DOI: 10.17603/ds2-bpxr-ck20
title: Food Access Restoration Model
title: in Food Access Impact Survey for Harris County and Southeast Texas after Hurricane Harvey in 2017

description: Access after disasters to resources such as food poses planning problems that affect millions of people each year. Understanding how disasters disrupt and alter food access during the initial steps of the recovery process provides new evidence to inform both food system and disaster planning. This research takes a supply-side focus and explores the results from a survey of food retailers after Hurricane Harvey in three Texas counties. The survey collected information on how the disaster affected a store’s property, people, and products and the length of time a store was closed, had reduced hours, and stopped selling fresh food items. We find that a focus only on store closures and property damage would underestimate the number of days residents have limited fresh food access by nearly two weeks. Further, stores in lower-income communities with chronic low-access to supermarkets (food deserts) were closed longer than other stores, potentially compounding pre-existing inequalities. We conclude that to plan for a more equitable food supply post-disaster, planners should embrace more dimensions of access, encourage retailer mitigation, and assess the types of retailers and their distribution within their communities. This mission includes social science collections related to models for predicting days to restoration of food access after a disaster. These collections include the programed workflow to replicated results for the journal article: Rosenheim, Nathanael, Maria Watson, John Cassels Connors, Mastura Safayet, Walter Gillis Peacock. “Food Access After Disasters: A Multidimensional View of Restoration After Hurricane Harvey”. Journal of the American Planning Association. doi.org/0.1080/01944363.2023.2284160
description: Food insecurity is a chronic problem in the United States that annually affects over 40 million people under normal conditions. This difficult reality can dramatically worsen after disasters. Such events can disrupt both the supply and demand sides of food systems, restricting food distribution and access precisely when households are in a heightened need for food assistance. Often, retailers and food banks must react quickly to meet local needs under difficult post-disaster circumstances. Residents of Harris County and Southeast Texas experienced this problem after Hurricane Harvey made landfall on the Texas Gulf Coast in August 2017. The primary data collected by this project relate specifically to the supply side. The data attempt to identify factors that impacted the ability of suppliers to help ensure access to food, with a focus on fresh food access. Factors included impacts to people, property and products due to hurricane-related damage to infrastructure. Two types of food suppliers were the foci of this research: food aid agencies and food retailers. The research team examined food aid agencies in Southeast Texas with data collection methods that included secondary data analysis, a focus group and an online survey. The second population studied was food retailers with in-person surveys with store managers. Food retailers were randomly sampled in three Texas counties: Jefferson, Orange, and Harris. The data collection methods resulted in 32 food aid agency online survey responses and 210 completed food retail in-person surveys. Data were collected five to eight months after the event, which helped to increase the reliability and validity of the data. The time-sensitive nature of post-disaster data requires research teams to quickly organize their efforts before entering the field. The purpose of this project archive is to share the primary data collected, document methods, and to help future research teams reduce the amount of time needed for project development and reporting. This archive does not contain Personally or Business Identifiable Information.