Galveston Island Residential Building Inventory for Multi-Hazard Resilience Assessment

Approximately 22,000 residential building footprints on Galveston Island, Texas, are attributed for wind, surge-wave, and flood fragility analyses. The inventory, created by Amini et al. (2025), links to 33,302 housing units and serves as the core built-environment input for damage, loss, and recovery models. It is provided as an ESRI shapefile in WGS 1984.

Use Cases

• Conducting wind, surge-wave, and flood fragility analyses based on structural archetype codes.
• Modeling population dislocation and housing recovery based on housing unit allocation data.
• Performing tract-level multi-objective mitigation optimization based on building attributes like replacement cost and first-floor elevation.
• Assessing economic loss from hurricane hazards using attributed building replacement cost and contents value.

Strengths

• Approximately 22,000 spatially explicit building footprints with a globally unique identifier for joining related tables.
• Each building is attributed with 13+ features including structural archetype codes, year of construction, and first-floor elevation.
• Linked to 33,302 housing units (20,381 occupied, 12,921 vacant) via the Housing Unit Allocation method.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for specific analytical needs.

Provenance

Source

DesignSafe Data Depot Repository Harvested Subcollection, authored by Amini, Kooshan.

Collection Method

Likely compiled and attributed through the Housing Unit Allocation (HUA) method and spatial analysis.

Time Range

null

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-20 14:52:51; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Galveston Island, Texas, USA.