Self-help housing and DIY home improvements: evidence from the American Housing Survey

Refocusing on Sustainability: Promoting Straw Bale Building for Government-Assisted, Self-Help Housing Programs in Utah and Abroad

“…It is understandable that there is often some confusion between these terms and respective home building programs since the boundary between the formal and informal housing sectors shifts with building code revisions, additions, and varying levels of compliance. While macro-level data analysis of self-help housing can lend great insight, such as recent studies by Brown, Mukhija, and Shoup [10] and Durst and Cangelosi [4], there is a risk of misleading findings due to aggregation of statistical data.…”

“…Durst and Cangelosi [4] noted the following important differences between "self-built" and conventional housing in their analysis based on the American Housing Survey (AHS) data (1997-2011) from the U.S. Census Bureau. "Self-help" dwellings ("self-help" and "self-built" are used interchangeably by the authors) were found to be about 400 ft 2 (37 m 2 ) larger than conventional homes.…”

“…. " [4]. If self-built is disaggregated from self-help housing, which is not an option from the review of AHS data in 2019, it is observed that self-help housing does not circumvent code, but can actually assist in the establishment of more energy-efficient building code.…”

“…Total floor area, including garage area, is an important determinant in net embodied carbon and overall sustainability of housing. The few academic studies of MSHH programs and managing SHOs found that self-help homes were typically larger than conventional homes [4,5]. In their study of SHOs in California, Mukhija and Scott-Railton [5] observed what they termed the disappearance of "modest housing," as more contemporary homes had two-car garages and increasing floor areas, and therefore higher construction costs.…”

“…Although collaborative housing in Europe has received considerable attention in recent years [1][2][3], scant attention has been given to the study of the informal housing sector and the role of self-help housing in the United States [4][5][6][7]. Research that draws a connection between straw bale building code and self-help housing is even rarer, with only one article detected from a case study of a low-income housing project in the United Kingdom [8].…”