This Competition will extend the City’s Coastal Storm Plan and constitute a critical step in New York City’s effort to plan ahead for long term housing recovery after a catastrophic disaster. At the discretion of the Sponsor, one or more Award Recipients' Designs for Provisional Housing will be incorporated into the City’s Housing Recovery Plan. Since both the Coastal Storm Plan and the Housing Recovery Plan are not based on likely scenarios, but the worst case scenario, they have also been designed to be scalable to disasters of smaller degrees.

The diagram above describes the migration of populations after a disaster. The horizontal axis represents time on an open scale with milestones indicated by black vertical lines. The vertical axis is split into bands, each one representing a relative distance from home to which the population is displaced. The entire population begins and ends in the “home” band. This is an optimistic projection; many displaced may not come back to their neighborhoods. 

After an evacuation is called, evacuees follow three basic routes: some leave the city to self-shelter offsite, some evacuate to the City’s sheltering system and a few stay behind. After the event, some return home immediately, some who were away enter the sheltering system, and some stay away. During the following days, the City coordinates rescue operations, damage assessment, debris removal, utility restoration, and establishes the basic mechanisms for recovery. 

As the sheltering system phases out, people move into existing temporary housing—this could mean available vacant apartments, hotels, or staying with friends and family. Many of these temporary housing solutions are untenable over a long period of time for various logistical and social reasons.