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AbstractThis paper analyzes the effect of disasters on affordable housing construction. Exploiting the exogenous timing of disasters and 26 years of affordable housing data, we derive causal estimates of the effect of severe floods on county‐level Low‐Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) allocations nationwide. We find that states respond to severe floods by increasing the number of LIHTC units per capita allocated to a flood‐struck county by 57 percent in the year after the disaster, compared to other years. We argue that this increased allocation of LIHTC units is indicative of a process of institutional or policy conversion, in which states are repurposing the three‐decade‐old housing tax credit program to meet contemporary disaster assistance and recovery needs. Given that the LIHTC program was not designed with disasters in mind, do the new units ameliorate or exacerbate renters' exposure to disaster risk? We find that severe floods are associated with a significant increase in LIHTC units per capita allocated outside of the 500‐year floodplain in an affected county within the three years after a severe flood. These findings suggest that states and housing developers are using the LIHTC program to support disaster recovery by expanding subsidized rental options in disaster‐struck counties and ameliorating risk to low‐income renters by locating those units outside of floodplains.

Long-standing wisdom holds that criticism is antithetical to effective brainstorming because it incites intragroup conflict. However, a number of recent studies have challenged this assumption, suggesting that criticism might actually enhance creativity in brainstorming by fostering divergent thinking. Our paper reconciles these perspectives with new theory and a multimethod investigation to explain when and why criticism promotes creativity in brainstorming. We propose that a cooperative social context allows criticism to be construed positively, spurring creativity without inciting intragroup conflict, whereas a competitive social context makes criticism more divisive, leading to intragroup conflict and a corresponding reduction in creativity. We found support for this theory from a field experiment involving 100 group brainstorming sessions with actual stakeholders in a controversial urban planning project. In a cooperative context, instructions encouraging criticism yielded more ideas and more creative ideas, whereas in a competitive context, encouraging criticism yielded fewer ideas and less creative ideas. We replicated this finding in a laboratory study involving brainstorming in the context of a union-management negotiation scenario, which allowed us to hold constant the nature of the criticism. Taken together, our findings suggest that the optimal context for creativity in brainstorming is a cooperative one in which criticism occurs but is interpreted constructively because the brainstorming parties perceive their goals as aligned.

Problem, research strategy, and findings: The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) is the most common financing mechanism for subsidized housing production in America. We investigate how and to what extent states are currently using the LIHTC to prepare for and recover from disasters. We systematically code guidelines in the 2017 LIHTC qualified allocation plans from 53 states and territories to identify disaster-related provisions. Twenty-four states and territories include provisions for preparedness or recovery in their allocation plans, of which 13 include only preparedness provisions, 3 include only recovery provisions, and 8 include both types. Preparedness provisions address project design and siting, whereas recovery provisions direct credits to disaster-affected areas or the replacement of damaged units. Using t tests, we compare three sets of states—those without any disaster-related provisions, those with either preparedness or recovery provisions, and those with both types of provisions—across measures of housing cost, demographic composition, disaster exposure, and political ideology. States with higher homeownership rates, lower home values, and lower rents are more likely than other states to have either or both types of provisions. Future research should investigate state adoption of disaster-related LIHTC provisions to better inform affordable housing policy. Takeaway for practice: State governments could mitigate disaster-related hazards and help speed recovery by including locally relevant preparedness and recovery provisions in their LIHTC allocation plans. These provisions could encourage resilient construction, weigh the social costs and benefits of LIHTC construction in floodplains, or waive program rules to address postdisaster housing shortages.