We can build homes to sit above flood waters so people can ride out the Harveys of the future, but it won’t be easy or cheap. [...]
More than a million people live in the 100- and 500-year flood zones across the Houston area, and hundreds of thousands more do in other U.S. cities, including Miami and New York. Harris County’s move conforms with the advice of building engineers, climate experts, and the insurance industry.
— Citylab
7 Comments
The "LaHouse" high-performance housing demonstration home by Louisiana State University's agriculture center looks like an ordinary suburban home but incorporates numerous design features to better resist severe winds, rain, hail, and flooding."
In an age of climate change all these design feature are ordinary.
they SHOULD be ordinary. with lacking or toothless regulation though, too many buildings still fail to reach certain minimum standards, and those are the ones that drown in floods, catch fire easily, or get destroyed every time a hurricane or tornado sweeps through.
It doesn't happen overnight and never has. Think about how long it took for high impact glass to be the norm in coastal states. The real impact will be on the cost of house construction and where developers make up the cost difference to remain in market ranges.
So, keep instead of changing the arrangement (ie. detached SF houses), we just add stilts? Sure...
Does not mater for me, the poor section north of my house is downhill so they will get the flooding.
Elevate homes? Brilliant! That's never been thought of before, not by the Louisiana French Plantation builders before the Civil war, the Gulf Coast cottage builders after the Civil War, the builders of the Single-Houses in Charleston, and all the builders in the Carolina and Virginia 'Low Country' and 'Tidewater' areas. Absolutely brilliant.
the idea of elevating houses is as old as architecture itself, but if tens of thousands of homes get flooded every year again & again, we obviously aren't applying it properly.
When the 'exclusive' River Oaks section of Houston was first developed they restricted the house styles to traditional American Colonial and English Tudor. In other words they ignored the highly-attractive architectural styles in service throughout the South that were already adapted to occasional flooding conditions and which could have saved their homes from becoming submarines. Now LSU wants to reinvent the wheel?
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