Abstract
A sustainable future for communities that are highly vulnerable to natural hazard events means not locating new sensitive land uses, requiring existing land uses to be retrofitted in order to obtain insurance, and implementing other restrictive policies. Our objective was to measure the willingness of U.S. adult residents of New Jersey, a state devastated three times by major tropical storms in 1999, 2011, and 2012, to agree with a very restrictive policy—placing a limit on the number of times homeowners may receive financial disaster relief from natural hazard events. Using random digit dialing for landline (65%) and cell phone (35%), the authors collected 875 surveys of New Jersey residents in 2013, four months after Hurricane Sandy devastated much of New Jersey. Fifty-nine percent of respondents agreed with this painful policy. They disproportionately were older males who were fiscally conservative, and they took this stance despite personally believing that global climate change-related natural hazard events are real and are a threat. In New Jersey and other states, officials and others responsible for securing public agreement with these programs face a difficult challenge of implementing these programs because of public mistrust of state and federal government as initiators and implementers.
Highlights
A sustainable future requires that government and industry develop and promote policies and programs that will benefit future generations [1,2]
This paper is about one of these changes—a policy that would not provide disaster relief to residential property owners if their property has been devastated by natural hazard events on multiple occasions
Sample attributes were compared with the state population baselines for differences by age, race, and gender using the 2009–2011 American Community survey, and the cell phone use information came from the January–June 2012 National Health Interview
Summary
A sustainable future requires that government and industry develop and promote policies and programs that will benefit future generations [1,2]. This paper is about one of these changes—a policy that would not provide disaster relief to residential property owners if their property has been devastated by natural hazard events on multiple occasions. The context for the first author began in 1998, when he visited Pattonsburg, Missouri (population was 502, about 350). Most of the houses in this hamlet had been destroyed in 1993 by floods that made parts of the Midwest of the United States look like another great lake. In 1998, the author observed foundations, boarded up houses, and a few occupied units. During the 20th century, Pattonsburg, according to residents, had been flooded 30 to 40 times [3]
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