Housing Reconstruction After Two Major Earthquakes: The 1994 Northridge Earthquake in the United States and the 1999 Chi‐Chi Earthquake in Taiwan

The idea of pre‐impact recovery planning has recently been promoted by researchers and practitioners, but very little research has been done to evaluate its effects on disaster recovery. This study compared two jurisdictions — the city of Los Angeles, California and Taichung county in Taiwan — in their recovery from earthquakes. Although the two cases also differ with respect to variables other than the presence of pre‐impact recovery plans, the available data suggest that having a pre‐impact recovery plan facilitates housing reconstruction and allows local officials to make more effective use of the window of opportunity after disaster to integrate hazard mitigation into the recovery process.