Disaster Recovery and Community Renewal: Housing Approaches

AbstractHow we understand and measure success in disaster recovery establishes the policy platform for how governments prepare for future events. In the past two decades, observers have recognized that the return to pre-event conditions is often unworkable-not only because the pre-event conditions were hazardous, but also because the disaster has created a new normal, requiring new ways of thinking and planning. Disaster recovery means more than restoring physical infrastructure and reconstructing housing and commercial buildings. Recovery is now linked to the concepts of resilience and community renewal, with social, economic, institutional, infrastructural, ecological, and community dimensions. Recent research has helped to identify the linkages among several factors: the welfare of individuals; the welfare of households; business and civic recovery; and the importance of health, education, housing, employment, and environmental conditions in recovery. The capacity for renewal, reorganization, and development is critical for ultimately going beyond recovery to community resilience. The range of approaches to the recovery process after recent earthquakes in Chile, China, Haiti, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, and other countries offers insights into successful policies and challenges to integrating housing and recovery at the human and civic levels.IntroductionJobs and housing are often cited as the key elements of disaster recovery. Individuals and communities struck by an earthquake, hurricane, or other calamity cannot "return to normal" unless people have means of supporting themselves and places to live. For residents and for the community as a whole, however, normalcy also requires that community services such as roads, bridges, and the utility infrastructure be functional; schools, health care, and social services be available; and banks, businesses, and governments be functioning. The way recovery is defined, the way it is financed, and the metrics used to evaluate its success or failure are critical to the kinds of assistance policies governments devise.The concept of disaster resilience can be defined simply as the capacity to rebound from future disasters. Several efforts are under way in the United States and globally among researchers and policymakers to develop the means of measuring and monitoring community resilience. Although no single model can quantify disaster resilience, the growing consensus is that resilience is a multifaceted concept, with social, economic, institutional, infrastructural, ecological, and community dimensions (NRC, 2010; Peacock et al., 2008). Several sets of resilience indicators or attributes can serve as baselines for measuring recovery progress and outcomes after a disaster event (Bruneau et al., 2003; CARRI, 2009; Cutter, Burton, and Emrich, 2010; Miles and Chang, 2006; Norris et al., 2008; Twigg, 2009). Community functions such as infrastructure, housing, economic viability, and social conditions are typically listed as performance indicators. This excellent work on resilience has advanced understanding of the multifaceted components of recovery and provided metrics for measurement, but there is a need to translate academic concepts into programs to help people in affected communities and local governments and to redefine policies in agencies at the national government level.Theory, unfortunately, is way ahead of practice. Even with the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMAs) development of the National Disaster Recovery Framework, several problems make implementing forward-thinking ideas on resilience and recovery problematic.1. Lack of preparedness for recovery. With the exception of a few cities in Japan and California, most jurisdictions and most individuals are not prepared for any major disaster or national emergency. Not only are individuals unprepared, communities are largely uninsured and have unrealistic expectations that government will make them whole. …