Abstract for: Modeling Post-Disaster Housing Recovery: Funds, Delays, and Reconstruction Backlogs after Hurricane Harvey

Post-disaster housing recovery is difficult to understand using static measures alone because funding, administration, and construction interact over time. This work develops a system dynamics perspective on how recovery backlogs persist despite substantial resources, using Hurricane Harvey recovery in Houston as an empirical starting point for model development. The work formulates a preliminary stock-and-flow model with damaged houses, available recovery funds, reconstruction starts, houses under construction, and recovered houses. Hurricane Harvey program documents and related literature are used to support initial parameter choices, dynamic-hypothesis development, and early testing of feedbacks involving backlog reduction, funding constraints, and completion delays. Preliminary model behavior suggests that recovery pace is highly sensitive to the timing of fund availability and to delays between reconstruction starts and completions. Early simulation runs produce a slowly declining damaged-housing backlog, indicating how nominally large allocations may still translate into extended recovery timeframes. This work-in-progress offers a dynamic structure for examining how funding delays, expenditure pressures, and construction bottlenecks interact in post-disaster housing recovery. Feedback is especially sought on model boundary choices, parameter priorities, and the most useful policy experiments for later calibration, sensitivity analysis, and broader application beyond Hurricane Harvey. AI-assisted language editing; author verified.