Provision of prefabricated temporary housings was the major solution to accommodate displaced people in the aftermath of a disaster. But in the Great East Japan Earthquake that occurred in 2011, provision of temporary rental assistance was also adopted, and applied in such large scale for the first time in Japan. Since temporary rental assistance is a mechanism that utilizes private housing stock, there is a concern about the influence on population outflow in the local cities with high homeownership rate. The purpose of this research is to clarify the factors in making the decisions for housing recovery from the disaster, focusing the influence of residential situation of temporary housing and the actual situation of the change of their family member, based on the statistical sounding data of all victims in Shichigamahama Town, Miyagi prefecture.
With paying attention to security of personal information, it were analyzed the anonymized data, which includes the Intention of Housing Recovery Options System and related partial data of Basic Resident Register, obtained from Shichigahama Town. The survey about Selection of Housing Recovery Options was conducted in July 2011, in February 2012, and in June 2013 about the provisional application. In addition, the survey of December 2015 was used as the final intention data.
It was found that the factors to stay same site with recovering their own house is connecting the regulation of land use and the residential situation of temporary housing tightly. Those who used temporary rental assistance tend to rebuild their houses outside the town. Focusing on the separation of households, many households kept its size, however, some of those separated their household during temporary housing divided its members at the time of recovery. In case of the household with many members, there were households that used two prefabricated temporary housing or two tentative private rental housings in separate place as a temporary-living; in the latter case, the ratio of household separation eventually increased. It is conceivable that it is difficult to summarize the opinions because of large physical distances.
During the reconstruction phase after the Great East Japan Earthquake, there has been a debate how to respond to the risk of cataclysmic disaster like tsunami. Our research showed that the risk-sensitive land use regulation had influence on the households' decision making where to rebuild their house. Furthermore, it is also shown that the possibility of some relevance between the situation in the temporary period and the housing recovery opinions. Temporary rental assistance is an important policy to make useful use of already existing stocks, but it is important to properly operate according to local circumstances.
