Turning Community Voice into Policy Action: How Buy-In’s Survey Supports Fair, Voluntary Post-Disaster Housing Relocation and Buyouts
For the last six months, UC Berkeley Master of City Planning student Pingpu Zhu has been working with Buy-In to analyze, improve, and expand our Community Partnerships Program Household Survey design. The Household Survey forms the basis of Buy-In’s intake and community advocacy programs, and we’ve been working hard for the last five years to make the survey a tool that can advance more just and equitable buyout programs in the communities we serve. The following blog post is a highlight of his analysis to date, with more to come as he works to complete his Master’s Degree capstone project in partnership with us. We’ve approach this as a Question and Answer that outlines his primary research questions.
Tell us more about your background and research interests.
I am a second-year Master of City Planning student at UC Berkeley, partnering with Buy-In to improve and refine the Community Partnerships Program survey questions and methodology. My work examines the relationship between environmental change and human settlement transitions, with a focus on the governance challenges of managed retreat in the context of climate change. I aim to advance more transparent and equitable voluntary relocation and home buyout programs that center residents’ long-term well-being. I approach these questions through the lenses of community engagement and indigenous conservation, in order to support lasting and positive adaptive transformations toward more resilient communities.
What is the opportunities and challenges of surveying in community engaged planning processes?
Surveys are one of the core information-gathering components in community-centered planning processes, serving as a critical hinge that can translate community voices into policy adjustments. Their greatest strengths are scalability, standardization, and strong comparability; they are relatively cost and time-efficient and can cover large samples in a short period. Surveys enable robust quantitative and stratified analysis and can be readily linked with administrative and geographic data, connecting subjective perceptions with objective environments to support policy evaluation and the development of performance indicators. However, surveys face a series of validity and representativeness risks, for example, incomplete sampling frames; social desirability/conformity bias and recall error among respondents; and, when surveys are long or poorly designed, fatigue and straight-lining, all of which reduce data quality.
How does Buy-In’s survey differ from other surveys on displacement, managed retreat, and disaster recovery planning?
A core problem with many current instruments for surveying in the context of climate-driven relocation and buyouts is the lack of comprehensive consideration of diverse geographic contexts, limited consideration of systemic, cross-cutting factors, and the absence of differentiated assessments across the pre, mid, and post-relocation phases. This leads to narrow conclusions with limited generalizability in much research and practice. Lengthy questionnaires and opaque data-use policies also erode trust and data quality, and many survey findings are insufficiently clear to be translated directly into actionable policy steps. Data extraction and access is also often an issue for residents and organizations that work with external researchers.
Below, I have outlined a few ways in which Buy-In’s survey addresses these shortfalls.
Keeping capacity, knowledge, and power in the hands of residents
Buy-In approaches the surveying process as a continuously evolving and co-created partnership rather than one-off data collection that is extracted from communities. The survey is built on long-term cooperations with community partners, and survey topics and implementation methods evolve with community feedback, making it a process of co-production and continuous improvement. Buy-In’s privacy policy, data sharing agreements, and programmatic MOUs ensure that data is gathered with the community, by the community, and for the community.
Buy-In’s data sharing agreements ensure that respondent’s data is secured and protected but is owned by the community so that our partners can continue to access and analyze the data to inform their programmatic goals and advocacy campaigns.
Buy-In’s survey process builds capacity in the communities we serve. Buy-In hires and trains community members to conduct surveys in their own neighborhoods. These kitchen-table conversations allow for community members themselves, rather than outside researchers, to be the keepers of critical knowledge and information.
Beyond providing the instrument, Buy-In offers training and operating guidance to help local teams build standardized data-collection and quality-control capacity, and it uses an institutionalized reporting and feedback mechanism to publish what was heard and what was changed, to track implementation and outcomes, and promptly feed evaluation results back to communities enabling residents to see how their input is incorporated.
2. Committing to tangible, action-oriented policy recommendations
Assessments of residents’ willingness and needs regarding post-disaster buyouts and climate-driven relocation center should center equity with the goal of driving policy action. Buy-In’s surveying process emphasizes actionability by tightly linking questions and responses to policy actions so that findings can be immediately used by local partners to design programs (such as buyouts) that are responsive to household needs.
3. Establishment of a modular baseline to allow comparisons across communities
Buy-In’s modular survey design effectively gathers residents’ needs and opinions, ensuring that community input shapes decision making. At the same time, the standardized baseline allows Buy-In to analyze comparable indicators for buyout programs across multiple communities. In turn, the process becomes more transparent and fair, and it becomes easier to monitor policy outcomes and continuously improve buyout program design and deployment in multiple geographic contexts.
4. Enabling continuous evaluation and monitoring
Compared with traditional surveys on disaster displacement, managed retreat, or post-disaster planning, Buy-In’s survey process makes it possible to evaluate a buyout program across the entire project cycle by engaging with individual households before the buyout program begins and establishing a baseline for future surveying.
What are some of the improvements that you’ve worked on?
Over the past three years, Buy-In has led the design of household surveys for six collective housing relocation projects, including coastal and inland states in the United States and Puerto Rico. The contexts primarily fall into two categories: relocation in response to flooding (both riverine floods as well as coastal storms) and those driven by chronic environmental contamination and environmental injustice. Although the survey has gone through minor iterations over the years, Buy-In recognized that it was time to conduct a more thorough review of the efficacy of the surveying process. In order to provide this feedback, I developed a cross survey analysis by reviewing all of the surveys Buy-In has done, comparing both the original questions as well as the outcomes across various survey designs
Upon review, a few key issues came to the forefront:
Length: Overall, the survey felt too long, with average completion times of over 35 minutes (according to SurveyMonkey), which may have reduced residents’ willingness to participate and lowered the efficiency of data collection. One of our key goals was thus to reduce the overall length of the survey to make it easier to administer and reduce participant fatigue.
Eligibility determination v. thematic insights: The survey covers both eligibility determination, which includes questions like location, flood history, flood insurance status, and other administrative factors, as well as substantial thematic questions that provide unique insights into residents opinions. Although eligibility determination is crucial for buyout program intake and applications, an excessive focus on it can weaken the depth of robust, substantive information gathered on specific themes. In order to reduce the amount of eligibility questions, we established a universal and concise respondent eligibility module to identify each respondent’s role and filter questions to match their specific role in the survey area (such as owner-occupant, tenant, or non-resident owner of properties in buyout areas). This design helps provide specific programmatic and policy solutions for different types of residents with properties in the program area.
Skip logic: Building off of these eligibility indicators, we worked to create a more meaningful skip logic. Skip logic enables precise data collection for multiple groups while reducing unnecessary questions for any given group. Buy-In’s original surveys suffered from unclear skip patterns, opaque relationships between different modules, and overlap among certain questions. To improve these design flaws, we removed or streamlined ambiguously worded and duplicative questions with clear branching and skip logics.
Substantial numbers of open ended and “other” responses: During our review, we also found that some pre-defined question options did not cover the real preferences of respondents, leading to a large number of “other” responses, which required the respondent or surveyor to input a short form open ended text option. To improve in this area, we analyzed and integrated “other” responses back into the main pre-defined answer options and compared “other” responses across different communities to better understand which pre-defined options needed to be customizable across communities versus which were universal improvements.
What types of questions does Buy-In’s survey cover?
Buy-In employs a modular and standardized survey backbone. The core structure is unified to maintain consistent definitions and comparability, while it can be trimmed and assembled to fit different program phases and local contexts. Whether in urban, suburban, rural, or indigenous communities, coastal or inland settings, and whether in post-disaster, chronic environmental contamination, or other managed retreat contexts, the instrument can be easily fine-tuned to community needs. Guided by these goals, we developed an initial baseline survey, which serves as the foundation for future expansion into a full-process evaluation covering the pre-, mid-, and post-buyout stages.
What are the core goals of each module?
Property Features, Household Characteristics, and Housing Conditions and Opinions are designed to assess baseline conditions of households and the community. Questions on housing tenure and housing type are directly related to eligibility determination, policy applicability, and compensation pathways. Questions on household composition, housing conditions, and lived experience influence subsequent preferences for relocating, as well as the actual capacity of households to move.
Risk Exposure and Impact, Risk Perception, Mitigation /Adaptation Actions, Insurance and Post-disaster Assistance are key dimensions for clarifying who is affected and where risks and needs are concentrated. Together, they provide the basis for designing disaster-adaptive policy support packages grounded in the community’s current risk burden, vulnerability, and coping capacity. Residents’ risk experiences and the impacts they have faced are also critical factors shaping their willingness to relocate.
Relocation Interest focuses on understanding community relocation needs and choices, including willingness to move, preferred relocation locations, compensation needs, and prior buyout experience. These indicators provide clear guidance for designing people-centered, feasible, and efficient buyout policies. By illuminating households’ relocation needs, this section offers essential reference points for developing fair, compliant, and implementable buyout strategies.
Buyout Entities and Implementations captures residents’ perceptions of the implementing agency and its governance strategies. This section helps project teams assess the community’s baseline understanding of the buyout program and examine whether policy implementation and communication channels are reliable.
What are your conclusions to date, and what’s next?
Buy-In’s survey is designed to assess the drivers and barriers, decision conditions, and support needs of buyout programs, with the goal of achieving fair, voluntary, and orderly housing relocation. We use indicators to identify community needs and incorporate them into modular programmatic design, resulting in more human-centered and needs-oriented buyout programs that are responsive to local context. We also aim to establish a streamlined and replicable intake process that can improve efficiency while creating opportunities from streamlined pre and post-buyout evaluation and monitoring, something currently lacking from traditional buyout programs. Buy-In is committed to an institutionalized reporting mechanism that helps policymakers translate survey findings and program best practices into immediately implementable relocation actions and management strategies for post-disaster property acquisition.
Although Buy-In currently administers only a single survey at the outset of its CPP programs, under the future framework we will establish end-to-end evaluation across the pre-, mid-, and post-buyout stages. This will enable more effective identification of community needs and policy oversight and feedback throughout the project cycle, thereby better advancing Buy-In’s community-centered equity goals. This is something I will be developing throughout my professional capstone project over the next sixth months and look forward to sharing the results of that analysis.