A framework to construct post‐disaster housing

Abstract

Purpose

Natural disasters often destroy hundreds of homes that leave victims homeless and leads to community displacement. In the USA, such disasters happen over 60 times per year. This leads to logistical and contractual nightmare for the planning agencies and political/community leaders required to provide shelter for displaced citizens. One of the most important challenges for the policy makers and aid providers is to make homes available to the homeless victims in as short a period as possible. Temporary shelter is costly and often excessively delayed. Also quality and long stay (more than four years for the Katrina victims) in temporary shelter affected victims both mentally and physically. The aim of this paper is to propose a strategic framework that assists responsible entities to provide housing to the disaster victims in a short period of time, for example to construct 200 homes in 30 days after disaster (representing a subdivision).

Design/methodology/approach

The main objective of this research is to perform feasibility study of implementing such a strategy that would enable agencies to provide better solutions for post disaster housing assistance. This paper mainly explains four phases that constitute the development of the strategic framework. The first two phases of the framework carry out pre‐disaster planning and establish relationships among the participating entities. Whereas, the third phase includes simulating post disaster processes identified in the previous phases to evaluate response trade‐offs. The last phase is about the real implementation of this strategy after disaster that also incorporates its outcomes and experiences into previously planned strategy.

Findings

It was found through second part of research, simulation studies, that such a strategy can be prepared before the disaster and activated when needed. This would drastically reduce the housing response time.

Originality/value

This would help in improving the strategy for future disasters. Successful execution would facilitate opportunities to reduce stress for the victims and encourage faster recovery.

Citation

Patel, S. and Hastak, M. (2013), "A framework to construct post‐disaster housing", International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment, Vol. 4 No. 1, pp. 95-114. https://doi.org/10.1108/17595901311299026