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“Long‐Term Temporary” Disaster Recovery Housing: Living in RVs Post‐Wildfire

Haisu Huang,Claire W. Herbert

Published 2025 in Rural sociologist

ABSTRACT

Sociological research has begun to examine how individuals and communities stabilize, recover, and rebuild post‐disaster, highlighting the importance of housing through the broader recovery process, which often takes multiple years. Wildfire impacts and losses have been increasingly studied by sociologists, but the recovery process has not been well examined in the rural context. This article builds on the nexus of housing, rural, and disaster recovery scholarship to explore the use of recreational vehicles (RVs) as an informal, post‐disaster housing strategy. Using qualitative research conducted with a rural community in Oregon post‐wildfire, we explain why residents choose RVs and what the experience is like for them. Although RV living is affordable and bolsters long‐time place‐based and RV community connections, it also exacerbates pre‐fire vulnerabilities and creates new sources of hardship and stress. RVs may function as a quick coping strategy for post‐disaster housing and reflect rural self‐reliance and community resilience, but we argue they are also a source of future disaster vulnerability that requires institutional intervention.

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