Beyond Disasters: Home Catalogs as a National Housing Solution

By Alexis M. Pelosi and Robin Keegan

Pelosi is a contributing author for The Epicenter and a strategic advisor to The Resiliency Company; Former Senior Advisor for Climate at HUD. Keegan is the founder/CEO of Spring Industries, a consultancy that provides thought leadership and services to prepare communities for future challenges; Former acting Associate Administrator for Resilience at FEMA.

In Part II of The Epicenter’s Home Catalogs series, Pelosi and Keegan covered how Los Angeles represents an evolution in how we rebuild after disasters. In this article, they expand beyond the climate disaster conversation and discuss how home catalogs can serve as a housing solution for a broader set of issues. When implemented effectively, home catalogs can raise the baseline standard of climate resilience while simultaneously addressing disinvestment, regulatory barriers, and housing supply challenges nationwide. 

Pre-approved plan catalogs can reverse decades of disinvestment and outdated zoning barriers.

Community disinvestment—the withdrawal of economic resources and public and private investment from an area—leaves behind neglected physical infrastructure, shuttered businesses, and a shrinking population, all of which erode the tax base needed to maintain what remains. 

For housing markets, this creates a vicious cycle: Deteriorating neighborhoods struggle to attract new development, while outdated zoning codes designed for a different era become regulatory barriers that make building on vacant lots prohibitively slow and expensive. The result is a landscape dotted with empty parcels that could address housing shortages but instead sit undeveloped. 

Permitting in a Week: How South Bend Solved Its Development Bottleneck

This is what decades of disinvestment did to Rust Belt cities, like South Bend, Indiana, where 30,000 people, nearly a fourth of the city’s population, left between 1960 and 2010. To encourage reinvestment, South Bend developed a strategy to update zoning guidance, streamlined coordination across city agencies involved in the building process, and created pre-approved home plans to accelerate permitting. As new pre-approved plans were developed, the city added them to the home catalog.

According to South Bend’s Director of Planning and Community Resources, Tim Corcoran, the city can now permit a house in less than a week and often on the same day. “The preapproved plans are kind of like the cherry on top of the cake, but the cake is really the process one has to go through to get to a pre-approved program,” Corcoran told Pelosi and Keegan. Focusing on the development process and making it easier and more rational for pre-approved plans simplifies the process for all other buildings.

Yet, even with streamlined permitting, the path to neighborhood revitalization faces deeper structural barriers. Corcoran underscored that the challenge is much greater than the permitting process alone. “It is worth noting that neighborhoods in this condition often have a large appraisal gap for new construction,” he shared. “Ultimately, this is the greatest challenge to healing damaged neighborhoods." When home values are low because of disinvestment, and there are no comparables for new construction, it makes it difficult, if not impossible, to build new without additional financial support to bridge the gap between the cost of new construction and the appraised value of the house. 

This is where the vicious downcycling of the neighborhood gathers momentum. Reversing the downward trend to foster a virtuous cycle of healing and rebuilding requires an all-hands-on-deck approach to the development process. Communities, whether rebuilding after a natural disaster or reinvesting following decades of decline, “must take a proactive approach to fixing broken zoning ordinances, making process improvements, providing design guidance for new construction and financial support to reverse decades of disinvestment.”

South Bend’s approach accounts for several of these elements. Pre-approved plans also helped address a design challenge. While developers might not see South Bend as a hot market for investment, the people who live there—particularly those living in neighborhoods where disinvestment has persisted for decades—are often interested in helping reverse blight. They want a say in how the community could look. 

To ensure local partners developed within the character and scale of local lots, South Bend started with five pre-approved designs that got developers and residents on the same page. The city is now reversing decades of stagnation with predictable results.

Imagine Kalamazoo: Building Trust Through Community-Led Design

Kalamazoo, Michigan, has also witnessed decades of disinvestment. Zoning rules from the 1960s and 1970s have prevented or complicated municipal infill—the development of new housing on vacant or underutilized lots within existing neighborhoods—making it difficult to revitalize blighted communities. 

Through a robust engagement process called Imagine Kalamazoo, the city worked with residents to reimagine neighborhoods and created a pattern book and pre-approved home catalog. Rather than impose designs, city officials asked residents to identify existing homes they loved. They’d say, "We would like more houses that look like Miss Maureen's house," according to Rebekah Kik, the Deputy City Manager for the City of Kalamazoo, Michigan, giving the community a shared language to discuss what mattered most about neighborhood character. This process simultaneously educated residents about zoning barriers and built trust around the types of infill development the catalog would enable, including missing middle housing like duplexes and fourplexes that could increase density without overwhelming existing blocks.

By partnering with nonprofit housing builders to construct the first forty-eight houses through the pre-approved plan process, Kalamazoo has learned what works and what doesn't with designs. Strong partnerships with nonprofit builders and ongoing community engagement allowed the city to make immediate adjustments, such as changing separate entryways to a shared foyer in one of the first duplexes at the residents' suggestion. 

The partnership with nonprofit developers also creates a pipeline of purchase-ready homeowners through city funds for homeownership training and downpayment assistance. To lower barriers further, the city created free financial pro-forma templates for each housing type to help small-scale developers and individual homeowners finance new units. This iterative approach—build, learn, adjust, repeat—has transformed Kalamazoo's catalog from a planning document into a dynamic tool that evolves with community needs.

Hurricane Katrina: Exposing the Hidden Barrier to Rebuilding 

Outdated zoning codes became a barrier to rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina. Marianne Cusato, the designer whose Katrina Cottage typology we discussed in Part 1, noted that residents' preferences—front porches close to the street, walkable blocks, minimal front-yard parking—had become illegal under existing codes.

Rebuilding teams worked with communities to update zoning, remove minimum parking requirements, and allow construction closer to sidewalks. ​The delays highlighted a fundamental truth (explored in Part 1 of this series): A city’s recovery is only as fast as its regulatory landscape.  

As Cusato explained to Pelosi and Keegan, the real utility of pre-approved plans is their ability to serve as “a stress test for removing barriers in the zoning code and permitting process.” This realization helps shift the conversation from reactive rebuilding to a proactive “design-to-permit” approach that treats housing plans as essential public infrastructure.

From Local to State to National — and Beyond: Scaling Home Catalog Adoption.

Successes in South Bend and Kalamazoo are being scaled into regional and national frameworks. Organizations like the Michigan Municipal League (MML) and Greater Ohio are launching statewide pattern-book initiatives that provide a "plug-and-play" technical framework for smaller municipalities, allowing them to opt into a centralized catalog of pre-approved designs.

Vermont announced its “802 Homes” initiative, becoming the first state to launch a statewide catalog of pre-vetted designs based on existing local buildings to ensure they blend seamlessly into established neighborhoods.

Nationally, there is unified, bipartisan support and a growing federal commitment to this model because it bypasses regulatory bottlenecks and reduces soft costs, which are limiting housing production. Both the House and Senate have passed legislation that authorizes new federal grants for local governments and tribes to develop their own pre-approved pattern books.  

In Canada, this effort has gone even one step further with the release of the 2025 Canada Housing Design Catalogue, 50 free “near-permit-ready” designs tailored to seven distinct climate regions. Going beyond basic floor plans, these designs include building performance reports, pre-calculated energy reports, and resiliency guides that specify material swaps for regional hazards like wildfires or extreme wind—ensuring that rapid building is also resilient rebuilding.

Home catalogs can create a more climate-resilient nation.

From South Bend’s one-week permits to Vermont’s statewide catalog, a fundamental shift in how we build homes is already underway. Los Angeles represents the convergence of this movement—combining the industrial scale of national homebuilders with cutting-edge technology and the hard-won lessons from decades of local experimentation. While L.A.’s recovery legacy will be measured in the number of homes rebuilt, its impact lies in demonstrating that these tools can work at a significant scale, transitioning home building from a reactive disaster response to a proactive, resilient housing delivery system. Whether a community is responding to a wildfire or decades of disinvestment, the rebuilding tools are universal. While there are still funding challenges to rebuilding post-disaster and in disinvested communities, home catalogs offer a promising way forward.

They can serve as a shared civic resource, removing soft-cost barriers and decreasing overall building expenses. Combined with AI-powered platforms and digital twin technology, these catalogs can reduce construction operating costs by up to 20 percent through increased efficiencies, lowering the barrier to entry while embedding high-performance standards like IBHS's Wildfire Prepared standard into every design. This ensures every new home is inherently safer than the one it replaces, ending the “rinse and repeat” cycle of disasters.

With states launching their own initiatives and proven results from communities nationwide, we now have the infrastructure to address housing supply challenges at scale. Streamlined administrative processes combined with resilient design catalogs lead to better community acceptance, reduced costs, and a strong case for investment in under-resourced neighborhoods. And when disaster strikes, this approach can compress rebuilding timelines from decades to years, opening the door to a more predictable, equitable, and climate-adaptive future for everyone.

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