Community Businesses as Social Units in Post-Disaster Recovery

Abstract

With global climate change and rapid development in environmentally vulnerable areas, communities are increasingly looking for ways to manage, adapt to, and mitigate adverse impacts from disaster events. To help communities achieve this goal, planners must first understand how various stakeholders behave in post-disaster situations. In this paper, we use household and business surveys conducted in New York City after the 2012 Hurricane Sandy to examine recovery decisions of businesses compared to households as well as their respective use of social, financial, and institutional network resources to recover. Our findings suggest that community businesses, particularly locally owned small businesses, are not simply economic units but also play critical social roles in community functioning. Business recovery decisions are often made based on social, not purely profit-maximizing reasons. Recognizing this dual characteristic of businesses is an important step to better engaging this stakeholder group in community resilience and recovery planning processes.