Abstract:
How wildfire drives inequalities in the built environment
Across the United States, thousands of homes have been destroyed by wildfires over the past decade, and millions more are at risk of future loss. Urban conflagrations, such as the 2025 Los Angeles Wildfires and the 2023 Lahaina Wildfire, are now routine. How do places change after experiencing such impacts? Integrating sociological and biophysical science approaches, this project documents two forms of neighborhood change following the 2018 Camp Fire through a close examination of residential structures within the burn footprint. We first show that housing stock filtering facilitated socially stratified patterns of physical damage, pointing to a need for wildfire mitigation policies that are better designed for dense neighborhoods and mobile home parks. Second, applying a geospatial machine learning technique to aerial imagery, we identify residences that had been reconstructed twenty months after the fire. Reconstructed buildings were more likely to have been owner-occupied prior to the fire and to have higher pre-fire property value, suggesting an emerging pattern of cost-burden climate gentrification. These findings illustrate how the built environment is a key site at which environmental phenomena interact with human-constructed landscapes, offering an important window for sociologists to study how climate change is driving social inequalities.
Kathryn McConnell is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, where her research broadly examines the social consequences of climate-related hazards. With a special focus on wildfire, her recent work investigates (1) how climate change is driving changes to housing and infrastructure, and (2) relationships between the environment and human mobility. Kathryn’s research has been published in journals such as Science, PNAS, Nature Communications, and Environmental Politics, and she has received funding from the NSF, NASA, and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. She served as a review editor for the fifth and an author for the sixth U.S. National Climate Assessment. Prior to joining the University of British Columbia, Kathryn worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University’s Population Studies and Training Center. She completed her Ph.D. and M.E.Sc. at Yale School of the Environment.