After a Disaster, Houses That Feel More Like Home

One of the first architect-designed emergency shelters of the post-Katrina era, if not the only one, was built not on the Gulf Coast but in Bethesda.

The HELP house -- the acronym stands for Housing Every Last Person -- is more than a tent but less than a home. The basic structure, which measures 8 by 12 feet, includes a kitchenette, bathroom and sleeping space for three. Solar power, a gravity-fed water supply and a composting toilet would make it self-sufficient. Units can be combined, moved and reused.

Architect Carib Daniel Martin and builder Rob Bragan conceived and erected the full-size model over Labor Day weekend with an outlay of $8,000 and labor provided by neighborhood kids. With so many people left homeless, Martin says, designing a low-cost, environmentally sensitive refuge seemed like a constructive thing to do. But without a manufacturer, his driveway on Wilson Lane is as far as the HELP project will go.

Dan Ferrara, a product designer in Morris, Conn., watched the post-hurricane disaster unfold with extreme frustration. Over the past four years, he and his daughter Mia have worked with the Weyerhaeuser Co. to develop a temporary dwelling for just such a disaster. Their Global Village Shelter is made of recycled cardboard treated with fire retardant and laminated for water resistance. Essentially a cube with a peaked roof, it measures slightly more than eight feet on a side. Two people can set one up in 15 minutes without tools, Ferrara says. The cost is $500.

A preproduction run of several hundred shelters was donated and shipped just weeks ago to Grenada, which suffered damage from an earlier hurricane. Ferrara, who normally designs sophisticated products such as air traffic control hardware and power tools, says he was hoping to give back by helping people in the Third World.

But it galls him that he's been unable to help after a hurricane devastated parts of his own country. It wouldn't be hard to crank out 5,000 Global Village Shelters in two days, he says, but calls to the Federal Emergency Management Agency have led nowhere.

"There is no process," Ferrara says. "You just can't talk to anybody. It's like a closed club."

FEMA spokesman Butch Kinerney responds that "there are a thousand people with a thousand ideas to make things better," but the middle of a disaster is the wrong time to pitch a new product. In any case, would-be suppliers are selected from a National Emergency Resource Registry.

The HELP house and Global Village Shelter are the latest in a distinguished line of ideas from designers. They stand as eloquent protests against the global status quo, but they have rarely reached the displaced people who might benefit.

Relief is complex, costly and unpredictable, but designers are right to focus attention on transitional dwellings. In the immediacy of disaster, the United Nations favors canvas tents and plastic sheeting, which are easy to stockpile and cheap to airlift virtually anywhere.

Rich countries don't do tent cities. FEMA relies on manufactured housing, perhaps to a fault. The agency has bought or ordered more than 115,000 mobile homes, RVs and trailers costing $10,000 to $20,000 each.

FEMA appears undeterred by criticism over the vast encampments of single-wides inflicted on Florida after Hurricane Andrew passed through in 1992. Kinerney said the agency had recently placed an order for 50,000 Airstreams, the "silver palace" of travel trailers, and 1,000 so-called park homes, which he said reminded him of the Works Progress Administration houses in the movie version of "The Grapes of Wrath."