Spatiotemporal Modeling of Social Capital and Infrastructure Mobility Resilience during Hurricane Harvey

Natural disasters disrupt human mobility, yet existing models often overlook the role of social capital in shaping evacuation, adaptation, and recovery. To address this gap, we develop an interpretable spatiotemporal model that integrates the Social Capital Index (SoCI), precipitation, and spatial interactions at the census tract level during Hurricane Harvey. Unlike hazard-only models, our framework explicitly quantifies how community cohesion interacts with environmental exposure to influence mobility resilience. Across six mobility metrics, we find strong predictive performance, with R2 values exceeding 0.7 and residuals tightly centered around zero. Neighborhoods with stronger social capital experienced systematically lower mobility disruption under comparable rainfall conditions, indicating that community cohesion buffered the influence of flooding on movement patterns. Recovery trajectories varied substantially across space: disadvantaged neighborhoods exhibited persistently slower recovery even after rainfall subsided, highlighting inequities in postdisaster mobility resilience. These results highlight social capital as an explanatory variable that systematically modulates disaster-time mobility, offering both theoretical and practical insights. By incorporating neighborhood-level cohesion into resilience assessment, this study provides evidence for prioritizing investments in social infrastructure alongside physical mitigation.