Archinect - News

Burning down the house to make American homes disaster-proof

2024-07-21T11:00:00-04:00

Last year's devastating wildfires in California and Hawaii once again came into focus as part of a New York Times exposé on the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (I.B.H.S.)-led movement towards the “biggest overhaul of building standards in more than 30 years.”

Burn demonstrations help visualize protective interventions that best resemble moats in unison with better building materials. The Times says: “The message to homebuilders is stark: Homes in certain parts of the United States must now be constructed with wildfires in mind, or they most likely will not be insured, which would mean they couldn’t be bought with a mortgage.”

Landscape designers as well as architects working on private residences will be equally affected. The MIT Technology Review wrote more extensively on the subject of design and the disaster-proof home in California last April.

NYT: Rising insurance costs impinging on affordable development efforts nationwide

2024-06-12T17:50:00-04:00

Less attention, though, has been paid to rental housing, particularly for low and moderate income people. Unlike market-rate apartment developers, those building multifamily projects financed by subsidies and tax credits do not have the ability to simply pass on those higher insurance costs to tenants, since they are limited by government guidelines as to how much rent they can collect.

The Times points out, many “low-income areas tend to be more prone to flooding and other catastrophic damage” – meaning that resilient design strategies often have to be added to the list of considerations for architects and their clients (as the ASLA’s most recent industry survey proves). The article quotes another conducted last year by the National Leased Housing Association as finding “nearly one-third” of all affordable housing developers nationally reporting insurance increases of 25% or more between 2022 and 2023.

How insurance companies are preparing for increasingly frequent and costly disasters

2019-04-03T14:04:00-04:00

The past two years have been particularly costly for insurance companies that are on the hook for billions of dollars in damage done by hurricanes, wildfires, floods and other disasters. As these disasters become more frequent and expensive, in part because of climate change, insurers are investing more in this research facility that studies how to protect homes and businesses from destructive wind, water and embers.

Opened in 2010, the IBHS Research Center offers full-scale testing of buildings and their materials under the harshest conditions. There, researchers are able to simulate Category 3 hurricanes and replicate wildfires in order to find best practices for mitigating the losses incurred by various natural disasters. Important findings have included a deeper understanding in how to reduce the risks posed by flying embers, and how shutting interior doors can protect homes from avoidable hurricane damage.

Funded by insurance companies, the organization's CEO Roy Wright tells NPR of the increased support for their research. "We've hit an inflection point where we're seeing more events impact more Americans," Wright says. "Our members have increased their investment and said, 'We want more researchers here. We want to see more activity playing out here.' We are collectively responding to this changing world that we're in."

Last year, the Camp a...

Lawsuit could make climate change readiness the city's burden

2014-05-23T12:37:00-04:00

A major insurance company is suing Chicago-area municipal governments saying they knew of the risks posed by climate change and should have been better prepared. The class-action lawsuits raise the question of who is liable for the costs of global warming. [...] “What the insurers are saying is: ‘We’re in the business of covering unforeseen risks... But we’re now at a point with the science where climate change is now a foreseeable risk.’”

Tackling Concerns of Independent Workers

2013-03-24T19:07:00-04:00

Today, the Freelancers Union is one of the nation’s fastest-growing labor organizations, with more than 200,000 members, over half of them in New York State. Ms. Horowitz, who has never lacked audacity, says she expects to expand the organization to one million members within three years. For some perspective, the United Automobile Workers union currently has 380,000 members.

Perhaps, architect interns, and those contract workers, will look to adding their numbers to this collective, instead of waiting for venal institutions - you know who you are - to make substantive changes to the way that things work.