*If fire and flood is the new normal (and it is), then you face a choice in housing: a disposable shack, or a castle.
*It's all about the "Break Even Mitigation Point."
The world is becoming uninsurable
At the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub, we are creating life cycle cost analysis models to include the costs and benefits of mitigation efforts alongside operational costs such as utility bills and maintenance. In our case studies we have demonstrated that investing in more hazard-resistant residential construction in certain locations is very cost-effective.
We have also developed a metric called the Break Even Mitigation Percent (BEMP) to address the cost-effectiveness of mitigation features for a particular new building in a particular location. The BEMP factors in the expected damage a building designed to code would endure over its lifetime, compared to a more resilient building design.
As an example, we compared two designs for a four-story apartment building located on the Gulf or Atlantic coasts – one constructed with nonengineered wood, the other with more resilient engineered concrete – and modeled the damage that these buildings would be expected to sustain over 50 years. For a building sited in Galveston, Texas, we estimated a BEMP of 3.4 percent, meaning that if US$340,000 was invested on top of the initial $10 million costs in order to build the stronger version, that investment would mitigate enough storm damage to the building over its lifetime to pay for itself….
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More hazard-resistant buildings produce broad social benefits. If a community can recover from a disaster more quickly, the disaster’s negative impact on the economy and vital systems like health care and education can be reduced. Importantly, hazard resilience means lives can be saved.
But architects and designers often have a different incentive: keeping construction costs low. This is why most new construction projects just meet code requirements, instead of making extra investments to weather disasters well. Builders do not often consider reconstruction costs – the money that owners, insurance agencies and taxpayers will spend in the future to recover after the first structure fails in a storm.
To address this disconnect, the nonprofit International Code Council spearheads Building Safety Month each May to spotlight the need for modern building codes, more aggressive code enforcement and better training for building inspectors. However, the United States does not have a national building code with federal enforcement. Instead states, and sometimes municipalities, devise their own approaches. This patchwork system is inefficient and ineffective. A similar situation exists in cyclone-prone Australia.
This past May the White House hosted a Conference on Resilient Building Codes to highlight the importance of developing codes that incorporate resilience and future climate change impacts….
