The lack of standard home rebuilding playbooks, combined with the uneven delivery of federal disaster recovery funding, has led to fragmented rebuilding efforts over the past few decades. However, disaster recovery has evolved to more systematic approaches using pre-approved home plan catalogs.
Winter Storm Fern swept across a huge swath of the United States in January 2026, revealing both vulnerabilities and progress on the climate resilience and adaptation front.
Twenty-three billion-dollar disasters, $115 billion in damage, and not one hurricane: 2025 was a masterclass in how climate risk in the U.S. has changed.
The lack of standard home rebuilding playbooks, combined with the uneven delivery of federal disaster recovery funding, has led to fragmented rebuilding efforts over the past few decades. However, disaster recovery has evolved to more systematic approaches using pre-approved home plan catalogs.
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.
One year after wildfires devastated Los Angeles, a new approach to rebuilding is underway, offering a potential blueprint for the construction industry to follow after a natural disaster.
Stakeholders and builders are developing catalogs of pre-approved home plans to shorten rebuilding timelines, reduce costs, and embed resiliency across burn areas. As a concept, using home catalogs to rebuild communities is not new. But what has happened over the past 20 years is a gradual shift from reactive, individual rebuilding toward more systemic approaches.
This piece highlights three evolutions in how communities have used pre-approved home catalogs to accelerate rebuilding. By reviewing these examples, we can better understand how we arrived at the current L.A. model, which addresses gaps that previously limited large-scale rebuilding.
While the idea of a "pre-approved" home feels new, it isn’t. For over a century, the American landscape was shaped by homes selected from Victorian “Pattern Books” (1840-1900). These were collections of floor plans and sketches from leading architects that allowed homeowners to choose a design and have a local builder recreate it using local materials.
The idea evolved in the 20th century with the Sears "Kit Home" (1908–1940). Families could order an entire house from a catalog and have all 30,000 pieces—from pre-cut lumber to the plumbing and electrical fixtures—shipped directly to their future front door. Homes could be assembled in just a few weeks, for a few thousand dollars, bypassing the costs and delays of custom construction.
After World War II, homebuilding shifted toward massive "tract" developments or custom builds. Zoning laws became more complex, building codes began to vary wildly between towns, and the era of the simple kit or the universal home pattern faded.
Sixty years later, disasters would bring the catalog concept back to life. The modern concept of the rebuilding catalog emerged in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Community members, designers, and local governments began taking a new approach: Post-disaster housing could be designed once and built many times.
With hundreds of thousands of homes severely damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) responded with temporary housing solutions, while local and state governments advocated to secure resources from Congress for permanent rebuilding. In addition to FEMA’s standard repertoire of temporary housing solutions that includes stays in hotels and rental housing, FEMA can also deploy mobile housing units (MHUs)—more commonly known as FEMA trailers. These units provide longer-term, but still temporary, housing for homeowners as they work to access rebuilding resources.
In the aftermath of Katrina, the slow approval of funding for permanent rebuilding meant that tens of thousands of FEMA trailers were placed on homeowners’ plots and in parking lots, parks, and other vacant land. Shortly after these trailers were installed, backlash ensued. Individual trailers offered cramped quarters, large trailer villages were not well resourced, and thousands of trailers were discovered to have a high level of formaldehyde.
However, perhaps the biggest critique of the FEMA trailer was that the cost to build and install the trailer was at least as much as some of the permanent repair costs that would have allowed residents to get home.
For Katrina, there was no existing playbook that could handle the magnitude of the rebuilding challenges, exposing the need for better-designed, faster-to-implement housing. The FEMA trailers became a symbol of a deeper structural problem: a federal recovery system that wasn't built for catastrophic disasters.
The Stafford Act, which governs the federal disaster response and recovery system, segments funding into temporary and permanent repair categories. This structure meant that substantial resources went toward temporary trailers instead of permanent home repairs. While FEMA funding can be used for permanent repairs, the conditions are narrowly defined—and post-Katrina, that option wasn’t extended to Gulf Coast states.
Residents across the region waited nearly a year for another federal program to fund permanent rebuilding. Even then, the challenges continued. The permanent rebuilding programs successfully distributed resources to homeowners, but they didn’t coordinate the builders themselves. As a result, there were no economies of scale, and it took years to mobilize the rebuilding efforts. Furthermore, people were stuck in substandard temporary housing through one, if not more, hurricane seasons.
As the challenges with the FEMA trailers became more widely known, both Mississippi and Louisiana worked with FEMA to create a design competition that sought to produce temporary-to-permanent housing solutions for post-hurricane recovery.
Designer Marianne Cusato was instrumental in developing the typology known as the “Katrina Cottage,” a small, affordable yet well-designed temporary home. Cusato drew inspiration from the shacks provided to San Francisco residents after the 1906 earthquake, which are still part of the city’s residential fabric today. These, she shared with Pelosi and Keegan, were "the bar I still hold my designs to, which is to ask, is this structure built well enough to physically exist in 100 years?” Beyond durability, the most significant principle guiding Cusato’s design was the humanity of the residents. “Temporary solutions for those in need can and should be dignified, and it is completely possible to achieve,” Cusato noted, but at the time, FEMA’s response fell short of that basic benchmark.
By contrast, Cusato’s Katrina Cottages featured traditional architecture, front porches, and comfortable proportions, providing a sense of home and community. Cusato and her team went on to partner with Lowe's to develop a pre-packaged Katrina Cottage kit, which the hardware chain hailed as the new Sears & Roebuck House.
The Katrina Cottage is a lasting typology in Mississippi and Louisiana. In Mississippi, many of the cottages are still standing on properties where the main house has been rebuilt or repurposed. Under the Louisiana pilot, a number of neighborhoods were built using the Katrina Cottage, or “Louisiana Cottage” model, as it came to be known in the state. Many of these neighborhoods remain vibrant communities.
Beyond Katrina Cottages, the Katrina response also introduced statewide design resources, such as the Louisiana Speaks Pattern Book. A collection of three architectural prototypes aligned to the state’s culture and history, the catalog sought to establish a "common language" for rebuilding through blueprints adaptable to location and lot size. However, it simultaneously exposed deep regulatory constraints.
When communities were asked to identify the most cherished homes in their neighborhoods, they often discovered that, under existing zoning codes, it was illegal to rebuild them. While Cusato highlighted that "it takes a disaster to shine a spotlight on our priorities," Katrina demonstrated that recovery remains constrained by site-specific costs and a disjointed regulatory landscape.
More than a decade after Hurricane Katrina, the next evolution in home catalogs for rebuilding came in response to the 2017 Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa, California. Santa Rosa marked a shift from a top-down model, where the individual or jurisdiction leads the design, to a "facilitator" model, where the city was “design agnostic,” prioritizing speed and volume.
David Guhin, Santa Rosa’s former planning director, recognized early on that the scale of the disaster required the city to rethink its role. "Success comes from the people on the ground who are already doing the work,” Guhin observed. “We realized we needed to focus on how to facilitate rebuilding instead of leading it—to get out of the way and get to ‘yes.’”
That meant allowing builders to both submit “master plans” or home designs already being used locally and to reuse them across multiple lots, eliminating the need for individual design reviews. It cut the "soft costs" of hiring architects and engineers for unique plans and leaned into the expertise of local builders, who were familiar with the workforce, suppliers, and regional building codes. Other measures included fast-tracking "like-for-like" rebuilds, treating the original home as a blueprint or pre-approved plan, assuming the same size and footprint, and creating a "One-Stop Permit Center" for all disaster-related permits, with turnaround times as little as one week.
In Coffey Park, a Santa Rosa neighborhood that lost nearly 1,400 homes, the "catalog" effort was led by neighbors. Originally a 1980s subdivision, residents in Coffey Park identified the original floor plans, manually matched models to maps, and shared them with builders. The community catalog helped builders construct 100 homes at a time, while allowing homeowners to choose what they wanted, which ultimately resulted in a diverse neighborhood. As Guhin noted to Pelosi and Keegan, "homeowners chose what they want, so you have modern, next to traditional."
In contrast, the rebuilding in Fountaingrove, another Santa Rosa neighborhood, was led by the Homeowners Association (HOA). Working with builders, the HOA offered six to seven models for homeowners to choose from, preserving the character of the subdivision.
Both of these catalogs used after the Tubbs Fire were clunky and manual, but they were driven by the community and provided immediate choices and the "industrial logic" needed to cut the rebuilding timeline from ten to just five years.
Ultimately, the Santa Rosa experience demonstrated that a jurisdiction's most effective role is to provide the regulatory infrastructure—the framework required to support catalogs of all types, sizes, and origins—enabling the rebuilding rather than attempting to lead the effort itself.
Six years after the Tubbs Fire, wildfires devastated Lahaina on Maui’s northwest coast. As recovery began, Pili Design co-owners Jeremy Stoddart and Brenda Braun pivoted from their typical custom design work to develop a catalog of pre-designed homes to help residents navigate rebuilding decisions.
Stoddart and Braun initially put the home catalog on their website as a free resource, and as president-elect of the local American Institute of Architects (AIA) chapter, Stoddart mobilized the design community to expand pre-designed home offerings. They partnered with the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement (CNHA), which was helping residents find housing and plan rebuilds. Stoddart and Braun also worked with other AIA member architects and designers to create free design plans that CNHA hosted on its website.
Furthermore, the AIA chapter participated in community workshops at the CNHA center, alongside FEMA, to help people think through their recovery plans. “We would give free advice on the process,” Stoddart shared, “and we could also say, as a starting point, you can look at this catalog and plans to start thinking about your rebuilding journey.”
Pre-approved home plans served as a communication and education tool for homeowners and architects alike. When starting from scratch in normal times, the design decision-making process is overwhelming for many, let alone after a catastrophic event. Home design catalogs allowed residents to engage in decision-making at a time when rebuilding decisions were particularly difficult.
The pre-design plans also helped Pili Design manage its workload during this period of high demand for architectural services. The firm could offer a solution when unable to take on custom work. For Stoddart, the pre-approved designs were “a mechanism of self-preservation for our firm because there was a certain point when we were so overloaded with both personal things for our own recovery process and the amount of work that was coming in. We were grinding for much of 2024, and at a certain point, the free design catalog gave us a self-preservation moment.”
In addition, the pre-approved plans increased coordination across the design community and rebuilding partners. While there are still challenges with permitting in certain zones that delay rebuilding, Stoddart shared that more than 50 percent of the firm’s work is now for pre-approved designs, indicating there is still a lot of rebuilding underway more than two years later, and there is a market for this type of solution. Recovery partners are also promoting these plans to residents as a way to streamline the long recovery process.
Despite the progress over the last 20 years to accelerate rebuilding after large-scale disasters, a persistent technology gap has prevented recovery efforts from scaling effectively for individual homeowners. In prior disasters, information was fragmented across departments, designers, and agencies. Homeowners struggled to determine which plans fit their lot, all while navigating immense grief.
As the next era of home catalogs emerges, AI and advanced mapping technologies are enabling more scalable applications than were previously possible.
What homeowners have needed is a centralized, consumer-facing portal capable of lot-to-plan matching, which requires Geographic Information System (GIS) data to identify which pre-approved designs align with parcel-specific setbacks, topography, and soil conditions.
Technologies like AI-powered design tools and automated parcel analysis position the homebuilding catalogs that have emerged following the 2025 wildfires in L.A. to have even greater potential and scale than their post-Katrina and post-Tubbs predecessors. Without this type of permanent digital infrastructure, institutional memory often evaporates once temporary disaster staff depart, forcing each community to reinvent the recovery process from scratch the next time a crisis hits.
This is the challenge that L.A.’s recovery model is designed to address. The city’s approach seeks to close this gap through AI-enabled coordination and agnostic catalogs of pre-approved home plans, which can be built by any qualified builder, manufacturer, or system chosen by a homeowner. These catalogs constitute shared civic resources, transforming static plan libraries into dynamic systems that support resilient recovery at scale.
In Part 2 of this series, we will dive more deeply into the L.A. rebuilding process and how it could serve as a model for pre-approved catalog-based homebuilding across the country.
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