Higher Ground: a Flash-Flood Recovery Center for Displaced Communities
by jake_feldman_13 in Design > 3D Design
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Higher Ground: a Flash-Flood Recovery Center for Displaced Communities
On the morning of January 22, 2024, a storm, unlike any seen in decades, hit San Diego and dropped 3.15 inches of rain in just two hours. Chollas Creek, the channel that runs behind Southcrest, Mountain View, and Shelltown, filled past its banks and pushed into the streets. On Beta Street the water reached five or six feet. Families climbed onto their roofs to wait for help. San Diego's fire and lifeguard departments ran close to 200 swift-water rescues before noon.
By the end of the day, roughly 1,000 homes and businesses were damaged, and more than 1,200 people were displaced. Most were working-class. Many were immigrants. A large share had no flood insurance because the area is not mapped as a floodplain, and it is just another expense many can't afford. A year later, families on Beta Street were still living in homes stripped to the studs, one needing an estimated $189,000 to rebuild.
As a San Diego resident and someone who had multiple friends affected and displaced by this flooding, who lost most of what was in their homes and spent months trying to get their lives back to normal, I wanted to design a place of refuge, a place of community, and most importantly, a place of healing for those who need it in these times of distress.
Four months after the Jan 2024 San Diego flood | cbs8.com
San Diego flood: Southcrest residents still rebuilding after January storms
Supplies
For this design, I used Tinkercad for the initial modeling process and Fusion for adding details, assigning materials, and rendering the model.
Site Analysis
The flood had a clear low point. Beta Street runs parallel to the South Las Chollas Creek, the outlet for a 16,000-acre watershed, and when the channel overflowed on January 22 the homes along it sat under five or six feet of water. That corridor, now the Southcrest Trails Park that parallels the creek bed through the neighborhood, is the lowest ground in Southcrest. It is exactly where a recovery center should not go.
That sets up two requirements that pull against each other. The center has to sit close to the people who were displaced, who are clustered along the creek. It also has to sit somewhere that will not flood, which means leaving the creek.
The neighborhood resolves this on its own terrain. The land rises east from the channel toward the crest the neighborhood is named for, around 40th Street, where Southcrest Park and the Southcrest Recreation Center already sit. That high ground is roughly half a mile from Beta Street, about a ten-minute walk for a displaced family, and well above the channel that flooded. Putting the center there keeps it reachable on foot and dry when the next storm comes.
Siting it beside the existing park and rec center is deliberate. A resilience hub works best attached to a civic place people already use and trust, not dropped onto a vacant lot. It is also city land, so a real proposal needs no acquisition and lines up with the public money already going into the corridor.
Flooding in San Diego Turns City Into Disaster Zone | San Diego Magazine
The Exterior
The exterior structure has two jobs. It must endure the upcoming flood while also creating a welcoming atmosphere for those entering.
The first line of flood defense is the site, the crest from Step 2. The second is the building itself. The ground floor is concrete, a flood-damage-resistant material that FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) defines as one able to withstand at least 72 hours of direct contact with floodwater without significant damage. If water ever reaches the crest, the ground floor is built to take it and dry out instead of being gutted the way the homes on Beta Street were. Everything that cannot get wet goes up. The curved roof works here too. It sheds rainwater toward the bioswales (the vegetated channels along the sides of the structure, which are designed to capture and filter stormwater runoff) planned for the corridor, so the center manages its own runoff rather than adding to the flow that overwhelmed the neighborhood. In the worst case the building stays standing and stays open: water passes through a hardened base while people and equipment stay dry above it.
A flood's cost is more than just the physical damages. A displaced family loses its routine, its privacy, and the daily contact with neighbors that holds a community together. The mental-health toll is real. A meta-analysis put PTSD prevalence among flood survivors at about 29%.
The shape of the building answers this distress. People consistently experience curved, contoured forms as softer and more pleasant, and sharp angular forms as harder and more serious. One fMRI study found that angular objects produce more activity in the amygdala, the brain's threat center, than curved ones, and a study of architectural interiors found people judged curvilinear spaces as more beautiful than rectilinear ones. The barrel roof and the low horizontal lines read as calm, the opposite of what someone expects of a storm refuge.
The timber carries that further through material. Visible wood surfaces measurably lower stress. Studies find rooms with exposed wood reduce sympathetic, or "fight or flight," nervous system activation. The full-height glass on every floor faces the park's trees and field, which one study found that a view of nature shortens recovery and helps with PTSD. The wraparound terraces give every floor private outdoor access, so even someone too unwell or anxious to leave has a place to step outside and look out. For a population recovering from trauma, the building's calm is part of the treatment, not a finish.
The structure is also built to go up fast and cheap, which matters when families are waiting to come home. The upper floors are mass timber on a repeating structural bay, prefabricated off-site and assembled on a schedule that runs about 25% faster than concrete with smaller crews and lower labor costs. Because timber is far lighter than concrete, the foundation can be smaller and cheaper. The repeating module also lets the design be rebuilt at other flood-prone neighborhoods without redrawing it. The same choice pays off on sustainability: each cubic meter of cross-laminated timber stores about a ton of CO2, and mass timber cuts a building's embodied carbon by 30 to 50% versus steel or concrete. I kept concrete only where the flood demanded it, at the base. Timber does everything above.
Why this design is structurally sound:
Microsoft Word - NFIP_09_Flood_Resistant_Design.doc
How a Bioswale Works: From Construction to Benefits - ScienceInsights
Why is this design psychologically healing:
The Impact of Wood in Indoor Environments: Enhancing Health and Well-being - Canadian Interiors
View Through a Window May Influence Recovery from Surgery | Science
Why this design is economical and environmentally friendly:
The Compelling Benefits of Mass Timber Construction | Buildings
Why Mass Timber Makes Sense - and Saves Dollars | HKS Architects
Floor 1: Overview
The first floor is for immediate care, it includes the following three main rooms:
- Lobby
- Medical Care
- Therapy Room
Floor 1: Lobby
You enter into an open lobby with the intake desk in view of the door. That placement is deliberate. Trauma-informed design treats a welcoming, visible front desk with clear sightlines as a basic reassurance for people who have just lost stability, and open circulation with strong sightlines lets someone see the entrances and exits and feel oriented rather than trapped.
The spiral staircase sits in the center of the lobby, visible from the entrance. That is the whole building's argument in one object. From the moment a family arrives in crisis, they can see the path up, to the floor where they will sleep and the floor where the community gathers.
Trauma-Informed Design: 5 Ways to Build Calm into Shelters and Housing | LHB
Floor 1: Medical Care
Medical care occupies the right side of the base floor, a set of triage and exam bays for the injuries, infections, and untreated conditions that surface in the days after a flood that need immediate attention. medical attention.
Floor 1: Therapy Room
The therapy room is straight to the left, an enclosed space with soft seating and a planter with trees and bushes instead of exam tables. Bringing live greenery inside is the "nature in the space" pattern from biophilic design, and indoor access to nature is linked to improved mood and lower stress and pain, which is most of what a therapy room is trying to do. Trauma-informed design also calls for both places to gather and places to sit in solitude and for warm, non-institutional finishes rather than the stark, clinical look that can retrigger distress, which this room does with its simple but inviting feel. This room is built for the far more difficult, but just as important, kind of healing, psychological healing, that roughly 29% of flood victims face.
Transforming Built Environments Through Trauma-Informed Design | I+S Design
Floor 2: Overview
Floor 1 stabilizes the crisis. Floor 2 is where people live while the longer recovery happens, which, after a flood, can run for months.
The second floor is split into four main rooms:
- Living Area
- Bathrooms
- Kitchen
- Dining Area
Floor 2: Living Area
The sleeping spaces feature built-in, mass-timber bunk beds designed specifically for long-term stays. By incorporating solid wood partitions, personal storage cubbies, and privacy screens, the bunks allow some access to privacy when it seems impossible. Recognizing that displaced children often suffer severe academic and social disruptions, the living space includes an assortment of integrated desks to give students an area to work.
Floor 2: Bathrooms
The showers and bathrooms return dignity. Private facilities are a small thing until you have gone weeks without them, and trauma-informed care treats that kind of basic privacy as part of feeling safe.
Floor 2: Kitchen
A complete kitchen lets a displaced family make its own food instead of receiving a tray, allowing families to connect and share familiar home-cooked meals.
Floor 2: Dining Area
Breaking bread together provides a natural, comforting anchor for daily life. Instead of isolating families in their individual quarters, the shared dining space encourages displaced neighbors to connect, support one another, and process their experiences collectively.
Floor 3: Overview
The third floor is split into two main rooms:
- Community Room
- Library
Floor 3: Community Room
One of the most important rooms in the building is the community room. This room includes a set of chairs facing a lectern with a microphone because the room is built for community voices. Affected residents use it to make collective decisions about rebuilding, hold cultural events, and address each other directly.
Floor 3: Library
The library comes first. Timber shelves, books, soft armchairs, and large windows facing the park. The wood and natural light have the same psychological benefits as described in Step 3, but the library adds something else. Books are cultural records, and when a displaced community loses access to culture, language, and shared knowledge, research describes that as one of the deepest non-economic losses, the kind that erodes identity and belonging in ways money cannot restore. A room full of books is a small act of cultural reclamation that flash floods like these can take.
What is Non-Economic Loss and Damage and Why does it Matter? | United Nations University
Final Render and Conclusion
The January 2024 floods along Chollas Creek did not just damage homes; they stripped the Southcrest community of its stability, safety, and daily routines. While traditional emergency shelters focus solely on keeping people dry for a few nights, this design recognizes that true recovery requires addressing both the physical and psychological toll of long-term displacement. By moving up the crest to safe ground beside existing civic spaces, the center provides an immediate safe haven that will not succumb to the next storm, purposefully engineered to guide families from crisis back to community.
Every level of the structure plays a specific role in this healing process. The first floor focuses on survival and stabilization, utilizing a flood-resistant concrete base that integrates trauma-informed sightlines, immediate medical triage, and biophilic therapy spaces to ground residents in their most vulnerable moments. Moving upward, the second floor restores dignity and routine. The mass-timber living quarters restore agency by providing private bunks, functional workspaces, and communal kitchens that allow displaced neighbors to reclaim the simple, daily rituals of cooking and resting on their own terms. Finally, the third floor looks outward to foster community and culture, offering spaces for collective decision-making and cultural preservation to ensure the neighborhood's voice and identity remain intact even when their physical homes are stripped to the studs.
Disasters like the flooding on Beta Street expose the vulnerabilities in our infrastructure, and the reality is that rebuilding working-class neighborhoods often takes years. However, recovery does not have to mean sitting in a sterile, temporary gymnasium. By combining rapid mass-timber construction, trauma-informed architecture, and deliberate civic integration, this center stands as a blueprint for how San Diego can offer its residents not just a temporary place to survive, but a permanent foundation to heal.