Food Access Restoration Model

Access after disasters to resources such as food poses planning problems that affect millions of people each year. Understanding how disasters disrupt and alter food access during the initial steps of the recovery process provides new evidence to inform both food system and disaster planning. This research takes a supply-side focus and explores the results from a survey of food retailers after Hurricane Harvey in three Texas counties. The survey collected information on how the disaster affected a store’s property, people, and products and the length of time a store was closed, had reduced hours, and stopped selling fresh food items. We find that a focus only on store closures and property damage would underestimate the number of days residents have limited fresh food access by nearly two weeks. Further, stores in lower-income communities with chronic low-access to supermarkets (food deserts) were closed longer than other stores, potentially compounding pre-existing inequalities. We conclude that to plan for a more equitable food supply post-disaster, planners should embrace more dimensions of access, encourage retailer mitigation, and assess the types of retailers and their distribution within their communities. This mission includes social science collections related to models for predicting days to restoration of food access after a disaster. These collections include the programed workflow to replicated results for the journal article: Rosenheim, Nathanael, Maria Watson, John Cassels Connors, Mastura Safayet, Walter Gillis Peacock. “Food Access After Disasters: A Multidimensional View of Restoration After Hurricane Harvey”. Journal of the American Planning Association. doi.org/0.1080/01944363.2023.2284160