Hurricane Ike caused massive damages to Galveston Island's residential structures including four public housing developments in September 2008. These developments were located in neighborhoods with some of the lowest incomes and highest percentages of people of color on the Island. Four months later the Galveston Housing Authority (GHA) decided to demolish all four developments consisting of 569 housing units due to the damages to the buildings. Today, despite federal regulations requiring reconstruction, court orders mandating replacement of the demolished units, and available funding, only 142 low income apartments have been rebuilt. We used the social vulnerability framework to understand these outcomes through the ability of groups to shape post-disaster recovery decisions. This paper argues that one of the overlooked characteristic of social vulnerability is a diminished ability to participate in post-disaster decision-making. There were few local advocates arguing for the preservation of public housing units and even fewer remaining residents to speak up for themselves in the face of strong local resistance to the reconstruction of public housing units or the return of public housing residents.The void of a strong and authentic local pro-public housing perspective in Galveston provided an opening for various local campaigns to claim that their desired plan benefitted the poor. The disaster recovery became an opportunity to remove or reduce public housing units and therefore, public housing residents.

Many previous disasters have demonstrated the need for extensive personal, public, and governmental expenditures for housing recovery highlighting the importance of studying housing recovery. Yet, much research is still needed to fully understand the multi-faceted and complex nature of housing recovery. The goal of this paper is to present a holistic model to further the understanding of the dynamic processes and interdependencies of housing recovery. The impetus for this work is that inequalities in housing recovery could be addressed more effectively if we better understood interconnected factors and dynamic processes that slow down recovery for some. Currently, there is a lack of understanding about such factors and processes. Literature from engineering and social sciences was reviewed to develop an integrated system dynamics model for post-disaster housing recovery. While it is beyond current capabilities to quantify such complexities, the presented model takes a major stride toward articulating the complex phenomenon that is housing recovery.

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