Abstract
As local governments face the burden of responding to climate-related hazards, their actions layer on top of existing class inequalities. This article reports on a survey experiment examining the responses of elected city and county officials to a proposed voluntary buyout of properties at risk from climate impacts. An experiment embedded in the survey tests whether politicians’ responses to a buyout proposal depend on identification of recipients as wealthy or low-income. Results show a significant difference in support across the targeted recipients: even with an identical cost recovery period, elected officials were more likely to support buyouts for low-income homeowners. The effect of social class targeting became larger after respondents considered wide-ranging benefits and drawbacks of buyouts: they favored buyouts to a greater degree for low-income recipients, and to a lesser degree for wealthy recipients, than for homeowners not identified with a class marker. If these responses translate into differential provision of buyout opportunities across income groups, it could help mitigate large class-based disparities in capacity to recover from disasters, while at the same time contributing to class-based disparities in climate migration.
