Emergency housing in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: an assessment of the FEMA travel trailer program

Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast of the United States in 2005. More than 1800 persons died, and the disaster stands as the costliest in U.S. history. Over 200,000 former residents of New Orleans continue to reside elsewhere. The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) emergency housing program, and specifically the design, manufacture, and deployment of its travel trailer housing units, remain the subject of controversy. The FEMA travel trailer program is critiqued, as is recent empirical evidence on the deleterious health outcomes experienced by many trailer occupants. The results of a pilot investigation are reported, whereby the post-occupancy assessments of a group of occupants of single-site FEMA trailer installations were compared to a group residing in two FEMA trailer park communities in New Orleans. Among the findings, the travel trailer unit was assessed by occupants as difficult to personalize to occupants’ preferred patterns of use, inadequate in size, affording few site amenities, and little overall privacy, and the unit itself functioned as a source of chronic environmental stress. The findings are translated into a theoretical/operative model of person-environment interactions, to assist in further research on this subject.

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