The pandemic brought on a boom in the housing market, with home sales reaching the highest levels since 2006.
I know I spent a lot of time perusing Zillow.
An insatiable demand in the housing market right now, causing sales to skyrocket.
That from one prominent housing expert as new home sales soared 19 percent over last year.
People in general looking at a home that they want to buy or build.
Their first question is not do you have sprinklers in this building or do they look around and see this
beautiful forest and say, oh, my God, it's going to be on fire in two years?
2020 also meant a lot of natural disasters.
It was the worst fire season in US history and there were over a dozen severe weather storms that each cost over a billion dollars.
We're not going to be able to create fire proof houses, non ignitable fireproof houses, because by and large, nobody
wants to live them. Building towards a resilient nation saves money,
saves the environment, saves lives. In 2019, just shy of a million new people were displaced due to climate disasters in the US.
The good news is that that number is down from one point two five million in 2018 and one point seven million in 2017.
We're delivering a very safe product that is making people's lives so much better.
Could we do it better?
Absolutely. We can always do things better.
Cost is a big consideration.
I know it was for me when I was doing my Zillow research, but I'm lucky enough to be able to afford to rent an apartment with adequate safety
measures, for example, this fire sprinkler.
So America needs to get a lot of people into homes that can withstand the ever increasing wrath of natural disasters quickly.
But is the U.S.
approaching building homes all wrong?
And how should houses be built in the US?
Over 15 million privately owned new housing units were finished in 2020.
Those should have been built to the building codes and standards set by local regulators, usually based on guidelines from the International Code
Council or the ICC.
The codes basically say if you have this kind of function going on within a building, in this kind of building, you can
use these standards in order to meet our level of safety, sanitation, etc..
When you build in an area, one of the first things you do is you acquaint yourself with the exact code
requirements that will effect the development and building process at that specific site.
Then the specifics, You also check against the code as you go, though we at FEMA are active
in that process and engage in promoting these hazard resistant building and fire codes.
It is really down to the local level to adopt, adopt and implement those new codes and standards.
Industry experts try to keep up with changes in technology and include evolving environmental factors when designing codes.
Every three years they republish their codes.
It goes before a committee that review these things in a public hearing format that then goes back out to the entire
membership. A ballot is open to them to come in and vote on whether they want to see this code change be introduced.
I think one of the biggest challenges in a code development process is there are all sorts of competing
interests and needs.
And it's really important that if you have a if you're a proponent of a code change and you're trying to move that
code change forward, you you have to engage in the process.
These codes are enforced at the local level.
Punishments could include revoking permits or holding up construction and in construction time is money.
A thousand dollars added to the price of a new home at any time in any way, we will eliminate
153,967 households from being able to buy that home.
Just a thousand dollar increase.
A faster build might help save money in the short term, but be devastating in the long run.
The last hurricane we saw in Florida with that one house left standing on the beach was a rather interesting solution.
It was an extremely expensive solution, but it was a lot less expensive than the solution that all their neighbors had
when they were didn't have a house anymore.
Since the first edition of the I-Codes, the international codes, for example, in 2000, communities that have adopted them have saved the nation
approximately one point six billion.
That's a B billion in averaged Analyzed losses from flooding, hurricanes and earthquakes.
Building to withstand the forces of nature can be tricky, especially as our understanding of the environment changes.
If you're looking to buy a home, the best thing you can do from a flood perspective is know what your current risk is from the current environment
and then how that will evolve over the next 30 years.
And flood risk isn't a static one time thing that you need to look at.
It is an ever evolving risk that continues to grow in some parts of the country at an exponential rate.
Since building codes can change frequently.
Staying up to code is easier said than done.
For example, depending on when a home is built in a community, different flood or fire regulations may be required.
If you have a large community, you can find yourself building under different code requirements.
And what's also quite easy to evaluate is the increases in
cost For example.
Homeowners may choose to invest in resiliency measures to stay up to code as opposed to buying a brand new house.
If we work toward addressing existing structure as well as new homes, what we find is that at times there's
so much focus on the new that they bear way out of percentage with the price tag should
actually be.
So we can't have that burden on new homes because we're losing too many first time buyers, first time move ups.
There are examples all over the country where communities have evaluated the risk and then
adopted resilient Current building codes to address that.
For example, a fire may not cross the street if nothing on the other side of that road ignites from the embers, communities that are flood prone may
choose to build trenches in the street to catch excess rainfall as opposed to letting that flood into a home.
So what we want to make sure of is that we eliminate most of the ignitions and
in high density neighborhoods, we can begin to do that with very limited or no window exposure between
houses. And we can have the the exterior materials non-flammable, including
our eaves and the boxing of our eaves using, let's say, fiber cement so we can have fiber cement on the walls.
We can have a nonflammable masonry material like block or something on that order,
and then use a nonflammable material for effacing and boxing OKAY.
Non-flammable roof that will help greatly.
Flooding is a little trickier than fire, but the floodplain that provided by the National Flood Insurance Program provides some guidance for
stakeholders. I would say it's less about, from my perspective, whether we're building the houses incorrectly and more so where are we building
these houses? So when you look at the things from FEMA and the special flood hazard areas, they come with a base flood elevation.
Those base flood elevations are based on engineering grade amazing studies that they do at that time.
The problem is that about 11 percent of those studies are from the 70s and 80s.
And if you think how the environment has changed since the 70s and 80s, to not then have that incorporated in new base flood elevation and where we
should be thinking about building and why you start to see why that can be an issue.
Further to that, there's a whole swath of the country that just doesn't have any regulation around this within special flood hazard area because
it's never been mapped. The codes can solve everything.
A resident's behavior has a huge role in stopping fire spread.
It won't help us if we keep our firewood on the deck all through the fire season.
It won't help us if we have patio furniture that's ignitable from firebrands next to our
view windows.
Research like Cohen's can save lives and billions annually.
Being cognizant of where structures are built is important too.
There's lots that the individual homeowner can do to help prevent a fire from actually spreading further, causing more damage than if you
just didn't take any action or maintaining your yard and other items like that in a very similar way to flood where you can raise your home or you
can put in backflow preventers or you can have sandbags and other things like that ready for those flooding events when you know they're coming.
The good news is that displacement due to natural disasters is on the decline, mostly because of better research and innovations to address the
issue. Our perception of the wildfire rolling through the community like some tsunami of hot gases, that is
not what happens in reality.
We've also had significant success in improving fire safety in the past.
I don't know about your apartment.
I think I see a sprinkler head in the background.
That's why.
And that has been incorporated into model codes in, Some degree, I wish it were stronger, but there are
those who think that's a burden.
It's cost impact issue.
It's difficult in some communities because of water supply issues.
There are problems with, it's not perfect, but it's certainly better than not doing anything.
We created a national flood model across the entire contiguous United States that can be applied to an individual property parcel.
So based on the building type, the elevation of the building, the value of the structure and our flood model, we're able to leverage the Army Corps of
Engineers, what are called depth damage curves, to know how much water would equate to what damage to that structure and then calculate that on
the fly and give it to you as the user.
So now not only do you know how much risk you have, but what that will likely cost you if that event does take place.
They plan to move to fire Next.
Cohen is collaborating with federal and local officials to better inform builders to stop the spread of wildfires through his home ignition zone
research. Fundamentally, we need to define the problem as a structural ignition problem,
not a wildfire control problem.
We have a lot of decisions we can make effectively in changing the local conditions of the House and its immediate surroundings.
And we have zero opportunity to control extreme wildfire.
This effort is also supported extensively at the federal level by FEMA.
I really want to encourage people to go to the FEMA Web site, download the app, go to the United States Fire Administration's website, download
the information. There is a tremendous amount of great information there for individuals to help them be
resilient before, during and after a disaster.
Architects and builders suggest that consumers like me need to adjust our mindsets to include safety as a top consideration.
This will allow people to make the necessary adjustments to stay in their homes longer and therefore slow the flow of climate migration and have
better financial investments.
People see the Events occur, the wildfires, the floods,
the, you know, daily news that somebody died in a house fire, but it doesn't stick, it doesn't change
their perceptions and that's to a certain degree why architects are there to guide their thinking,
to say Yeah, you could have that.
But, you know, for the same price, you could put a sprinkler system in this entire building and be relatively assured that your family is
going to be safe for the next 50 years.