This post is not a programme description. It is a thinking-out-loud piece — an attempt to articulate something that field experience keeps pointing toward but that existing humanitarian frameworks have not yet caught up with. It is offered as a starting point for conversation, not as a finished answer.
A duplex under construction. Two attached units rising from the same foundation, aerated concrete block walls, timber rafter frames already set, pink insulation visible in the gable openings. Scaffolding still in place. In the background — a row of multi-storey apartment buildings, the Soviet-era housing stock that defines urban Ukraine. This building is not a humanitarian programme output. It is what recovery actually looks like when it is working.
The question I keep returning to, after years of working in Ukraine's shelter response, is this: for the households who have lost not just a roof or a window but an entire house — the family whose home was destroyed in a strike and who is now living in a collective centre or with relatives — what does a proportionate, dignified, and durable response actually look like? And is the humanitarian sector, with its SOPs and its reference costs and its activity matrices, capable of delivering it?
I am not sure the honest answer is yes.
The Scale of Total Destruction
Ukraine's housing crisis has two very different components that are often conflated in planning but require completely different responses. The first is damage — windows, roofs, facades, structural elements that can be repaired and the house restored. The programmes that have delivered Category 1 and Category 2 repairs over the past four years address this component, imperfectly but substantially.
The second component is total loss. A house that no longer exists. A building hit directly by a missile, burned to the foundation, or so structurally compromised that demolition is the only safe option. For this category, there is nothing to repair. The humanitarian repair framework — Light, Medium, Heavy — has no answer. The family that lived there cannot return to something that is not there.
By the most conservative estimates, tens of thousands of private residential buildings across Ukraine have been completely destroyed since February 2022 — not damaged, destroyed. In villages along the former front lines in Kharkivska, Khersonska, Zaporizka, and Donetska oblasts, entire streets have been obliterated. The question of how to help these families is not a repair question. It is a construction question. And the humanitarian sector is structurally, philosophically, and financially poorly equipped to answer construction questions.
The Plot as the Starting Point
Here is the observation that I think deserves more attention than it currently receives in housing recovery planning: in the vast majority of cases where a private house has been completely destroyed in Ukraine, the land plot on which it stood still belongs to the family that lived there. The house is gone. The land is not.
This is not a trivial distinction. In most post-conflict reconstruction programmes, land acquisition is one of the most complex, expensive, and politically fraught elements of the entire intervention. Site selection, purchase or allocation, legal transfer, title registration — these processes can consume years and significant budget before a single brick is laid.
In Ukraine, for the category of households whose house was destroyed on land they own, that problem does not exist. The land is there. The title is (usually) documented. The family's connection to that specific piece of ground — social, economic, emotional, agricultural — makes it the natural site for reconstruction. The question is simply: what do we build on it, how do we finance it, and who is responsible for making it happen?
For families in villages and peri-urban settlements, the attachment to their specific plot goes far beyond housing sentiment. It is the site of kitchen gardens that provide food security, of fruit trees planted by grandparents, of livestock infrastructure, of soil that they know and have farmed for generations. Relocating these households — even to better-quality housing elsewhere — severs an economic and productive relationship with land that cannot easily be recreated. Reconstruction on owned land is, in this context, simultaneously a housing, livelihoods, and food security intervention.
Why Duplexes and Townhouses Make Sense
If we accept the premise that reconstruction on owned plots is the right approach for families who have lost their homes completely, the next question is what to build. A direct replacement of the destroyed structure — same footprint, same typology, same size — is the intuitive answer. It is also, in many cases, not the most efficient or equitable one.
The typology shown in the photograph — a duplex or paired townhouse — is worth thinking about seriously. Two attached residential units sharing a structural system, a foundation, a roof, and potentially a utilities connection. Each unit is an independent household. Each family has their own entrance, their own living space, their own private area. But the cost of construction per unit is lower because they share infrastructure. The energy performance is better because shared walls reduce heat loss. The build time is shorter because efficiencies of scale apply even at this small scale.
Now consider the application in a Ukrainian village context. A plot of land that belonged to one family, on which one house stood, now has space — potentially — for a duplex. The owning family occupies one unit. The second unit could house another family — a neighbour who also lost their home on a plot that is now too small or too damaged to build on independently, or an IDP family that has no plot of their own but needs housing in the same community. The owning family gains a neighbour and potentially a modest income. The IDP family gains stable housing in a functioning community. The community retains social cohesion and critical mass.
This is not a complicated model. It is a very old one — multi-family housing on shared plots is how most of human history has been housed. What makes it interesting in the Ukrainian context is that it creates a mechanism for reaching two different categories of need — those with land but no house, and those with neither — within a single construction intervention.
Four Models Worth Thinking Through
The Construction Typology Question
Whichever model is applied, the choice of construction typology matters enormously for cost, speed, and long-term performance. The building in the photograph uses aerated concrete block (gas concrete), which has become the dominant material for new residential construction in Ukraine for good reasons: it is widely available, relatively affordable, thermally efficient, fire-resistant, and can be worked by small local contractor teams without heavy equipment.
A standard duplex unit of approximately 60–80 square metres per half, built from aerated concrete block with a timber rafter roof, can be completed to watertight and windtight shell stage within three to four months by a competent team. Full fit-out — heating, electrical, plumbing, windows, internal finishing — adds another two to three months. Total construction time of five to seven months from groundbreaking to occupancy is achievable at this scale.
The energy performance of aerated concrete block, combined with a well-insulated roof and energy-efficient windows, significantly reduces the long-term heating costs for occupants — a meaningful consideration for households who have already been impoverished by displacement and who will not have the resources to pay high utility bills in the years after they return.
What a standard unit might cost
Without pretending to precision — costs vary significantly by region, contractor availability, and specification level — a rough estimate for construction cost of a single 70 m² unit within a duplex structure in Ukraine in 2026 ranges from approximately USD 20,000 to USD 35,000 for shell and fit-out to basic habitable standard. This is significantly more than a Category 2 repair programme reference cost. It is also the cost of replacing a home that no longer exists, which is a different category of intervention altogether.
The more useful comparison is not against a repair programme but against the cost of leaving a family in a collective centre. Three years of collective centre operation — at $760 per resident per refurbishment cycle plus ongoing care and maintenance, utilities, and programme staff costs — already approaches the cost of a new unit. The economics of new construction for total-loss households are not as unfavourable as they initially appear.
What the Humanitarian Sector Can and Cannot Do
It is worth being honest about the limits here. New residential construction at scale is not what humanitarian organisations are designed, funded, or mandated to deliver. The governance requirements, the planning permissions, the quality assurance systems, the long-term tenure frameworks — these require a level of integration with local authority and national government systems that goes beyond what most humanitarian programmes can manage within a standard grant cycle.
But the humanitarian sector can do a number of things that would accelerate and enable this kind of reconstruction. It can fund pilot projects — ten, twenty, fifty units — that test the models described above and generate evidence about cost, speed, quality, and social outcomes. It can support local authorities in developing the administrative frameworks needed to manage social housing designations under Resolution 495 and Law 12377. It can fund the needs assessments and technical designs that map the total-loss caseload and identify the plots where reconstruction is legally and technically feasible.
Most importantly, it can make the argument — to donors, to national authorities, to international financial institutions — that the reconstruction of Ukraine's private housing stock cannot wait for a peace agreement. People who lost their homes completely are living in collective centres, in relatives' crowded apartments, in damaged structures that do not meet minimum habitability standards. Every year they wait is a year of lost agricultural productivity, interrupted education, fractured community life, and accumulated trauma. The cost of waiting is not zero. It is very high — it is just distributed across sectors and systems in ways that are harder to count than a construction bill of quantities.
Not every household that lost a house has the capacity — financial, physical, or organisational — to participate in any reconstruction programme, however generously funded. Elderly residents living alone, households with multiple family members with disabilities, single parents, families with very young children — these are the people most likely to be still in collective centres three years from now if the default response is to build housing and expect people to navigate it.
Any programme that works on this topic must have a specific, non-generic answer to the question of what happens to the most vulnerable. Turnkey housing — fully constructed, fully fitted, handed over with a key — is the only answer that actually reaches people who cannot organise their own reconstruction process. The model has to be designed for the person who has lost the most, not for the median beneficiary who has retained some capacity to navigate complexity.
The Conversation That Needs to Happen
The building in the photograph is a private construction project — two families, a shared structure, a plot of land, a local contractor. Nobody in the humanitarian sector funded it. Nobody wrote an activity description for it. It is just what happens when people who have resources and land and agency decide to build.
The families who lost everything in a missile strike in a frontline village — the grandmother whose house was the only thing she owned, the young couple who saved for a decade to build it, the family of four now in their third year of a dormitory room in Dnipro — do not have the resources and the agency to do what the families in that photograph are doing. That is the gap. Not the technology, not the building typology, not even the land. The gap is the financing mechanism that allows the same outcome — a family on their own land in a new house — for people who cannot organise it themselves.
Designing that mechanism is the most important housing recovery conversation that Ukraine's humanitarian and development sectors are not yet having at scale. It is time to start.