As climate-driven hazards accelerate, a dangerous structural misalignment has emerged: What building codes deem legally permissible to construct is increasingly at odds with what catastrophic risk models deem financially viable to insure.
As long as building codes lag behind climate realities, private insurance markets will continue to dictate local safety standards by default. Resiliency Codes offer a clear, actionable strategy to change this dynamic.
As long as building codes lag behind climate realities, private insurance markets will continue to dictate local safety standards by default. Resiliency Codes offer a clear, actionable strategy to change this dynamic.
The Epicenter’s three-part home catalogs series from Alexis M. Pelosi and Robin Keegan describes how we arrived at the current moment and explores what it means for the future of housing after disasters and in communities facing disinvestment, outdated zoning, or housing supply constraints.
The same principles that accelerate disaster recovery can address housing supply constraints, urban disinvestment, and affordability challenges in any market.
Los Angeles is pioneering a new disaster recovery model that combines cross-sector collaboration, AI-powered coordination technology, and pre-approved wildfire-resilient home catalogs.
The lack of standard home rebuilding playbooks, combined with the uneven delivery of federal disaster recovery funding, has led to fragmented rebuilding efforts over the past few decades. However, disaster recovery has evolved to more systematic approaches using pre-approved home plan catalogs.
States are seeing their emergency reserves shrink for the first time since the Great Recession. The path forward is a new, two-pronged pro-growth, pro-resilience model that expands the state’s economic base while simultaneously modernizing the financial tools used to protect it.
From stormwater systems to flood mitigation projects, we must redefine community-level investments in resilience not as a municipal cost, but rather as a direct investment in preserving property values and stabilizing the private cost of homeownership.
