Housing: the largest single line

In every damage assessment I have seen, housing is the largest single category. It is also the category where the delivery problem is different in kind from everything else.

Why housing is not infrastructure

A bridge has one owner, one specification and one decision. A damaged apartment block has forty owners, some of whom are abroad, some of whom cannot be located, some of whom disagree about whether to repair or demolish, and all of whom have a legal interest that has to be resolved before work starts.

Multiply that by the number of buildings and the administrative problem becomes the binding constraint rather than the construction.

How it was addressed

By moving the decision to the owner rather than the state. Compensation for repairable damage paid to the owner against recorded damage. For destroyed housing, a certificate the recipient uses to buy a replacement property wherever they choose.

That second mechanism is the important one. It converts an impossible central planning problem — deciding where to build replacement housing for people whose intentions you do not know — into thousands of individual decisions made by the people who actually know their own circumstances.

The part that remains hard

Multi-unit buildings where the structure itself is damaged. An individual certificate does not repair a shared roof or a compromised load-bearing wall, and the condominium associations that legally own those elements are frequently inactive or unable to organise.

That is the housing problem that will still be being worked on in ten years, and it is administrative rather than financial.

A bridge is ordered by the state, a house by its owner. That difference changes the whole supply chain: a thousand flats means a thousand separate decisions and a thousand separate payment schedules. On the equipment side I know the difference between a bulk order and a single one; the reason housing moves so slowly is not technical but this dispersion.