The Cost of Improving Vulnerable Housing

Recommendations for Investments in Housing Resilience from an Analysis of Global Project Data

The Cost of Improving Vulnerable Housing is a first-of-its-kind study that provides compelling evidence of the comparative advantages, cost savings, and wider benefits of improving vulnerable homes, rather than building new ones, for disaster resilience.

By leveraging Build Change’s unique vantage point following almost 20 years of making housing more resilient worldwide, the study was able to draw on close to 1,500 retrofit designs for housing from fourteen countries across Asia, the Pacific, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Through comprehensive analysis of direct construction costs for different kinds of home improvement work, it provides detailed insight into the spending and outcomes of housing investments for a range of housing typologies around the world, both in prevention and post-disaster contexts.

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Cite

This work may be cited as follows: The Cost of Improving Vulnerable Housing: Recommendations for Investments in Housing Resilience from an Analysis of Global Project Data. Denver, CO: Build Change, 2022.

Copyright

Build Change encourages dissemination of its knowledge, this work may therefore be reproduced, in whole or in part, for non-commercial purposes as long as no changes are made and full attribution to this work is given. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

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In this free 1-hour Webinar, housing experts from Build Change present some of the study’s key findings and discuss how they can be applied to home improvement projects across the globe, with case studies from Colombia, Nepal, and the Philippines.

The Cost of Improving Vulnerable Housing

Recommendations for Investments in Housing Resilience from an Analysis of Global Project Data.¹

Improving vulnerable housing…

Upgrading a house to safely receive an additional story in the future cost 35% of the average cost of building a new house.³

Improving vulnerable housing…

While the primary objective for all designs was to reduce housing vulnerability through Disaster Mitigation Measures, over 40% of spending was in other areas. This shows significant demand among homeowners for a range of home improvement measures.

Improving vulnerable housing…

Preventative measures after a disaster can protect the investment for a low additional cost: An additional investment of 30%– beyond the cost of repairing major damages incurred from the disaster-can ensure the whole home is resilient against future threats.⁴

Improving vulnerable housing…

In the Philippines, incremental Risk Reduction improvements ($72/m²) were found to be affordable for lower income clients of microfinance institutions. However, subsidies and grants are still needed to make home improvement affordable for the poorest households.

Improving vulnerable housing…

Relative to new construction costs, there was no increase in the cost of mitigating against both earthquakes and high winds versus only earthquakes; both cases were on average about 1/4 the cost of new construction for the corresponding locations.

Footnotes:

This study was based on home improvement designs and implementation across 14 countries in Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Pacific Islands. A pool of 1484 home improvement designs that were developed – and in most cases implemented – by Build Change formed the basis of the study.
UN-Habitat estimate.
Of the same size in the same locations.
Based on data from the Sint Maarten post-hurricane (Irma) recovery program.

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