. Using a combination of descriptive statistics and spatial regression models, the analysis focuses on the intersection of subsidized housing and wildfire hazards. Results show that subsidized housing is disproportionately located outside the WUI in California’s metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas. However, policy interventions are necessary because many vulnerable households—including those residing in the 140,000 subsidized units in the WUI—live in harm’s way. Keywords Subsidized housing Wildfire Wildland-urban interface Hazard Vulnerability California ●
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Introduction Climate change is projected to increase the land area burned by wildfires in the western United States in the coming decades (USGCRP 2017). Warm years, droughts, and earlier snow-melt years have created conditions more susceptible to wildfire ignitions (Diffenbaugh et al. 2015; Westerling and Swetnam 2003). Horrific images and stories from recent American wildfires—particularly those in California—have increasingly attracted news coverage, calling attention to this growing threat to human life, wildlife and well-being. The Camp Fire in 2018 was the deadliest in California history at the time, resulting in 86 deaths and more than 153,000 acres burned
* C. J. Gabbe [email protected] 1
Department of Environmental Studies and Sciences, Santa Clara University, 500 El Camino Real, Santa Clara, CA 95053, USA
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Luskin Center for Innovation, Luskin School of Public Affairs, University of California Los Angeles, 3250 Public Affairs Building, Box 951666, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1656, USA
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(CAL FIRE 2019). California is the state with the most residents and housing units in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), a characteristic often considered as a proxy for high wildfire risk (Radeloff et al. 2017). Increasing numbers of people now reside in the WUI, both in California and across the nation. In
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