The Impact of Urban Sprawl on Disaster Relief Spending: An Exploratory Study

Thomas Lambert, James Catchen and Victoria Vogelgesang

Journal of Economic Issues, 2015, vol. 49, issue 3, 835-864

Abstract: Followers of urban affairs and public policy have written much over the years about the rise of suburbia and development beyond older city boundaries in the US, whether such development is called urban, suburban, or ex-urban sprawl. Many researchers have focused on various issues concerning sprawl, especially on the unintended consequences that new development has had for municipal finances, neighborhood income and residential segregation, and transportation planning, among other issues. Over the last decade, a new area in the literature on sprawl has focused on how the “built environment” of residential areas can impact health and emergency services. We contribute to this latest set of papers on sprawl by trying to empirically estimate the impact of sprawl in metropolitan regions on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) spending on “public assistance.” This assistance encompasses spending on debris removal, emergency protective measures, and rehabilitating or rebuilding of infrastructure, public buildings, public utilities, parks and recreational areas, in post-disaster relief efforts. In our exploratory analysis, the results indicate that urban sprawl is a factor in influencing the level of FEMA’s public assistance spending.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00213624.2015.1072401 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Impact of Urban Sprawl on Disaster Relief Spending: An Exploratory Study (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mes:jeciss:v:49:y:2015:i:3:p:835-864

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/MJEI20

DOI: 10.1080/00213624.2015.1072401

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Economic Issues from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().