NLIHC submitted comments to the U.S. Census Bureau on behalf of the Disaster Housing Recovery Coalition (DHRC) and the Housing Recovery Research Consortium regarding several proposed disaster recovery-related questions in the new phase of the Household Pulse Survey.
The NLIHC-led DHRC is a coalition of nearly 900 national, state, and local organizations, including many working directly with disaster-impacted communities and with first-hand experience recovering after disasters. The DHRC works to ensure that federal disaster recovery efforts reach the lowest-income and most marginalized survivors.
NLIHC also convenes the Housing Recovery Research Consortium, which consists of researchers from academia, research centers, and non-profit housing organizations who come together to improve access to high-quality data, identify research questions relevant to effective and equitable disaster response and recovery, and disseminate research and best practices as they relate to housing for vulnerable populations.
While billion-dollar disasters frequently impact multiple areas of the country, the U.S. has no standardized data collection tool that can capture the material impact of disasters on housing, household health, and household well-being. The Household Pulse Survey was developed by the Census Bureau to quickly collect information about household experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. For this reason, the survey is also an ideal tool to use to better understand the impact of disasters. In a notice in the Federal Register, the Bureau outlined several proposed questions regarding disaster recovery, including questions on displacement, immediate access to food and water, and living conditions.
NLIHC’s comment proposed expanding the existing questions and adding several in order to broaden the usefulness of data produced by the survey, specifically regarding households with lower incomes. The comment suggests creating an additional question about whether households applied for assistance from a federal, state, or local government after a disaster and what types of assistance they received. In addition, the comment suggested building on an existing proposed question regarding the displacement of disaster-impacted households by asking about the type of shelter occupied by households in the immediate aftermath of a disaster (i.e., whether they lived with family members, in hotels, temporary shelters, or in a place not intended for sleeping, such as a car or park). The comment also suggests asking about the experiences of individuals who were not displaced by disasters but who may have remained in damaged homes due to the inaccessibility of alternative shelter or other factors.
In addition to the substance of the questions, the comment requested that the Census Bureau broaden the areas where the survey is deployed to ensure that data are being collected from areas where smaller-scale disasters have occurred. Such disasters may not receive approval for federal assistance, so information on how households manage disaster impacts without a full-scale federal response would be useful in determining where such aid should be deployed.
Read a copy of the comment at: https://bit.ly/3PivPlR
Read the initial posting on the Federal Register at: https://bit.ly/3PgoT8J