NEWS

CHAPEL HILL -- The hurricane season has officially hit its peak, and experts are predicting above-normal activity in the Atlantic. Federally funded research may help hurricane victims in North Carolina and beyond make a difficult decision associated with that disaster: whether or not to move from their flood-prone homes.

A University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill project, "Relocation and Decision-making of Natural Disaster Victims," centers on buyout programs – where states purchase flood-prone homes from willing sellers – and why some home owners choose to participate in such programs and why some don’t.

"The National Science Foundation was interested in the project primarily because they wanted to see through the lens of people living in 100-year floodplains and understand their concerns and what components factored into their decision-making," said Dr. James Fraser, a sociologist and senior research associate with UNC’s Center for Urban and Regional Studies.

Fraser’s project is just one example of how UNC’s federal social sciences funding, including the NSF and National Institutes of Health, is making a difference in addressing issues with local, regional and national concern, said Dr. Tony Waldrop, vice chancellor for research and economic development at UNC.

UNC ranks third in federally financed research and development expenditures within the social sciences for fiscal year 2001, with a total of $18.1 million. Including the NSF and NIH (mostly) and other agencies, federal funding numbers for social sciences have increased about $3.4 million over fiscal year 2000, when UNC still ranked third in that category.

"Some of the most compelling research being conducted on our campus is in the social sciences, and these funding numbers illuminate this fact," said Waldrop.

Overall, the university ranks as the top public university in the South and one of only two N.C. campuses featured in the top 20 for fiscal 2001, the latest year of funding in the NSF’s report on total federal academic science and engineering obligations released earlier this year.

About half of UNC’s total fiscal 2001 federal social science funding was in the area of sociology, including research projects addressing aging, adolescent achievement and problem behaviors, and rural health, among others.

"Our federal grants, in the social sciences and other areas, explore issues that are wide-ranging and relevant to our times," said Waldrop. "Carolina’s national leadership in research funding creates tools that will help improve the lives of people in our state and throughout the world. In the process, this funding and the research results enhance our state’s economy."

Fraser, the principal investigator for the natural disaster relocation project, said the report is to be finalized this fall. Co-investigators are Drs. William Rohe and David Godschalk. Rebecca Elmore serves as project manager.

Project components included about 100 interviews with government officials, planners, nonprofit personnel, officials affiliated with faith-based organizations and other federal, state and municipal stakeholders; and 400 telephone interviews with people living in 100-year floodplains in Kinston and Greenville (N.C.), San Antonio (Texas) and Grand Forks (N.D.)

The final report is still preliminary, but Fraser said four considerations had clearly emerged from the interviews and surveys in how people consider the decision of a buyout: personal economics, risk of future flooding and danger, attachment to their neighborhood and – most importantly – the level of trust in local government.

"People have expressed in our study that they believe what they feel and have experienced is as valuable as the needs of the city to move people out of the floodplain," he said.

The local government officials and planners, in general, said they favored the buyouts because they wanted to move people to safer areas and did not want the continued cost of rebuilding houses in residential areas that were at risk for future flooding. However, some residents of these areas – many of whom were low-income, elderly and minorities – processed the risks differently and expressed worries about affordable mortgages on future homes and the assessed value of their current homes, Fraser said.

A few preliminary survey findings include:

· Residents felt a great deal of pressure to participate in the buyout. While city officials and program staff viewed their roles as being sympathetic to the complex concerns of flooded residents, the vast majority of residents (79 percent) said they felt they had no choice but to participate in the program, since any options presented to them were simply not practical or financially feasible.

· The majority of flooded residents felt they had little to no input in the buyout process. The majority of respondents (61 percent) reported having no input in the actual design of the buyout and what that meant for overall citywide planning. Many residents also felt they had no say in where they could relocate and were angered there was no discussion about this issue.

· Residents’ levels of neighborhood attachment proved to be a significant factor in the decision-making process. Residents considered neighborhood attachment to be as important, if not more important, than the probability of future flooding in making their decision to participate in a buyout. More than half of the respondents (53 percent) said they were very concerned or somewhat concerned about leaving their neighborhood when making their decision about participating in the buyout program. Nearly half (42 percent) said they would have stayed and rebuilt their home if they had been given the chance, while 55 percent said they would not have stayed and rebuilt, primarily because they felt the damage to their home was simply too great.

· Overall, buyout staff and residents viewed their city’s buyout program in a positive light. Although many buyout staff and residents reported being frustrated by the buyout process, the majority of study respondents reported overall satisfaction with the process. Most residents felt buyout administrators were trustworthy, that their city did the best it could under very difficult circumstances and that residents appreciated having the opportunity to participate in the program.

The project also received Federal Emergency Management Agency funding, and Fraser said agency officials were interested in the report findings because they wanted the buyout program to be more effective. Fraser said he hopes to interest agency officials in a follow-up project to investigate how effective buyout programs would be if administered before a flood.

Hurricane Floyd, in September 1999, destroyed more than 8,000 homes statewide and caused about $6 billion in insured and uninsured damage. Many of these homes, Fraser added, had been flooded a few years earlier as a result of Hurricane Fran.

"Given the level of interest in this issue and the fact that so many people felt that political

context in local government was a major predictor in their decision-making, I’d like to ultimately work with a project that would help local government develop a pilot program giving residents a greater say on how these programs were run locally."

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News Services contact: Deb Saine, (919) 962-8415 or deborah_saine@unc.edu