The Second Best Time to Invest in Resilience Is Right After a Disaster Hits

The largest pool of resilience money in the country only unlocks after the damage is done. 

FEMA's Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP) is funded as a percentage of what a declared disaster has already cost. When there is no declaration, there is no money.

That sounds like a design flaw, but it is closer to a description of the whole system. Between FY2010 and FY2018, FEMA obligated roughly $11.3 billion for hazard mitigation, and 88% of it, about $10 billion, moved after a disaster rather than before one. 

The pre-disaster side has spent the past year in court. FEMA terminated Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC), FEMA’s pre-disaster hazard-mitigation grant program, in April 2025, canceling a funding notice worth $750 million. A federal judge declared the termination unlawful that December, and the program's restoration is still being litigated.

Put another way: 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.

We keep missing the resilience window. Between 2013 and 2022, about 18% of HMGP funds went back to the Disaster Relief Fund unspent. That’s the equivalent of wildfire mitigation on 5.1 million acres of goat-grazed fuel breaks (the strip of land where goat-grazing reduces wildfire risk)—roughly the land area of Massachusetts—left undone.

Here's why we should double down on the post-disaster window if we want to make real progress on resilience:

Attention. The governor is on the ground, and the cameras are there. The public wants something done and wants to know why it happened. We cannot manufacture that focus in a normal budget cycle, and we also cannot keep it. The research on flood insurance is blunt about this: More people buy policies the year after a hurricane, and the effect fades over the years that follow.

We are rebuilding anyway. People will still need houses, and roads will be repaved. When money is already moving, building back stronger is closer to a rounding error than a new line item. Building to current codes, compared to 1990 standards, returns $11 for every $1 invested and adds about 1% to construction cost. 

More importantly, the community can feel the value of that investment mere weeks after a major disaster. Rafaela Monchek, a disaster recovery and resilience expert, recalls returning to the Gulf Coast after a hurricane: "We were eating in a restaurant literally across the street from the beach two weeks after a hurricane came through," she said. "The mitigation efforts they had undertaken were so well done that the damage was minimal." 

People are willing. A family that has lost the same house to the same flood twice will consider an elevation, a buyout, a stricter code, or a move. Pitch any of that while the risk is theoretical, and it is a much harder conversation. Alabama built an entire program on that fact after Hurricane Ivan destabilized its insurance market in 2004. The state requires insurers to cut the wind portion of a premium by 20 to 55% for a home built or retrofitted to the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) FORTIFIED standard, and it wrote the upgrade into the claim itself: Coastal insurers must offer an endorsement covering the cost of rebuilding to FORTIFIED after a covered loss. Alabama had four FORTIFIED homes in 2010. It had 52,805 by 2024, more than half of every FORTIFIED designation in the country. In Mobile and Baldwin counties, they are now nearly one in five single-family homes.

The structural barriers in the post-disaster window

Even when the post-disaster window is open, it’s easy for resilience investments to get missed. Natalie Enclade, who runs BuildStrong America, puts it plainly: "We know what we're supposed to do. We know that resilience saves money. But it kind of just falls off of the radar of people from time to time." And there are structural barriers, especially for individual homeowners.

The clearest look I have at this is our own case files. Our advisors at Bright Harbor worked alongside survivors of the Eaton and Palisades fires through the rebuild. With every rebuilding homeowner, advisors talk through code-upgrade coverage and a resilience-focused Small Business Administration (SBA) add-on that lets a borrower take up to 20% above verified physical loss specifically to rebuild stronger. But most hit the same three walls:

1. The math already seems underwater. Multiple survivors were underinsured by 30 to 40%. A Department of Angels report put the typical Los Angeles fire survivor roughly $500,000 short on rebuild costs. Code-upgrade caps of $60,000 to $71,000 were sitting against general contractor bids of $1.5 million to $1.8 million. When the base rebuild already exceeds the payout, hardening can feel like a luxury.
2. The money arrives backwards. Both the code-upgrade coverage and the SBA add-on reimburse after the cost is incurred, so a cash-constrained family has to front the money first. One mortgage servicer held insurance proceeds in escrow until the rebuild reached 75% completion. Loss-of-use funds run out, forbearance ends, and families carry a mortgage on a destroyed home and rent on a temporary one while the insurance side catches up.
3. Nobody's job is to sell it. O.P. Almaraz, founder of Allied Disaster Defense, has seen where the stall happens. Homeowners will replace vents and upgrade siding, then balk at removing the twenty-foot Italian Cypress along the front of the house. "It's really the aesthetics," he said. It’s easy to assume homeowners are being irrational. But Almaraz points to something deeper: No profession exists that is trained, marketed, and priced to redesign a yard for fire the way kitchen designers exist for renovations. Contractors who build to IBHS standards are scarce for the same reason.

We’re faced not with a failure of will, but a sequencing issue. The decision window opens when people are exhausted and underfunded and are being asked to front cash they do not have, and it closes before checks clear.

The groundwork has to happen now

The work is not persuading people to care about resilience in advance. Most will not, and the reality of when funding becomes available gives them no reason to. Instead, we can identify and fortify the specific points where resilience decisions actually get made: the adjuster's first estimate, the loan application, the contractor bid, the permit. From there, we can build the plans, the financing, the trained builder networks, and the pre-approved documentation in advance, so they are ready to deploy the day the window opens.

A crisis is not a gift, and I would never say otherwise to someone still counting what they lost. But the moment right after the loss is a real opening to build back something sturdier than what stood there before, and letting it pass should be a decision, not an accident.

There's an old saying about trees: The best time to plant one was 20 years ago. The second best time is today. The same is true about investing in resilience. The best time to invest was before disaster struck. But the second best time is in the post-disaster window. It’s late. But it’s not too late.

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