Are Today’s Building Codes Enough to Improve Home Resilience?
In the face of rapidly increasing losses from natural disasters, many housing advocates are pushing for more stringent building codes to make homes more resilient to disaster.
Arguably, the roughly 119 million homes built before 2010 suggest that retrofitting the existing housing stock should be a higher priority to achieve resiliency than boosting the building codes for new homes already built to more stringent standards.
“Sometimes just ensuring that the homes are actually built to code, a good code, can make a home more resilient,” says Michelle Foster, VP of Sustainability and leader of the National Green Building Standard (NGBS), a voluntary above-code certification program that added a +Resilience measure in 2022 and will offer a more pragmatic approach in its 2025 version.
But recent efforts by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) to roof and reroof homes in Louisiana and Alabama to its Fortified Home resiliency standards exposed cracks in modern code enforcement.
“Even when (a more robust roofing specification) is in the code, roofs are just not inspected very often,” says Alex Cary of IBHS, “and thus more vulnerable to severe damage, total loss, and high replacement costs.”
To ensure compliance for both NGBS +Resilience and IBHS Fortified Home standards, those programs hire, train, and certify independent evaluators to inspect, gather documentation, take photos, and otherwise audit every single house.
“Third-party verification really is key,” says Cary, “and has proven to be a differentiator in terms of reducing damage and cost after a weather, fire, or seismic event.”
“You cannot rely on the existing codes and standards,” to respond to the increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters, says Dick Davis of FM Global. “I don’t like to put too much reliance on waiting for the codes to change to solve all the problems.”
This post was excerpted from the featured article, “Defining and Delivering Resiliency,” in the current issue of Pro Builder magazine.