Cost-Effective Housing Systems for Disaster Relief

This Task Report presents the approach and results of the costeffectiveness analysis of 13 temporary housing systems preselected in Task I-B-2 (Volume 4 ) .

The preceding analysis in Task I identified potentially applicable technology by surveying the entire range of currently available housing systems and screening out those products that did not meet a set of first-level criteria . Systems passing the test of this broad and mainly qualitative analysis were pre-selected for quantitative analysis in this Task.

The "cost per family assisted" for a given housing system was determined to be the best measure for comparing cost-effectiveness. It is defined as the cumulative average cost incurred by the government over the average useful life of a given housing unit divided by the cumulative number of families who used that unit.