To Solve America’s Housing Crisis, We Need to Center Resilience

America is racing to fix its housing crisis. At a pace not seen in a generation, a pro-housing agenda is advancing at every level of government. Resilience must be part of it. 

Earlier this year, Congress passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, the largest housing bill in decades. Between July 2024 and July 2025, state and local governments enacted 124 housing bills across 33 states. 

And yet, every year, disasters destroy the equivalent of one month’s worth of new home construction. This means building more and faster only works if we also build better and smarter. A new paper from the Housing Multiplier Project, an informal network of research institutions and policy organizations, shows how building in the right places, with the right mix of housing, to the right standards, can have a multiplier effect—not just on housing supply, but on resilience. Call it a resilience multiplier. 

New Housing Not Built to Resilient Standards Becomes a Future Liability

The housing movement has spent nearly a decade focused on building: eliminating barriers, cutting red tape, and driving down costs. These are important priorities, but they aren’t addressing the silent drain on the nation’s housing supply caused by disaster losses. Since 1980, billion-dollar disasters have become far more frequent, driven by intensifying weather and more housing construction in vulnerable areas. 

In Arizona and California, more than 90% of new homes built between 2020 and 2022 faced significant fire risk. In North Carolina, between 1996 and 2017, roughly 10 new homes were built in high-hazard areas for every one home bought out through a government buyout program after a disaster. In Houston, more than 65,000 homes have been built in flood zones since Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Each of these homes is a ticking disaster liability—a contributor to future housing challenges and shortages after the next disaster strikes. 

It is widely assumed that building in established, lower-hazard areas costs more and takes longer than building on undeveloped land. That assumption has less to do with real cost differences and more to do with legacy permitting and zoning rules that make building in existing neighborhoods (infill) slower and more expensive than it needs to be. Nationally, 75-90% of land zoned for housing in the United States only permits single-family detached homes. Anything denser requires a variance or rezoning, triggering a discretionary review process. As Brookings notes, the uncertainty and cost of that review “complicates – and undoubtedly kills – many prospective housing developments.” It makes infill slower and more expensive, pushing development toward greenfields and high-hazard areas where it’s easier to get approvals to build because they are granted automatically, without a discretionary review that could delay or block the project. 

For too long, disaster risk has been considered a safety issue layered on top of the housing conversation. In reality, it threatens the long-term supply gains housing advocates are fighting for. State and local policymakers, developers, and lenders looking to build must think long term. They are not adding durable housing supply when a home is built in a high-risk area. Instead, it is a liability that eventually becomes uninsurable, unaffordable, or both. 

For too long, disaster risk has been considered a safety issue layered on top of the housing conversation. In reality, it threatens the long-term supply gains housing advocates are fighting for. To stop treating resilience as an afterthought, we must build it in from the start. Brookfield Residential’s post-fire rebuild in Los Angeles shows us one approach. 

Brookfield, a large production builder, committed to rebuilding all of its LA fire rebuilds to the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS) Wildfire Prepared Home Enhanced (WPH Enhanced) standard. By standardizing designs and coordinating construction, Brookfield can apply construction efficiencies typical of master-planned communities to individual lots. This allows them to spread the incremental cost of resilience further, and given the small price difference between building to code versus building to the WPH Enhanced standard, they made it standard for every home they are building. In Altadena, that cost, according to the Builders Alliance website, is $325-$395 per square foot, which is one of the most affordable rebuilding options for the highest resilience standard.

The Three Pillars of the Resilience Multiplier

Where we build, what we build, and how we build are the three legs of the proverbial stool that only deliver their full benefit when deployed together. Let’s take them one at a time.

Where we build

Where we build determines more than whether a home is safe from the next disaster. Siting homes in lower-hazard, already-established neighborhoods improves the odds in insurance risk pools and, according to Pew Charitable Trusts, cuts upfront municipal infrastructure costs by $21,000 per home, halves long-term maintenance costs, generates 13% more tax revenue per acre, and leaves open land intact. The capacity already exists: 16 million homes could be built on low-hazard underutilized commercial/vacant land near transit, plus 6.7 million more on public land without pushing further into high-hazard areas. But having the land isn’t enough if what’s legal to build on it doesn’t fit the housing need. 

What we build

What we build, meaning the type of housing we allow, determines where that housing can go and how much land we need for it. Before World War II, the most common types of housing built in American cities were duplexes, fourplexes, and other “missing middle” housing. That type of housing fit several households on a piece of land that today, under single-family zoning, only holds one. Pre-approved plans are one way to make it easier to build this housing.

Canada’s federal Housing Design Catalogue pairs missing middle housing types—ADUs, rowhouses, fourplexes and sixplexes—with climate resilience guidelines built into every design. Los Angeles’s Foothill Catalog Foundation does the same for wildfire rebuilds, which includes Junior ADUs and ADUs, with every home designed to meet the IBHS Wildfire Prepared Enhanced standard. 

Expanding what we allow to be built lets existing neighborhoods absorb more housing, unlocking infill development often on the lowest-hazard already-developed land, building the durable, lower-risk housing stock we need to address the housing shortage. 

How we build

Finally, how we build determines whether we are simply shifting the risk or reducing it. As I’ve written before, in the regulatory gap left by outdated codes, it’s increasingly insurers, not engineers or building experts, who end up setting the real standard for what’s “safe enough” to build. That’s backward. Insurance spreads the risk of any one property across a much larger pool—policyholders, insurers, reinsurers—and when disasters overwhelm the private market, it doesn’t shrink the risk as much as it shifts it.

Resilient building codes do the opposite; they reduce the risk by hardening homes against extreme weather. Where risk can’t be fully avoided by location alone, it can be reduced by the building standard that applies. For example, Florida’s statewide wind code, enacted after Hurricane Andrew, has cut windstorm losses by 72% since 2002. Data from Alabama’s FORTIFIED program shows the impact: 73% fewer claims, 15% lower claim amounts, 72% lower total losses post Hurricane Sally. Yet fewer than half of all communities at risk of one or more hazards have hazard-resistant codes, and only 21% in hazard-prone areas have adopted them.

The Case Study of Colorado: The Framework in Practice

Colorado shows how states can move on all three fronts of this framework at once. 

Roughly half of Colorado’s population lives in the wildland-urban interface, and more than a million residents live in areas the state forest service rates as moderate to very high wildfire risk. With nearly 70% of the state’s residential lands designated only for detached single-family homes, new housing development is pushed outward into wildfire-prone areas. The result is higher insurance bills—Colorado’s average homeowner premium rose 52% between 2019 and 2022, driven in part by wildfire risk. In 2021, the Marshall Fire destroyed more than 1,000 homes in suburban Boulder County.

Colorado responded by building the three-legged stool: where, what, and how. In 2024, the legislature passed reforms legalizing ADUs statewide (HB24-1152), requiring greater density near transit (HB24-1313), and ending parking mandates near transit (HB24-1304), opening land in lower-hazard neighborhoods to greater density and a wider mix of housing types. The state also adopted the 2025 Colorado Wildfire Resiliency Code, setting building-hardening and defensible space requirements in the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI). It then paired the Resiliency Code with insurance reform (HB 25-1182) that gives homeowners the right to see their wildfire risk scores from insurers, tying mitigation directly to premiums. 

These changes are projected to reduce high-wildfire risk development by seven percentage points. In fast-growing areas, modeling showed these changes would drop the share of new development in Colorado Springs’ high wildfire risk areas from 49% to 22%, keeping an estimated 30,000 households out of harm’s way.  

This was a coalition effort that was focused on zoning, codes, and insurance as one problem, not three. Colorado legalized more home choices, steered growth away from hazard zones, and hardened the standard for homes still built in harm’s way. It avoided trading a supply problem for an insurance problem.

The Resilience Multiplier

Build it right, and build it to last. That’s the throughline of the Housing Multiplier Project’s paper, grounded in data and examples of what happens when we get housing “right.”  

One such example is Babcock Ranch, Florida, a community built with resilience from day one. Built on elevated land to higher resilience codes, it survived Hurricanes Ian and Milton with minimal damage while neighboring communities suffered tens of billions of dollars in storm damage across the region. You don’t need to replicate Babcock Ranch wholesale to get its benefits. What’s required is meeting the underlying standards that made it resilient—hardened codes, smarter siting, resilient construction.

Research from FEMA finds that hurricane wind provisions in modern building codes add roughly 1% to construction costs while flood-resistant elevation requirements add 1.2% to 1.7%. A separate University of Alabama study of more than 2.7 million single-family home sales across 26 states found no evidence that modern hazard-resistant codes increase the home sale price or constrain housing supply. Headwaters Economics estimates that rebuilding a home to wildfire-resistant standards costs on average less than 10% more than typical construction. While critics can rightly point out that these costs are real, they are also only a fraction of a home’s total price once land and development costs are accounted for. The costs are also real after a disaster: A post-disaster rebuild typically costs 10-20% more than building with resilience from the start, with additional costs from increased insurance premiums, decreased insurance availability, and the out-of-pocket expenses from underinsurance.    

Embracing the framework in the Housing Multiplier Project’s paper gives us the opportunity to do more than build our way out of a housing shortage. It allows us to create a resilient built environment that is affordable, secure, and designed to withstand whatever comes next.

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