A longitudinal Survey of Homeowner Flood Mitigation Decisions: What are the Motivating Factors?

The goal of this project was to examine the factors that affect homeowner decision to choose flood risk mitigation activities including buyout, home elevation, and flood insurance. The curated data consist of both primary and secondary information. Primary data from 1, 366 predominantly coastal homeowners were collected in three waves: data obtained in wave 1 were collected from August 29 through September 15, 2018; wave 2 is from October 19 through November 23, 2018, and wave 3 is from March 18 through April 22, 2019. During these periods, US East Coast and Gulf Coast experienced Hurricanes Florence and Michael. The primary information in the dataset includes homeowner demographic information, property information such as house type, homeowner tenure in the property, year house was built, house damage experience, estimated extent of damage from past flood events, flood insurance information, mortgage information, and house elevation. Additionally, the primary data contains information on homeowner preference for buyouts, house first floor elevation, and flood insurance from a discrete choice experiment. For the secondary data, property address information is overlaid with spatial flood risk data layers to collect flood risk information including location in floodplain, distance from the coast, flood depth, and probability of flooding to the house under different storm event scenarios.