Housing as a recovery measure: A survival analysis of time to stable housing among a post-Katrina cohort

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, over 100,000 households were displaced from their housing for at least six months, and even three years post-disaster tens of thousands are still without permanent and stable housing. An out-migration from stable housing of this magnitude has not occurred since the 1930s Dust Bowl. This research uses survival analyses to examine the factors associated with time to stable housing among a randomly sampled longitudinal cohort of households displaced by Hurricane Katrina. The Gulf Coast Child & Family Health Study (GCAFH), drawn as a multi-stage stratified cluster sample of displaced households in Louisiana and Mississippi, encompasses 1,079 households established in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. These households were drawn from FEMA lists of congregate settings (trailer parks and hotels) and from FEMA lists of census blocks which had sustained major or comprehensive damage. Subjects in the cohort have been interviewed annually in each of the three years since Katrina. When last surveyed in summer 2008, 64.4% of respondents in the G-CAFH cohort reported living in unstable housing, including travel trailers or housing circumstances in which they would have to move within a year. Stable housing has emerged as a central measure of stability and recovery among these displaced populations, and this study has examined the effects of both community-level and household-level factors associated with time to stable housing, using Kaplan-Meier and Cox Regression analyses.