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The combination of climate change and economic growth in disaster-prone regions increasingly exposes the population to extreme weather events. While the aggregate impacts of disasters are well documented, much less is known about the individual responses to these environmental shocks. In this paper, I estimate the average treatment effects of household-level damage using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design in the context of Hurricane Harvey, which damaged more than 200,000 homes in Houston, Texas in 2017. I leverage the relationship between flooding and a home’s elevation, exploiting a discontinuous increase in damage from $0 to approximately $48,000 once water reaches the first floor. I provide novel evidence that disaster damage induces homeowners to relocate from their pre-storm residence while simultaneously delaying their decision to sell their property. The impacts on residential mobility attenuate over time, but I document a persistent divergence in the location and type of housing selected by damage-induced movers. My results indicate that flood damage makes people more likely to move shorter distances and transition out of homeownership. Despite the combined shock to shelter and wealth, I find that flooded households are more likely to sort into higher-income census tracts in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. Given the importance of place-based spillover effects, the long-run welfare implications of suffering flood damage remain an open area of research.

We estimate the first time-varying, county-level index of housing supply elasticities across the United States, using a structural vector autoregression model with sign restrictions to identify the effect of a positive demand shock. This index reveals four features of the supply curve in different local housing markets. First, supply elasticities are low, on average, generating faster price growth than housing unit growth for most of the country. Second, there is significant variation in elasticities across counties, both urban and rural. Third, elasticities have declined in more counties than they have risen over time, particularly in large urban markets. Fourth, these new estimates predict housing quantity growth better than previous models in the literature.

In the aftermath of a wildland-urban interface (WUI) wildfire, documenting subsequent reconstruction can help anticipate the consequences of future destructive events. This case study chronicles the post-disaster rebuilding patterns of the 2011 Bastrop County Complex Fire, the most destructive wildfire in Texas history. By analyzing tax account records from 2011 to 2021, we assess single-family home rebuilding rates and examine the disaster’s impact on single-family lot sales. By 2021, the fire-impacted area had been rebuilt as WUI residential development with more single-family homes within the fire perimeter than had been in 2011. While new development within the fire perimeter accounted for some of this elevated exposure, single-family home construction was disproportionately focused on destroyed lots. Single-family lots within the fire perimeter, whether destroyed or not, were more likely to be sold at least once during the period 2011 to 2021. Our study is the first to document the post-wildfire rebuilding patterns of the most destructive Texas wildfire.