When it comes to affordable housing crises, there are are some potential benefits to be gained from viewing the crisis from a disaster perspective. This is particularly true where efforts to contain a housing crisis cannot keep up with the rapidly increasing scale of the problem. That’s happening just about everywhere on earth!
Where housing has been damaged or destroyed in a disaster, such as a hurricane or volcanic eruption, there is almost always an urgency to finding at least temporary housing solutions. These temporary solutions can become quasi-permanent if there is no expeditious way to repair damaged housing or build new ones raoidly. This is a particular problem for households without the financial resources to buy their way out of a home-destroying disaster.
One intriguing question that disaster managers have been exploring: can a rapidly erected temporary shelter become in time a respectable permanent housing solution? This question has an important resonance not only in disaster management, but in housing crisis management. Quickly available temporary housing could count as useful additions to affordable housing stock if it could be reliably converted without great difficulty into permanent homes.
Two articles explore, either directly or indirectly, some benefits of viewing the housing crisis as a slow-rolling disaster.
The first article, a Hawaiian affordable housing project, was inspired by recovery construction after an natural disaster — the loss of housing caused by volcanic lava flows. Some of the recovery involved building a village for evacuees. The man who spearheaded the village construction has teamed up to work on a current affordable housing project. This project explores the construction issues of an expandable living space beginning from a simple core. Read more in HAWAII NEWS NOW: Big Island Builders Design Turn-Key Modular Homes For Low-Income Families
The second article concentrates on disaster recovery housing after flooding in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. This experiment, viewed from a personal perspective, uses a similar approach to the Hawaii project. It also uses expandable modular housing. This article goes on to survey other experiments to use modular housing across the nation, concluding that in spite of its potential, ‘expandable’ emergency housing has so far failed to overcome a number of problems that have hampered its widespread adoption. Read more in Mother Jones: We Need To Radically Rethink Our Approach To Disaster Recovery. Here’s One Solution.
