Disaster Relief:
No More Poor Houses for Poor People

750 thousand tons of styrofoam (cups, plates, packaging etc.) are disposed of in landfills each year. Enough material to build 1.5 million 18 m2 (OCHA standard for transitional shelters) permanent living environments per year. ShelterUS neither burns nor disposes of oil. It converts it to modern stone. Ninety percent of every SIM panel we use is air.

This... (Click for PDF)

... instead of this.

Typical emergency shelters are wood, metal, canvas, or plastic sheathing, over a light wood or metal frame. Such structures have a useful life of one month to three years, and are normally phased as follows:

1. Temporary shelter
2. Transitional shelter
3. Permanent housing

By addressing each of the three categories with an initial delivery of SIMPLE components, phases one and two are omitted.

One ShelterUS SIMPLE house serves as emergency shelter and then transforms into transitional shelter and by extension becomes permanent housing. Each phase has a useful life of over one-hundred years, with no components disposable. Thus for a cost less than traditional three phase relief housing, the initial two phases of which are neither fire, wind, quake or flood resistant, survivors of natural disasters may have a headstart on their permanent housing from day one.