Are Earthquake Victims Living in Highway-side Public Housing Still Dissatisfied with Public Housing Overall?: a Follow-up Survey of Disaster-response Public Housing

The Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent tsunami on March 11, 2011 destroyed an immense number of homes. To ensure that victims could enter permanent housing as soon as possible, disaster-response public housing was built rapidly. Some of this housing is located in areas with poor acoustic quality, such as alongside a highway. We conducted successive questionnaire surveys at a highway-side public housing facility for disaster victims. Our previous survey conducted in 2014 revealed that residents living in apartments facing the highway were irritated by the traffic noise and tended to be dissatisfied with public housing overall, compared with residents living in apartments not facing the highway. Further, highway-side residents tended to evaluate individual living environment factors of their homes as lower. A follow-up survey conducted in 2015 revealed that highway-side residents were still irritated by the traffic noise. However, their overall evaluation of public housing had improved significantly, and their tendency to evaluate the individual living environment factors of their homes negatively had almost disappeared.