Preamble: On March 2nd and 3rd 2026, researchers and practitioners gathered at the Housing Resilience Roundtable, an event produced by the University of Florida (UF), Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience (FIBER) and Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) School of Architecture and Engineering Technology (SAET) in partnership with the Center of Excellence for Housing and Community Development Policy and Research (HCDPR), and the University of Texas at Austin. The event was part of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grant #H-21737 CA. What follows are my notes as the organizer and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the HUD or the USA Government.
What memories are imprinted in your home in the process of pouring a concrete foundation, nailing SYP studs, filling the gaps with insulation, and closing it with gypsum board? The dream house being manifested is filtered through multiple layers of complex regulatory systems, market pressures, material availability (or reliability), and labor skills. We want a house that acts as the keeper of our health, safety, and welfare. And yet, our reality is chronic disease.
Your house remembers your dog. As someone who just lost a cat, I was moved. The context for this sentence was not poetic. It was meant as a digestible illustration of what happens to toxins inside buildings. We are constantly co-creating the invisible (to us) microbiome of the places we inhabit. By the materials we choose (and produce). By the products we use. By how we interact (and prescribe interactions) with fire, water, earth, and air.
Lisa Platt opened the first session by tracing this dynamic to before the Industrial Revolution. Silk moths, she reminded the room, build their cocoons with remarkable parsimony: context-specific, regionally tuned, structurally precise. We used to build that way. Then we moved to standardization, and somewhere in that process we lost the thread between material and place. Her research at UF FIBER works to recover it computationally, building models that score material performance against specific climate risks: water intrusion, extreme heat, the slow accumulation of moisture behind a sealed wall. Technology can be a connector, but smart home technology is useless if the materials are already failing.
Corbett Lunsford carried that argument into the house itself. His discipline is home diagnostics. What the blower door, the infrared camera, and the pressure gauge reveal is that most building failures are not one thing going wrong, but several systems falling out of tune at the same time. The air inside our homes is not inert. It holds what you cooked last night, what you cleaned with this morning, the compounds from your deodorant spray can. Researchers are still mapping how these compounds interact, react, and accumulate in the enclosed spaces where we spend most of our lives. What compounds are we making inside building walls? Nobody fully knows.
Our institutional memory wavers. Is it by design? Who has the construction document set? Please mail it in. Our building codes were shaped by fire. FIRES. In a little over a century we were able to formalize standards that can be implemented across the globe, reducing dramatically the number of fires and fire-related deaths in the USA. The same drive toward standardization that made our buildings safer from fire made them less equipped to handle what came next: moisture, heat, the slow chemistry of a sealed envelope in a climate the code was never written for.
Jeana Ripple named this precisely. Building codes, she observed, have no feedback loops. They were never designed to ask: what is the cumulative urban-scale impact of this decision across a century? Type V wood-frame construction was adopted in the early 1900s to advance political and economic goals. It was optimized for fire. It became the default everywhere, including low-lying areas it was never designed to inhabit. The tight envelope that saves energy traps moisture. The code that solved one hazard produced another: enters, mold candy. That is not what I want inside my walls.
Barbara Wilson asked the harder question underneath that observation: who gets to revise our regulatory landscape? Her argument begins with Panarchy. When one strategy is consolidated and replicated across many systems at scale, local adaptive capacity dwindles, the same way monoculture makes forests catastrophically vulnerable to a single event. Creative destruction ensues. Standardization is efficient until it isn't. When it fails, the consequences are long-standing for those with the least margin. How do we make space for the commons inside a private-property-entrenched code system? How do we code for collective wellbeing? She pointed toward informal settlements as a learning ground, not out of romanticism, but because there are already adaptive strategies in place that formal systems have not yet learned to value. The answer, she suggested, might already exist at the scale we keep overlooking.
Data tuned to the neighborhood as the datum can begin to connect user, builder, designer, context, and institution. We don't build on blank canvases. Houses exist in an ever-changing socio-ecological context. Social epidemiology posits that your stance changes your decision-making process. Katherine, Heather, and Gloria nodded in agreement.
Adele Houghton offered the empirical evidence for why stance matters. Her architectural epidemiology framework starts from a simple provocation: the property line is the wrong unit of analysis. When she studied cities that had signed climate health pledges, she found that citywide data showed reduced rates of respiratory and chronic disease. The aggregate number looked like progress. But when she stratified the results by social vulnerability, the picture changed. The gains were concentrated in less vulnerable neighborhoods. The more vulnerable communities were not being helped. The city-scale data was masking neighborhood-scale harm. What you measure determines what you see. What you see determines what you build.
David Perkes has been in Biloxi since Katrina. Twenty years of building houses with and for people who have lost their homes. He told the state, early on: if you want people to stay in these houses long-term, they have to like them. The urgency to house people and the importance of housing people well are not the same thing. He offered a story near the end of the session. A community elsewhere, not in a floodplain, not in any dataset that would flag them for risk. Residents had been placing sandbags at their doors for years. Not because of a river. Because the hillside above them was all concrete, and whenever it rained, the water came straight down into their houses. Local officials had no idea. The data did not show it. The residents knew. They had always known. Nobody had asked.
The Housing Resilience Roundtable was designed around this convergence. Three sessions, each a different scale: materials, codes, and neighborhoods. Each pair of presenters arriving at the same gap from a different direction. The gap between what a system was designed to remember and what it needs to know now. A forum for discussion might just be what this moment calls for. The Housing Resilience Roundtable is an evolving container meant to hold and nurture conversations that can connect across disciplines and practices so we can imagine (and act on) resilient futures for our homes, our neighbors, and our communities.
What might we remember? Or better, what memories might we make together?
Resilience for All argues that resilience planning for vulnerable communities requires place-based, inequity-conscious approaches that couple technical and social systems. Wilson presents community design projects in Detroit, Biloxi, and New York where small-scale, resident-led design served as a tool to test urban futures, process trauma, expose inequities, and build collective vision. Her core claim: the burden of shifting power imbalances should not fall on vulnerable communities. Municipalities that want their most exposed residents to benefit from development must invest in those residents' self-determination and adaptive capacity. Wilson, Resilience for All (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2018), 169-175.
Creative destruction is a cycle in the complex system framework in Panarchy theory. It describes the collapse that follows due to a system so tightly connected and over-accumulated that it has traded resilience for efficiency, until a disturbance releases what has been stored. The collapse is not a malfunction. It is structurally inevitable in any system that consolidates without maintaining adaptive capacity. Holling and Gunderson identify the rigidity trap as the pathological version of this: a system that resists collapse through social control and the ejection of novelty, accumulating potential it can no longer productively release. Gunderson and Holling, Panarchy, 34, 96.
If, like me, you love footnote gossip, Katherine McKittrick makes the case for extensive use of these to carry, consider, and discuss multiple stances/perspectives in one paragraph. McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories.
In Belonging, bell hooks (born Gloria Jean Watkins) reflects on interactions with her family and her many different perspectives at different stages of life. hooks, Belonging.
The Gulf Coast Community Design Studio is a professional service and outreach program of Mississippi State University's College of Architecture, Art and Design, established in Biloxi in response to Hurricane Katrina. Its mission is to provide professional assistance that increases the capacity of local communities to address housing, public space, and neighborhood development, while advancing the regional and national dialogue on design, affordable housing, coastal resilience, and sustainable development. Since 2005, the studio has completed projects ranging from post-Katrina house rebuilding and flood zone mitigation planning to tidal marsh restoration and workforce housing design, working through close partnerships with local organizations across the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Perkes, Gulf Coast Community Design Studio, https://www.gulfcoaststudio.msstate.edu.
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For Further Reading
Bosch, T. C., M. Wigley, B. Colomina, B. Bohannan, F. Meggers, K. R. Amato, and M. K. Melby. "The Potential Importance of the Built-Environment Microbiome and Its Impact on Human Health." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121, no. 20 (2024): e2313971121.
Gunderson, Lance H., and C. S. Holling, eds. Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002.
hooks, bell. Belonging: A Culture of Place. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Houghton, Adele, and Carlos Castillo Salgado. Architectural Epidemiology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025.
Lunsford, C., and G. Lunsford. Home Diagnosis. Television series. Georgia Public Broadcasting / PBS, 2019. https://www.pbs.org/show/home-diagnosis.
McGhee, Heather. The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. New York: One World, 2021.
McKittrick, Katherine. Dear Science and Other Stories. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.
Moore, Steven A., and Barbara B. Wilson. Questioning Architectural Judgment: The Problem of Codes in the United States. New York: Routledge, 2013.
National Fire Protection Association. "Fire Loss in the United States." 2025. https://www.nfpa.org/education-and-research/research/nfpa-research/fire-statistical-reports/fire-loss-in-the-united-states.
Perkes, David. Gulf Coast Community Design Studio. Mississippi State University, 2005-present. https://www.gulfcoaststudio.msstate.edu.
Platt, L. S., and A. Zeinali. SAMPL: Sustainable Adaptive Material Performance Level Dashboard. Gainesville: UF FIBER / University of Florida, 2024. https://dcp.ufl.edu/interior/sampl.
Ripple, Jeana. The Type V City. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2024.
Tran, V. V., D. Park, and Y.-C. Lee. "Indoor Air Pollution, Related Human Diseases, and Recent Trends in the Control and Improvement of Indoor Air Quality." International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 17, no. 8 (2020): 2927. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17082927.
Farmer, D. K., M. E. Vance, J. P. D. Abbatt, A. Abeleira, M. R. Alves, C. Arata, E. Boedicker, S. Bourne, F. Cardoso-Saldaña, R. Corsi, et al. "Overview of HOMEChem: House Observations of Microbial and Environmental Chemistry." Environmental Science: Processes and Impacts 21, no. 8 (2019): 1280–1293. https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2019/em/c9em00228f.
Wilson, Barbara Brown. Resilience for All: Striving for Equity through Community-Driven Design. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2018.
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Ana Tricarico Orosco AIA
UF Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience (FIBER)
Tallahassee FL
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