How Construction and Capital Resource Availability Drive Regional Post-disaster Housing Reconstruction

Abstract

Natural hazards cause damages to the U.S. residential housing stock every year, and reconstruction of damaged housing is essential for the long-term community resilience. Post-disaster housing reconstruction in the U.S. is a market-driven process, influenced by the availability of construction and capital resources. Previous case studies have illustrated that housing reconstruction outcomes are uneven across different disaster-affected regions of the U.S. and may be attributable to varying availability of regional construction and capital resources. However, there is a lack of quantitative studies exploring the relationships between resourcing factors and housing reconstruction outcomes across varying geographical regions of the U.S. Using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression and Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR), this study aims to: (1) quantify the relationships between pre-disaster construction and capital resource availability and post-disaster housing reconstruction outcomes at a regional scale; and (2) explore spatially varying relationships between resourcing factors and reconstruction outcomes. The Northeast census region of the U.S. is used as a case study for this research, due to unprecedented levels of residential housing disaster damages from 2011-2012. Results from the case study highlighted significant relationships between resource availability and reconstruction outcomes, and the relationships varied across the study region.