Using Building Permits to Monitor Disaster Recovery: A Spatio-Temporal Case Study of Coastal Mississippi Following Hurricane Katrina

The pace of disaster recovery varies considerably from one place to another. Even when places suffer impacts from the same event, recovery studies often lack the spatial and temporal resolution to fully understand such local variability in the recovery process and patterns. This paper discusses the novel use of building permits and a spatial scan statistic to identify the spatial and temporal dimensions of recovery in coastal Mississippi following Hurricane Katrina. Our work identifies significant space-time clusters of recovery activity and indicates that the amount of damage experienced and the amount of pre-event housing strongly influence the timing and location of building permit clusters. This analytical method and the use of publicly available data are valuable for a better understanding of long-term recovery processes.