I was just reading Ernest Beck’s State of Shelter over at Design Observer. The Haitian earthquake has made an estimated 1,000,000 people homeless. Until a permanent housing solutions can be found, a lot of people are sleeping in the streets and it shouldn’t be that way.

This reminded me of my own quick study in 2005 after Katrina for an entrepreneurship class. My imaginary company, Red House Ink, would develop 4 person, semi-rigid shelters. After researching what aid organizations had been using (and still do for the most part), I decided that a compromise between rigid and pliable materials would be a good fit for a shelter that could house people for several months.

Many of these large scale disasters involve a lot of rain, so I started my concept with a fully enclosed polymer base, tall enough to protect the inhabitants from water running through the camp site. The size of the shelters themselves is a standard unit size for aircraft pallets. My thinking was that these units could be transported with vehicles ranging in size from pickup trucks to C-130 transport planes.

The biggest challenge is not to come up with great ideas of how we can house a million people. The issue is finding someone to fund the venture and as of right now, no one has stepped up.