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

Abstract

Students of public policy have written a lot over the years about the rise of suburbia and development beyond older city boundaries in the United States, whether such development has been called urban, suburban, or ex-urban sprawl. Many writers have focused on various issues concerning sprawl, especially on the unintended consequences that new development has had on (among other issues) municipal finances, neighborhood income and residential segregation, and transportation planning. Over the last decade or so, a new area in the literature on sprawl has focused on how the "built-environment" of residential areas can impact health and emergency services. This research note adds to these latest set of papers on sprawl by trying to empirically estimate the impacts of sprawl in metropolitan regions on United States Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) spending on rehabilitating or rebuilding infrastructure in post-2 disaster relief efforts. In this exploratory analysis the results indicate that urban sprawl is an important factor in influencing FEMA relief spending in the US.

Compact Development Policy and Urban Resilience: A Critical Review

“…Environmentally, urban sprawl has negative effects and externalities and may degrade urban resilience in the long run [147]. Unplanned urban sprawl in natural lands that destroy wetlands and other natural assets increases vulnerability and reduces capacities for postdisaster relief [148]. Furthermore, the relationship between the urban microclimate and compact development reveals that urban form directly affects urban climatic well-being.…”