Florida's disaster-proof community withstood yet another hurricane | Hacker News Reader

Florida's disaster-proof community withstood yet another hurricane

fastcompany.com

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They are incredibly expensive homes, even by my California standards.

First hit on Zillow: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4207-Marina-View-Way-Cort...

$1.9 million for a 3 bedroom, 3 bath, 1600 sqft.

Came to the comments to see this. Wow. That's a lot for Florida, especially with their property taxes.

I assume you could amortize the cost if you made it an apartment complex. Maybe zoning is preventing it though?

Are they expensive to build, or are they expensive because nobody else is offering hurricane proof housing in the area?

Re-inforced concrete frame and brick or concrete block walls are not that much expensive, and require less mantainance over time.

People who live in hurricane prone areas should consider those materials instead of the typical wood-frame plus cardboard and stuff.

I always wonder why people don’t build brick and mortar homes in natural disasters prone areas. Sure the initial cost is high but the recurring cost due to all this damage is probably way higher.

Apologizing in advance if this is a stupid question. But when I compare houses in say Germany or Singapore to those in the US, I can’t believe the ephemeral construction here.

I can think of at least a few:

1.) Cost (mostly in the labor rather than materials, and because of less standardization probably)

2.) [1]Earthquakes. Unless you do extra steps (which add more cost), it's much likelier to collapse in an earthquake.

3.) Harder to tear down for new construction. (More of a city-planners nicety than a homeowner's consideration, but still there.)

Probably a couple other points I'm missing.

[1]https://www.earthquakecountry.org/step4/urmwalls/

Yes, unreinforced masonry building walls as describe on the link is an absolutely bad idea on earthquake prone areas.

But reinforced concrete structures are a different story. Concrete and masonry itself is brittle, but the steel rebar reinforcement adds flexibility and and tensile strength to the concrete. With an adequate design it is as safe or even safer than lighter wood structures, considering that it's inherently more fire safe, which is a big safety concern post quake.

Taiwan homes nowadays are mostly built with reinforced concrete structures and those modern buildings behaved very well in the 7.4 quake earlier this year.

Japan is probably the most earthquake-prone country in the world, and houses here are generally made with timber framing, for smaller buildings. For large apartment buildings and housing towers and such, they're made of concrete-reinforced steel of course, but timber is far more economical for individual houses.

Doesn't Japan also have a different cultural attitude towards houses? IIRC, a property sells mostly for the value of the land with the expectation that the house will be a tear down and that there isn't much restoration and rehab (aside from some gaijin Youtubers). With shorter life expectancies for homes, it seems like they aren't built with permanence in mind. There must be some interplay with code requirements for earthquakes vs. modern energy efficiency. Japanese houses I've been in have been ice boxes with little insulation and a large dependence on portable heaters. But maybe that is an artifact of location based on the severity and length of winter and houses farther north are more well insulated... maybe.

>IIRC, a property sells mostly for the value of the land with the expectation that the house will be a tear down and that there isn't much restoration and rehab

This is somewhat outdated. People buy used properties all the time; it's not the 80s any more, and people don't have money to waste tearing down houses after 10 years, and people move around from time to time because of work etc. It is true that used houses depreciate, though, over a 40+ year time span, but the land in desirable areas (e.g. Tokyo) generally appreciates.

>it seems like they aren't built with permanence in mind.

That's exactly the same as in America, worse actually. Have you been in an American house built in the last 50 years? They're poorly made, by unskilled labor after being designed by people with no formal education. Japanese houses by contrast are designed by architects and engineers and made to withstand extremely strong earthquakes (required by strict building codes). They generally aren't made to look luxurious, however, so you won't find granite countertops and other stuff like that that American houses tend to add to try to look like mansions (i.e. McMansions), and tend to use a lot of pre-fab materials that are quick to assemble.

>Japanese houses I've been in have been ice boxes with little insulation and a large dependence on portable heaters.

It sounds like you only visited houses built in the last millennium. Mold is a big, big problem in many parts of the country so ventilation tends to be prioritized over insulation, and energy efficiency hasn't been much of a concern until more recent years.

Like the sibling said, cost is a big factor.

Brick and mortar takes a lot more labor than stick built houses. And the US has a lot of timber to build housing with.

There are ways to build more resilient wood buildings too, but it requires more expensive materials and/or more labor, so it only happens when it's mandated... most states, including Florida, limit how new building codes apply to existing structures, but I'd expect most buildings in Florida that were built within the last decade to do pretty well with hurricanes. Most of the worst damage is to older homes that weren't updated to meet newer standards; or is in places with so much impact from storms that no reasonable building would survive.

Yes, but other than for aesthetic reasons, concrete and masonry is also very low maintenance. The negative aspect is that insulation is more expensive and leads to even thicker walls. But the thing basically lasts forever after it is built.

>I always wonder why people don’t build brick and mortar homes in natural disasters prone areas.

If there's any chance at all of an earthquake, those types of buildings are deathtraps. I guess Germany doesn't have to worry about earthquakes, but they do happen in the US occasionally, especially in the west, but sometimes also in the east (there was a significant one in New Jersey earlier this year).

Not reinforced concrete. Only non-reinforced masonry buildings are.

Florida code requires wind rated houses for new builds. While they could probably use engineered wood, I'd bet it's more expensive than concrete.

Put another way, every home I saw built in Florida when I lived there was made of concrete blocks.

So they're not even allowed to use cheap yellow pine framing like most of the rest of the US does.

Florida is fast becoming a place where only the wealthy can afford a high quality of life. Actually, I think they crossed that line years ago, but nobody with the ability of speak to a large audience has any incentive to say it out loud.

Anyone that does their due diligence ahead of time will find out for themselves.

Ideally, only sufficiently sturdy homes should be allowed in risky areas. The absurdity of the current situation is subsidizing risky behaviors of people who choose to live in hazardous areas and socializing the inevitable costs onto everyone else when FEMA and/or insurance step in to rebuild in the same risky locations with the same substandard construction and expecting a different result.

Just doing a wee bit of economic risk analysis seems to be beyond this publication.

We can absolutely engineer a home to be resilient against <pick your sigma> natural disaster short of a tsunami, volcanic eruption, or meteor strike, BUT it makes zero economic sense to do so beyond <pick your sigma>.

The rational approach is to build to <lower sigma> and insure to <higher sigma>.

Many Roman civil engineering structures still exist today and they really shouldn't. They were extremely over-built due to the ignorance of materials science and structural engineering at the time.

Just 'cuz we can doesn't mean we should.

The article is about an area that gets hit with hurricanes multiple times per year and the article ends with a discussion of how poor insurance was for the neighbors.

Real estate prices can be very divorced from building costs so I'm not really sure that having terrible standards is giving anything back to the home owners, it might be skimmed as profit for developers or it might mean more money going into a mcluxury race in low quality housing stock.

I think these people simply had bad insurance.

I've dealt with multiple home-owners policies over the years including one claim for a hurricane-powered tree branch piercing completely through the roof & window of a bedroom and one case of a complete under-foundation water main break resulting in a "write-off" flood of the basement and parts of the foundation.

In both cases, there was an explicit clause related to "re-build as-new to extant code" and, though it took time, everything was re-built as new--including to new code related to water-main piping, electrical grounding, and foundation cement sealants.

I concur that having terrible baseline building codes and dwelling underwriting is long-term lose-lose.

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