HFHP’s Habitat Building and Resource Center (HBRC) pools the expertise of construction professionals of various affiliates and the Philippine National Office.

Run as a knowledge business, its principal products are:

• Appropriate technology
• Technical capacitation
• Bulk sourcing of materials
• Sharing of best practices and lessons learned.

The HBRC was started with the help of construction professionals from the General Santos affiliate. Today, the HBRC involves the collaborative efforts of the construction talent and expertise of other affiliates, notably Taguig and Greater Metro Manila.

Projects in which HBRC innovations in technology and project management were piloted include:

• Dreamland Heights project of the Muntinlupa Development Foundation and the Asian Development Bank in San Pedro, Laguna, in which HBRC project management kept house costs at the targeted ceiling of PhP 60,000.
• BASECO project of the city government of Manila in Port Area, Manila, where the HBRC faced the twin tasks of building homes on the soft ground of a recently reclaimed area and the city government’s cost ceiling of PhP 40,000. To meet these challenges, the HBRC designed the BASECO houses to be built with lightweight steel-alloy frames and fiber-cement boards.

The HBRC’s expertise has even been exported to Aceh, Indonesia, where three HBRC staff—one of whom was from the General Santos affiliate—are seeking to apply these lessons in the reconstruction of homes destroyed by the tsunami disaster last year.

Another area where the HBRC’s expertise has been put into use was the construction of school buildings that were funded by the various Friends of Habitat: the Netherlands-based STIHO group, which sponsored a school building at a Habitat community in Talisay, Negros Occidental; and SC Johnson and the GMA Kapuso Foundation, which funded the reconstruction or rehabilitation of public-school buildings that were destroyed by the landslides in various Southern Luzon provinces in December 2004.

The HBRC has also helped another housing ministry, Gawad Kalinga, in a housing project in General Santos City.