Peacock co-authors paper revealing
recovery lessons learned from Andrew

Walter Gillis Peacock, the director of Texas A&M's Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center, co-wrote a research paper published in an academic planning journal detailing how housing recovery can be aided in the wake of a major natural disaster.

In "Planning for Housing Recovery? Lessons Learned from Hurricane Andrew," Peacock and Yang Zhang, an assistant professor in Urban Affairs and Planning at Virgina Tech, wrote that planners, state and local governments and land-bank programs all have a role in an area's recovery.

The paper was published in the current issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association.

"Major natural disasters are likely to be followed by housing market volatility, high rates of property abandonment, and uneven housing recovery," they wrote in a summary. "To prevent long-lasting adverse effects, planners should focus on reducing housing turnover, retaining home ownership, and promoting reuse of abandoned properties. State and local governments should consider imposing emergency moratoria on foreclosures and insurance cancellations and providing incentives to encourage the rebuilding of low income and rental properties."

Land-bank programs, they continued, could dampen housing market volatility, and emergency property disposition programs and eminent domain processes could expedite reuse of abandoned properties. However, redevelopment should be consistent with long-term development, equity, and hazard mitigation goals, they said.

To arrive at their conclusions, Peacock and Zhang examined single-family housing recovery, housing sales, and property abandonment following Hurricane Andrew in south Miami-Dade County, Fla.

They also examined the effects of home and neighborhood characteristics and hurricane damage on recovery, analyzed home sales and properties abandoned to assess the extent and duration of the hurricane impacts, and conducted correlation analyses to identify neighborhood attributes associated with post-disaster home sales and abandonment.

Hurricane Andrew caused an estimated 41.1 billion in 2010 U.S. dollars damage when it came ashore in South Florida in 1992.

The issue is in Volume 76, Issue 1 of the 2010 Journal of the American Planning Association.

Their paper may be read online or downloaded as a pdf from http://informaworld.com.

- Posted: Mar. 24, 2010-