Roadblocks to Housing after Disaster: Homeless Veterans’ Experiences after Hurricane Sandy

June L Gin,Aram Dobalian,Claudia Der-Martirosian,Christine Stanik

doi:10.1061/(asce)nh.1527-6996.0000330

June L Gin, Aram Dobalian + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1061/(asce)nh.1527-6996.0000330

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Abstract

AbstractIndividuals who are homeless are disproportionately likely to experience negative outcomes during disasters. Setbacks to their efforts to access needed services, such as transitional housin...

Highlights

IntroductionHomeless individuals face barriers to preparing for disasters due to the prevalence of past trauma, preexisting mental and physical health concerns, lack of resources and access to services, and social and economic marginalization (Edgington 2014; Every and Thompson 2014; Walters and Gaillard 2014; Wexler and Smith 2015)
In 2017, 553,742 individuals in the US were identified as experiencing homelessness on a given night (US Department of Housing and Urban Development 2017)
The social stigma that homeless individuals encounter within a community every day often causes them to be denied access to shelters designated for disaster victims; such denials have occurred in disasters ranging from Hurricane Andrew in 1992 to the 2017 Atlantic hurricanes in 2017 (Dearen and Kennedy 2017; Phillips 1998; Settembrino 2016, 2017a, b; Vickery 2018)

Summary

Introduction

Homeless individuals face barriers to preparing for disasters due to the prevalence of past trauma, preexisting mental and physical health concerns, lack of resources and access to services, and social and economic marginalization (Edgington 2014; Every and Thompson 2014; Walters and Gaillard 2014; Wexler and Smith 2015). Because of these challenges, they often experience devastating challenges during disasters due to their inability to prepare and lack of resources for recovery (Brown et al 2013; Doran et al 2016). Unsheltered homeless individuals are often forced into the physical margins of their community by rules that prohibit sleeping in public spaces and trespassing laws that lead them to try to stay out of sight, both of which contribute to their social isolation (Settembrino 2017a; Vickery 2018), make them hard to reach with help, and compromise their access to disaster information

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