habitat4all delivers services and technology in urban development, social infrastructure, hotels and housing.

Return on capital
When compared apples with apples to a traditional construction program, higher speeds represent up to 3 times higher return on capital for similar unit costs. Unit costs in turn are also lower for H4A, the absolute difference depending on local labor cost conditions. In low cost countries, the difference in cost vs. traditional methods will be smaller (eg. 10% lower for H4A) whereas in higher-cost countries, H4A landed costs will be significantly lower (eg. 20% lower for H4A). The reason is that H4A is not a labor intensive solution; materials representing roughly 75% of total landed costs. As a result, total ROC can be between 3 and 4 times higher with H4A than with traditional construction methods, the main reason being speed.

Financial sustainability
With H4A it´s possible to design homes to meet target costs which allow for full cost affordability by lower income families provided there´s in place a government-guaranteed scheme enabling private funding to households and each of these has a reliable source of income even at minimum wage. Our experts have demonstrated that 15-20 year leasing programs for a 40 sqm social home can be affordable (less than 1/3 of average income) by households in the lowest income strata, in a country such as Colombia. Regardless of whether governments choose to fund part of social housing programs or not, the H4A paradigm is compatible with financially sustainable programs targeting poor families.

Environmental sustainability
H4A is biased on standard industrialized components manufactured at scale by industrial suppliers using lean principles. In addition, construction assembly is a totally "clean dry" process not requiring brick and mortar and only very limited power (only perforation for foundations) and no specialized machinery.
As a result when compared with standard brick & mortar construction methods, H4A assembly requires a small fraction of the energy bill of a traditional home during the construction process.

Impact on local development
habitat4all works to ensure that a maximum of value-added is generated by suppliers in the countries where its solution is implemented. Amongst the criteria to select suppliers for large social housing projects we consider that a key one is local availability of suppliers and/or readiness to install supply facilities in the affected local markets (eg. for galvanized steel, fiber panel manufacturing, etc.). Through this approach we aim to contribute to create net industrial employment in the markets where we operate, in addition to providing a longterm feasible new approach for large scale housing and infrastructure.

Safety
The H4A construction paradigm ensures higher safety for construction workers than traditional methods. The reasons are easy to explain: most value is in materials, the construction process consisting basically in a component assembly process.


The H4A open building system presents advantages in all of the following areas: design and building flexibility, quality, speed, return on capital, financial sustainability, environmental sustainability, development sustainability and safety.