foundations of rural housing
the problem of building climate resilient housing in developing countries
In October, I spent a week in Bogota, Colombia observing the quality of housing on momentaneous landscapes. Seeing the clearly separable parts of a house assembled together with materials that I could easily identify, a thought came to mind: what would it take for me to build an entire house myself?
the problem
Unfortunately, this problem isn’t as clear-cut as it seems. Building housing today means making it resilient to the disasters that might strike as a result of variabilities in the climate.
By 2030, 3 billion people are estimated to live in substandard housing, which is 40% of the world’s population. At the same time, disasters make 14 million people homeless each year which means that the need for affordable, climate-resilient housing is always outpacing the supply. This is particularly relevant for the Asian-Pacific region as it is representative of eight out of the ten countries with the highest levels of displacement and housing loss.
The world is also becoming more urban, with 2.3 billion more people predicted to live in cities by 2050. As demographics change and more people are either living alone or in multi-generational homes, housing will need to adapt even further because the housing we have now won’t meet the environmental needs of today.
Because of climate change, disasters are becoming more frequent, and we need to recognize and bring attention to the fact that housing loss is preventable - unlike the way the problem is treated today where governments and stakeholders wait for disaster to strike to begin to rebuild. Any efforts to reinforce homes are generally considered out of reach for both implementation and affordability. If we make the appropriate investments and changes now, we can reduce the loss of life, livelihoods, and homes in disasters in the long term.
root causes
The root causes behind the issue of climate-resilient rural housing are diverse and interconnected. First, there's the challenge of affordability. Many rural communities around the world struggle to access low-cost, sustainable materials and construction techniques that could provide durable housing. While most developed countries can benefit from economies of scale, the relative lack of skilled construction workers and engineers and developing countries creates a market in which innovation is hardly possible. A lack of financial support, training, and awareness about these materials compounds the problem.
It doesn’t help that the effects of the climate tend to be the worst in the most rural and poor countries. Rural communities, where many of the world's poorest people reside, are disproportionately affected by climate change. To build climate-resilient housing for these communities, we must address both their financial limitations and the environmental challenges they face. For those populations, especially those below the poverty line, price trumps all other considerations as sensitivity increases exponentially when the actions of individuals without sufficient purchasing power don’t directly lead to long-term wealth accumulation.
Lastly, there's a lack of comprehensive research and policy guidance on this issue. While global initiatives like the Global Program for Resilient Housing are a step in the right direction, they often lack the context-specific insights needed to effectively implement climate-resilient housing projects across different geographies and cultures. As an example, the unique resources facing each geography are often required as a prerequisite to developing an engineering solution that involves importing the least amount of materials in efforts to keep the cost of housing and reinforcements as low as possible. The unique contextual understanding of the disasters that exist in each of these regions leads to different types of climate disasters that need to be solved independently. The number of independent variables to be controlled, simply speaking, will lead to a solution that won’t be obviously scalable. If initially scalable without changes, will not be effective or affordable.
hypothesis
Last year, I read a book called “How Buildings Learn.” Its main idea is that all buildings are predictions, and all predictions are wrong. If our predictions about buildings are wrong, we should design them to make them easy to change. This principle is more often integrated within modern green buildings with budgets far larger than those available in the developing world.
In the developing world, there are countless projects today that have approached the problem of building climate-resilient housing through the lens of adaptability and change.
Building or retrofitting housing to withstand extreme weather events is one of the best and most cost-effective ways of adapting to a changing climate. Simple things can be done, like tying down a roof or using storm shutters for windstorms, which can substantially reduce the risk of housing damage during a storm.
Climate impacts can also be minimized by sourcing materials locally, as they are more likely to withstand the changes that are expected in the coming decades. There is a tendency, particularly in post-disaster aid, to either put up temporary shelters or to use pre-fabricated houses. Not only are carbon emissions generated by transporting these inappropriate materials long distance, but the risk with this approach is that these houses often do not take into account long-term sustainability considerations, and as a result, are even more susceptible to disasters and climate stresses. In Indonesia, an organization called Build Change worked with brickmaking cooperatives to make small changes to their production to ensure stronger materials and reduce carbon emissions.
Many are leveraging emerging technologies - like Build Change, with the support of IBM, created the Intelligent Supervision Assistant for Construction to ensure that local builders can assess the safety of the construction components most likely to suffer from materials defects before use.
barriers
Three major barriers stand in the way to adopting resilient housing at scale: people/policy, money, and technology. Resilient housing is great - but it needs to be made affordable at scale. To adopt the policies that enable resilient housing to be implemented globally, investment needs to be driven from the public and private sectors towards resilient housing. To make affordable finance available to homeowners from a financial perspective. From the policy side, it’s necessary to drive the demand for resilient housing by incentivizing homeowners to prioritize resilient homes. Not only is it necessary to align but enforce national and legal frameworks that consider both natural hazards and building vulnerabilities in a streamlined way. While systems change is needed to build safer homes and create safer people, on a high level, the amount and speed of economically incentivized innovation will be a catalyst for stabilizing the equilibrium of housing and safety in today’s world where the need for climate-resilient housing is sharply increasing.
what’s missing
After analyzing tens of case studies with focuses on a diverse range of geographies in the world, a few key similarities stood out between the studies. Most climate-resilient housing projects are unsuccessful because of some combination of inadequate planning and implementation, financial constraints, lack of public awareness and engagement, and regulatory barriers. In New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, The Make It Right Foundation aimed to build 150 sustainable and affordable homes in the Lower Ninth Ward. However, many of these homes experienced structural issues and material degradation, resulting in costly repairs. The Netherlands' floating houses project, although having an innovative approach to combating rising sea levels that had been successful in some instances, it faced challenges like high construction costs, regulatory hurdles, and limited public acceptance.
Good projects succeeded in involving local stakeholders and considering their needs and preferences throughout the planning and implementation process. Construction materials and building strategies were locally sourced in many cases although needed more time for planning and development. Successful projects also tended to consider a wide range of factors, including environmental, social, and economic aspects, to create comprehensive solutions. Arguably, the most important benefit that set aside successful and unsuccessful projects was adequate funding and financial support. This separated, most often successful implementation from unsuccessful implementation.
Overall, the combination failure of a lack of thoroughness and focus on solving climate problems that are unique to the geography of the area of implementation leads to the failure of many climate-focused, economically incentivized climate projects.
an approach to solving this problem
The best places to plan a pilot are where the solution is needed, where other solutions don’t exist/have been unsuccessful, and where the solution has the highest probability of succeeding.
An ideal location:
faces a climate problem that doesn’t require important materials to be “better”
example: floods require foundations to be stronger which means the overall quality of materials needed for a specific component of the house to become resilient
has the purchasing power for a house/government incentive
collaboration opportunities with governments for reduced or subsidized housing can drastically reduce the time it takes to get to the implementation stages.
through research and papers, we’ve decided the ideal investment for a house is between 20%-30% of annual household income
countries facing climate disasters that have a relatively high income can often afford insurance which removes the need and incentive for low-cost housing.
A filter for ideation is reducing friction. It’s awesome to build a house from scratch, but even better if there’s a low-cost, convenient reinforcement.
we’re posting updates on this project here on substack. if you or someone you know has worked in construction or housing, we would love to chat!
reach out to us here.