The Weekly: Alabama Used Five Financing Levers to Scale Resilient Building Standards Across the State
Alabama’s approach to scaling the FORTIFIED standard has become a blueprint nationwide.
Hurricanes
32 articles
The Weekly: Alabama Used Five Financing Levers to Scale Resilient Building Standards Across the State
Alabama’s approach to scaling the FORTIFIED standard has become a blueprint nationwide.
Alabama Paid for Stronger Roofs. Hurricane Claims Fell Up to 74%.
Alabama used five financing levers to get insurers and homeowners to pay for FORTIFIED roofs.
The Weekly: Hurricane Isaias Is a Test of the Gulf Coast’s Bet on Hardened Homes
Florida and Alabama have spent hundreds of millions fortifying homes. Isaias is the first mainland hurricane to test that resilience since 2024.
Cities Face $1 Trillion in Deferred Infrastructure Costs. Building Resilience Requires Pricing That Exposure.
Municipal markets overlook the cost of aging infrastructure. New tools can help cities size their reserve funds against their actual exposure.
The Weekly: Disasters Open A Window To Rebuild with Resilience. Policymakers Can Use It To Fix The System.
To address the housing crisis in the U.S., we need a three-part strategy for centering resilience.
To Solve America’s Housing Crisis, We Need to Center Resilience
If we don’t build it right and build it to last, new housing supply won’t solve today’s housing crisis.
The Second Best Time to Invest in Resilience Is Right After a Disaster Hits
For most of the country, in most years, the post-disaster window is not the second-best time to invest in resilience. It is the only time anyone does.
The Weekly: Extreme Heat Is Straining the Grid. Redesigning How We Build Can Ease the Pressure.
The drivers that make extreme heat so severe were all in play over Independence Day weekend: More people live in areas exposed to extreme heat, existing infrastructure is vulnerable to extreme heat, and cooling is expensive and not universally accessible.
Three Examples of How Incremental Change Led to Resilience
Early proof points are what eventually unlock scale, and they almost never look like proof when they begin. We need the compounding of resilience over time, and we need to recognize when the next disaster creates a narrow window for rapid investments in resilience—all at once.
The Weekly: Why Small Moves Beat Big Mandates in Resilient Real Estate
Incrementalism is often dismissed as not scalable enough to translate into population-level outcomes. But a series of incremental changes, conducted by various stakeholders in concert, can translate into new norms, higher standards, and more resilient cities.
Severe Storms: The Cost Drivers Making Them So Expensive
Population growth in areas prone to severe storms has increased asset exposure and the physical assets in harm's way are not designed to withstand high winds or hail. Meanwhile, building premiums to rebuild after severe storms are increasing.
The Evolution of Home Rebuilding Catalogs: Lessons from Katrina, Santa Rosa, and Lahaina
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.