It’s Time to Fix our Housing Construction

For most of human history, housing has been built with local materials that could withstand the environment around them. Whatever wood or stone was available was used to build everything from houses to churches and pubs. If an area was prone to flooding then houses could be raised on stilts. Pueblo tribes in the American southwest build their communities in canyons in shady areas using local materials to make bricks. However, here in the US we tend to build houses in one standard way that is often out of sync with the environmental realities of the location. It’s time to change this. Houses in flooded areas should be ready to handle a flood while homes in hurricane zones should be build to withstand wind, water, and storm surge. This intractability costs billions in insurance costs and anyone who pays renters or homeowners insurance is quietly subsidizing poor house construction policies.

In this video we are going to learn about we can fix housing and make houses more resistance and recoverable from natural disasters. It’s time to make housing responsive to the environment and not the other way around.