With natural disasters striking communities across the US at an accelerating pace, the question of how to build disaster-resilient homes that can endure them has never been more critical.

New research spanning political science and civil engineering shows that the answer could lie at the intersection of smarter regulatory systems and stronger structures.

While neither approach is sufficient on its own, together they offer a promising path toward safer homes.

University of Notre Dame political scientist Susan Ostermann and civil engineering professors María J. Echeverría from California State University, Sacramento and Abbie Liel from the University of Colorado Boulder have identified the building code features that have the biggest impact on hazard resilience and translated those features into tangible, practical building solutions.

The findings from their National Science Foundation-funded study appear in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.

Ostermann and Liel say that housing resilience is both a governance issue and a technical problem. Building codes, as written, already contain nearly everything one needs to build safe homes—but in many places, implementation remains a barrier.

“Regulations support the goals of safe, resilient housing, but they can also get in the way,” says Ostermann, associate professor of global affairs and political science at Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. “We need to understand how culture and local building practices interact with regulatory processes.”

A locally informed approach to regulation was especially important given the site of the study: Anchorage, Alaska. Geographically isolated from the continental US, its independent-minded population often distrusts governmental rules. Even after more than 750 homes were destroyed or damaged by a magnitude 7.1 earthquake in 2018, many Alaskans have retained their libertarian-leaning views. In other words, simply strengthening building codes does not guarantee safer construction if the codes are not followed in the first place.

“People everywhere share a desire for safe housing, but communities vary in the degree to which they regulate and enforce building codes,” Ostermann says, regarding this research into building disaster-resilient homes.

Read the full article about building disaster-resilient homes by Tracy DeStazio at Futurity.