Resilience from the Ground Up: Community-Based Housing in Urabá, Colombia

In Colombia, housing policy remains out of step with reality—focusing on mass construction of often unaffordable and poorly located new homes over improving the country’s existing housing stock. Communities that are especially vulnerable to climate change risks, like the historically excluded, Afro-descendant populations of coastal Urabá, are left to fend for themselves. With our recent initiative at Build Change, a global organization for resilient housing, we are trying to show that the key to systemic change lies not in building for people, but in equipping them to lead and design their own housing upgrades.

Housing and Exclusion in Colombia

Colombia’s 1991 Constitution recognizes housing as a fundamental right, mandating that the state ensure access through social housing programs, financing systems, and community initiatives. Yet the country faces both poor living conditions in existing homes and a shortage of housing units.

Colombia’s public policy has focused on mass production of new housing through mortgage systems, while neglecting improvements to the country’s stock of self-built housing—which is large. Around 60 percent of the country's new housing is informal, built outside the permitting and building code systems with no guarantees of structural safety, according to the Center for Construction and Regional Urban Development Studies in Colombia.

High land costs, limited credit, and rapid urbanization continue to drive this informality. And despite legal recognition of community self-construction as producing legitimate structures, households receive little state support or technical and financial resources to ensure safety.

Inequalities in housing—which extend to public services and socioeconomic opportunities—are deeply rooted in historical exclusion tied to race, gender, economic status, and geography, disproportionately affecting indigenous and Afro-descendant populations and perpetuating cycles of poverty. In Urabá, located in the Antioquia region along Colombia’s northwest Pacific Coast, disparities are compounded by a history of armed conflict linked to drug trafficking routes and by economic marginalization.

Yet Urabá’s strength lies in its strong community organization, empowering residents to preserve culture, defend territorial rights, and build resilience. For Afro-descendant communities in particular, land and housing are not only basic needs but also central to identity, cultural survival, and collective autonomy.

Building Equity Through Support for Community Organizations

To tackle Colombia’s housing deficit, Build Change partnered with the country’s Ministry of Housing to provide technical assistance to community-based organizations (CBOs). This support enables them to implement the national housing program and, conversely, to integrate housing and climate justice principles into Colombia’s national housing program.

Design and engineering support from structural engineers and architects, combined with local knowledge on climate risks and construction practices, allows organizations to offer safer, more sustainable construction practices, retrofit existing homes, and advocate for adaptation measures that reflect residents’ specific vulnerabilities. It enables the co-production of resilience upgrades such as strengthening walls, boosting the safety of roofs, increasing ventilation and natural lighting, and enabling rainwater harvesting, all making homes safer during tropical storms and more resilient to extreme heat. These interventions are also central to advancing climate justice in Urabá. Excluded from formal housing markets, many Afro-descendant communities are forced to live in high-risk areas such as flood zones, unstable hillsides, or poorly serviced informal settlements.

Around the world, development projects are still largely designed from offices and boardrooms, not in neighborhoods. Failing to include the rich knowledge and experience of the very people they aim to help, these approaches may be lauded as efficient, but they are disconnected from local realities, lack community buy-in, and fail to build local capacity and lasting change.

By contrast, Build Change’s project dedicated a significant portion of time and resources to mapping local CBOs, building relationships with local stakeholders, and engaging the community to jointly create a strategy and implementation plan for housing. We worked with CBOs that have strong housing leadership to craft a project strategy, integrating a community approach with locally relevant climate resilience measures, such as strengthening walls against wind and rain and raising floor levels to mitigate flooding. In designing the housing interventions, CBOs organized community workshops to map climate-related risks to housing and habitat, shaping design priorities with a resilience lens.

CBOs and homeowners identified local material prices and prepared cost estimates, ensuring budgets reflected real conditions and strengthened local supply chains. These tailored and participatory design proposals were translated into on-the-ground construction for five pilot housing improvement projects.

This community-driven approach built the capacity of local CBOs through genuine co-production from start to finish. Rather than transferring expertise in a top-down way or relying solely on participatory workshops, the process involved working hand-in-hand with local stakeholders and homeowners throughout planning, design, implementation, and evaluation. This approach not only improves housing safety and dignity, empowering local communities to define and sustain their own development, but also tackles a legacy of race- and class-based disenfranchisement. By shifting knowledge, resources, and expertise directly to the community, this approach advances the right of marginalized groups most impacted by conflict, poverty, and climate change to stay on their land and in their homes.

Achieving Scale Through Systems Change

Lessons from strengthening under-resourced communities in Colombia can hold the key to equitable community engagement in housing projects worldwide. Our findings include:

• Strengthening CBO participation drives equity and transparency in the home improvement process, especially in under-resourced areas.
• Technical assistance delivers not only a house but also the capacity to continue home improvements in the future.
• There is a trickle-up effect of improving self-built homes, helping to reduce the housing deficit globally.

In building the capacity of CBOs to implement Colombia’s national housing program, local communities can scale resilient housing in regions that the government struggles to reach—and where trust in the government is perhaps minimal. In partnership with Colombia’s Ministry of Housing, City and Territory, Build Change is piloting a nationwide technical assistance program modeled off our experience in Urabá. This program will equip community organizations with the technical, administrative, and financial skills needed to implement housing initiatives across Colombia, moving from successful pilots to long-term policy integration. These skills enable community organizations to access public funding and act as local implementers of the country’s national housing program. Several CBOs from Urabá are already positioned to receive Ministry funding under national housing improvement programs. Embedding this model into Colombia’s public housing policy will create a clear path to a more resilient future.

Editor’s note: The views expressed in the articles on The Rooftop are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policy positions of New America.