Comment by Animats
1 day ago
Not uninsurable, but buildings are going to have to become tougher.
It's happened before. Chicago's reaction to the Great Fire was simple - no more building wooden houses. Chicago went all brick. Still is, mostly.
The trouble is, brick isn't earthquake resistant. Not without steel reinforcement.
I live in a house built of cinder block filled with concrete reinforced with steel. A commercial builder built this as his personal residence in 1950. The walls look like a commercial building. The outside is just painted cinder block. Works fine, survived the 1989 earthquake without damage, low maintenance. It's not what most people want today in the US.
In Yugoslavia, in 1969, one of the biggest earthquakes occurred, destroying several cities. After that, the country’s leaders decided to change building codes. Even today, although Yugoslavia no longer exists, the countries that adopted those codes have homes capable of withstanding earthquakes up to 7.5 on the Richter scale.
My main point is that if we face major natural disasters, we need to take action to mitigate their impact in the future. As a foreigner, it seems to me that Americans prioritize building cheap homes over constructing better and more resilient ones.
Why bother building a better home when it's cheaper to buy insurance and rebuild later?
This is why prices are important - sometimes it's sensible to build cheaper houses without these safeties if the risk isn't there, but if the risk does exist then it needs to be priced right to provide that incentive.
The key thing to understand is that you don't get to choose when the house gets destroyed or get advanced notice. Which means you might be in there, or your kids, or all your belongings. But yes, after you're dead in the rubble someone else can rebuild your house and it might be cheaper.
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How about the cost of your life? If the house resists the earthquake and you are inside it, you don't die.
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Maybe be there is no longer "cheap" and that's the issue
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Maybe people don't like to restart their lives like that if it's avoidable, even if it costs more.
in case of earthquakes: to not to die.
Only you also take into account your cheap home will likely accelerate the problem. Which never happens.
Hah financialization strikes again. Try explaining this to a person from a third world country, they would say "what are you talking about". Also they would have better health care than your average American.
> As a foreigner, it seems to me that Americans prioritize building cheap homes over constructing better and more resilient ones.
"Americans" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
It would probably be more accurate to say "It seems to me that the history of American culture and economic systems have led to a system whose emergent behavior is to prioritize building cheap-but-easy-to-modify homes over constructing smaller-harder-to-modify-but-more-resilient ones."
Sure "we" need to take action, but the machine is very large and we are all very small gears in it. A twenty-something buying their first house doesn't have a magic wand to wave that will summon cinder block houses into being that don't physically exist. A builder who wants to build cinder block houses doesn't have a magic wand to rewrite city building codes that presume residential construction is mostly wood. A city council member who wants to modernize building codes doesn't have a magic wand to get enough constituents to prioritize this over housing costs, homelessness (but I repeat myself), jobs, etc.
Everyone's problems seem easy when you are very far away from them.
(Recently there was a major public building collapse in Serbia: the porch of the Novi Sad railway station collapsed, killing 15 people. This has really focused attention on corruption and caused massive protests.)
What collapsed was the newly rebuilt part of the porch, not the old one built to those codes. It has nothing to do with insufficient building codes, hence a corruption scandal.
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Reading up on this a bit, it seems it was the 1963 earthquake that precipitated the change in building regulations? The 1969 one seemed comparatively mild(?)
> Americans prioritize building cheap homes over constructing better and more resilient ones.
It's all considered disposable, much like strip malls.
The problem always becomes, who is going to pay for that action.
Yeah, I'm surprised that the damages of the LA fire occurred, because it was known beforehand that California had a fire problem (and also have an earthquake problem I think).
I'm here in Eastern Europe and our buildings can withstand a lot of things.
> we need to take action to mitigate their impact in the future. As a foreigner, it seems to me that Americans prioritize building cheap homes over constructing better and more resilient ones.
As an European, it baffles me as well.
If this doesn't happen to "cheap" homes here, why does it happen in California, to rich people's houses?
All the properties that survived in those LA neighborhoods all had some pretty basic and intentional fire resistance
I’m curious about how many others did that burned down too
But so far the ones highlighted had super obvious mitigations that its astounding to see were not more common
The government banned insurance companies from raising prices. They used tax payer money to subsidize this for a while which increase home prices. Eventually insurance companies stopped offering insurance.
When state actors even dabble in socialism disasters happen people die.
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The fire problem can be managed by burning or removing some of the dead wood, and building adequate water storage. Apparently California has been neglecting those two problems for decades.
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In 1666 London had a bit of a problem with fire, after that some building codes were introduced. Buildings made entirely from wood were not allowed and roofs had to have a parapet.
If you don't know what a parapet is, take a look up to the roofs on London's older buildings, the front wall rises up past the bottom of the roof. If there is a fire in the building then the parapet keeps the burning roof inside the footprint of the building rather than let it 'slide off' to set fire to the property on the other side of the street.
The parapet requirement did not extend to towns outside London, which makes me wonder why.
The answer to that is to see what goes on in the USA. After a natural disaster they just pick themselves up and keep going. Florida was obliterated in 2024 but nobody cared after a fortnight. Same with the current wild fires, nobody will care next week, it will be forgotten, even though having one's home destroyed might be considered deeply traumatic.
I think that the key to change is to not have too many natural disasters, ideally nobody has living memory of the last fire/flood/earthquake/pandemic/alien invasion/plague of locusts so that there is no point of reference or 'compassion fatigue'. Only then can there be a fair expectation of political will and the possibility of change.
> Florida was obliterated in 2024
That’s an huge exaggeration. FL was not obliterated in 2024.
Stats:
Total storms 18
Hurricanes 11
Major hurricanes (Cat. 3+) 5
Total fatalities 401
Total damage $128.072 billion
(Third-costliest tropical cyclone season on record)
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> ideally nobody has living memory of the last [...]
Funny, I would have said the exact opposite. If people forget how bad things were, they seem more likely to repeat them.
Nazism, for one. And the rise in antivax sentiment - people today have never come across an iron lung, which is a testament to medical technology, but it means some silly opinions get way more traction than they should.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana
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If the market is allowed to price insurance correctly then we can motivate building designs to be more disaster resist. If the McMansion can't get insurance but disaster resistant, modest homes do, then people will adapt.
"Correctly" is doing a lot of work here. Some readers might miss that this is double edged. Insurance is a mandated product. You don't have a choice if you want a mortgage, or want to run a business. So while it is true that the sustainable price for insurance in many areas is higher than what current regulations allow, let's not forget what happens in an unregulated insurance market; price gouging.
If the regulators have defined 'price gouging' as a price substantially below the break even mark, literally any profitable insurance product is implicitly believed by them to be price gouging. The US does a weird thing where "insurance" no longer means pooling risk but some sort of transfer payment welfare system. If they're going to define "price gouging" as profitable activity it is hard to see how the economy is going to function.
Allowing insurers to make a profit and run a business without interference is going to be cheaper - and in most instances better - than whatever the politicians are trying to build here. If you get rid of all the mandatory-this and price-gouging-thats then to stay in business insurers have sell products that people want to buy at a competitive yet sustainable price. It works for food, it'd work here too.
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> unregulated insurance market; price gouging.
with sufficient competition, it is impossible to price gouge.
So if there is supposed price gouging, then there must be insufficient competition. Therefore, the source of the lack of competition would need to be removed (ostensibly, by gov't - such as increasing business loans so that new insurance companies can be started).
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For what it’s worth, you can get a house with no insurance or mortgage. They tend to be cheap. I had an uninsured thatched cottage for a while, it was 68k
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Price gouging isn't actually what we're seeing in the most disaster prone areas. Insurance companies aren't charging open ended prices, they're simply exiting the market. Florida for example.
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The big risk that we need regulation for is not that insurance charges too much, but too little. There will always be the temptation to charge less than the other guy, get lots of customers and hope nothing really bad happens.
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P&C insurance is a pretty competitive industry, and there are plenty of mutual insurance companies in the P&C business that don't have a price gouging incentive. Most of the regulations that are about reducing counterparty risk for the insured are probably necessary, but price controls are not, and generally, they only distort the market.
Can you define “price gouging”?
Insurance (at least the kind we are talking about) is only mandatory if you have loans, and even then it is not 100% mandated. We do need insurance regulations, but price caps limit what things actually make sense to cover. To put it another way, you are free to buy land in a risky area if you want, but nobody has to insure it or loan you money for it. If you find someone who will loan you the money if you can get insurance, then you can't get insurance, that sucks for you but nobody owes it to you to hand over money on a losing investment. These requirements can be abused, but there really isn't much evidence of insurers, lenders, and investors colluding to rip people off.
Resistant homes will pay nearly the same prices as everyone else. So the cinder block home owner is subsidizing the sticks houses.
Same happens in autos. Monitored safe driving nets at most 10-20% discounts. Biggest factor is age, and even then, difference between 20yo and 35yo driver is 38%.
There are no tricks or deals to insurance.
> Resistant homes will pay nearly the same prices as everyone else.
but this means the insurance company is mispricing (or is being forced to misprice) the risk of resistant homes.
In theory, when correct pricing happens, these resistant homes should face less claims, and thus the premiums paid on them is high profit margin; ala, the customer is a good one, and the insurer should persue this customer more than another. This ought to results in a discount for said customer's premium, as more insurers vie for this customer over another.
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This is more a matter of market rules than an inherent property of insurance; currently we do not let insurers get sufficiently granular due to some assumptions about wider social benefits of a less individualised system.
This might be reworked to allow for fire resistant designs to be a factor.
> Biggest factor is age, and even then, difference between 20yo and 35yo driver is 38%.
That's because age is both observable and strongly predictive of risk.
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It was only a week or so ago that I learned that a major failure mode of most houses in Florida during Hurricane season used to be the roofs ripping off. The tie plates and straps that were invented to solve that problem created the McMansion as a side effect.[1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oIeLGkSCMA
Interesting video, didn't know about truss plates
Let's just consider Los Angeles for a second. For decades working class immigrants were pushed to the foothills in Altadena by redlining policies which placed them at risk for wildfires. Today their risk is exponentially greater due to the effects of unchecked climate change, and many cannot afford insurance even now.
How exactly do you expect these people to adapt? Many live in multigenerational households and could never afford to rebuild their house or move without uprooting their communities to another state.
Why are the victims made to adapt to the atrocious actions of the wealthy and powerful? Maybe our policy discussions should start from a place of compassion and work towards solutions from there.
One of my daughters was born with moderate to severe autism. There's no obvious cause. I'm told that from what we know it's at least 10 different factors that go into it, one of which is environmental pollution. So maybe corporations are partially at fault.
If I could cure it (yes, I'm using that term. It's a debilitating condition and she'd be better off without it) by selling my house and moving hundreds of miles away from family I'd do that in a heartbeat without complaint. All we can do is make the best of things.
People don't understand the exponential change. As you correctly stated, the effects of climate change are exponential. Why? Because if you take a normal distribution and shift it linearly, the area on the edges grows exponentially. This is why even a linear shift in temperature can lead to an exponential rise in disasters.
Math is hard for people, even on HN.
Wood for earthquake resistance vs masonry for fire resistance seems like a false dichotomy.
Australia has a lot of experience with building fire resistant homes, and they didn’t do it with masonry, they did it with timber and steel framed homes, plus fireproof cladding and roofing materials, keeping a perimeter free of vegetation and protecting against ember ingress.
It is possible to have both earthquake and fire resistance in a stick framed home, without the expense of resorting to reinforced concrete.
California's building codes are the same. Three problems: overhaul takes generations, monster fire storms will still burn resistant materials, and brush upkeep is difficult
Australia is surprisingly urban, especially in terms of I would guess 90%+ of people live in relatively safe places fire wise (putting inhalation of particles aside).
People in built up areas almost don't think at all about wildfire safety, cladding an so on.
When I briefly lived in Oklahoma I found it frustrating that they use stick frame construction for homes and apartment buildings. Even when we know how to build much safer wind resistant houses.
What I thought was worse was once a tornado rips up a neighborhood builders are allowed to build replacement stick framed homes.
Oklahoma is full of lowest bidder builders. Living in OK I rarely see a house built in the last 10 years that looks like it was built to last. Yet another thing Americans don't seem to care about anymore.
More like can't care about anymore. Median household income is 63k in OK and housing costs are through the stratosphere, it's no wonder people will pick any home over none.
And I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.
Genuine question. Does this story get told to children in Oklahoma, and if so, don’t the children think to themselves “wtf parents, have you seen our house?”.
Yes, as a European I'm always confused about what Americans think is the moral of that story..
Note that brick is much worse than wood for wind-stoked wildfires; think ‘explosive fiery-hot shrapnel’ rather than just catching on fire like wood.
(This is not a contradiction of your point, just a useful related factoid for the modern era.)
You're going to die if you're around to witness either (if you didn't already pass out from smoke/heat/lack of oxygen). It literally doesn't matter.
The advantage of suburbs in which houses are mostly built from non-flammable materials is that while maybe one or two rows of houses closest to forested areas will likely burn out, there won't be enough calorific potential for the fire to propagate further into the suburb.
Also for firefighting efforts the difference between a house burning out and a house burning down is huge. The former means that most of the fire is already contained in a non-flammable structure, reducing the risk of spreading and also making efforts to quench it with water more effective.
"Brick is much worse than wood for wind-stoked wildfires" is a strange take. If a wildfire is approaching, I'll take a town built from brick rather than plywood any day.
Brick does tend to survive. Brick as an insulating layer can save lives. Brick also explodes violently under conditions where wood merely burns. Neither of these save homes in our wildfires, though; it turns out what saves homes is things no one realized at first:
Don’t plant trees within fifty feet of a structure. More, if you didn’t inflate your home like a balloon to fill a property to the brim with home. Cut them down and make a firebreak. Clearings exist for a real and serious reason. Aesthetics have been given precedence far too long in this regard.
Make your home airtight (or positively pressurize it, if you have the power and tech to do that safely) so that embers don’t get pushed in by the winds and pulled in by the temperature differential currents and catch your house on fire from inside its walls. Not much fun in having a brick building burned out from embers that were forced in through a poorly-sealed door.
Saturate your roof with water, so that it doesn’t trap embers and act as a fire repeater to the next house on the block. Not only will your roof not burn, but every ember that lands on it will likely go out. Even if your roof is metal, consider installing sprinklers anyways. Maybe you’ll help save your neighborhood someday.
It’s not the building material that’s the one problem here; it’s the carelessness of building code, safety enforcement and absence of federal and state aid to fireproof homes in known fire zones. It’s the catastrophically incorrect hundred year old policy that would rather burn down a chunk of homes every ten years rather than admit that policy is wrong and that the indigenous people were right all along. Brick or wood or concrete or steel, none of these will stop the hottest fires with any certainty. We know what does, and we’ve allowed it to become unsafe to have wood homes. We know how to stop these wildfires. Build with brick if you like, but:
Only fire can prevent forest fires.
Think about what you’ve just written… you’re saying that a stone building is less safe than a wood building in a fire.
Have we seen any stone cities burn down lately? Because I haven’t seen London burn down since they replaced all the wooden houses with brick in 1666.
I am not sure the wood framing matters much in this case. The fires are burning houses because the roofs are flammable, or embers are getting in the house through the eaves or a broken window. So in the end you have a completely burned down wood-framed house or a hollow concrete house that is no longer structurally safe.
WW2 saw urban firestorms in European cities built of brick. The insides are still flammable.
Wind-stoked wildfires are not cat4 or something tornadoes.
Most new houses built like that in a lot of places in Europe. Prefab reinforced concrete load-bearing walls + pourous concrete for the rest. It's either stucco or one layer of brick on the outside to give character to the building.
More than just buildings.
ZONING and Building Code need to change.
You're correct that buildings must be more robust and literally capable of surviving an ongoing 4th of July event directly above the property.
However they must also be built such that there is less which is able to burn. Also so that that which does burn is less deadly when it burns.
There also need to be better firebreaks and less natural 'fuel load', which when there IS a good set of rain in the near future, needs to be burned in a rotating cycle to restore nature's fuel balance and discourage catastrophic uncontrolled correction events.
Relatedly, door locks sometimes seem to be "insurance rated", as in insurance companies give their opinion on what sort of lock one should use. If you couple that with the belief that no lock is 100% secure, it sort of suggests that a collaboration with insurance companies to decrease the odds they'll have to foot huge reconstruction bills (via stuff like you said, construction techniques, firefighting capacity, etc.) could alleviate this conflict somewhat.
We live in an ICF house. People don’t realize it is “framed” with concrete instead of wood unless we tell them. Siding on the outside and drywall on the inside.
I don't think its necessarily the case what people don't want, but I assume that type of build doesn't come cheap and people find existing homes expensive enough.
It seems some houses that focused on fire safety survived the fire with minimal damage.
https://nypost.com/2025/01/15/real-estate/passive-house-surv...
Metal roof, passive house so embers don’t get sucked in. Concrete walls around the property and plants that don’t contribute to the fire.
The house might cost an additional $100k to build compared to conventional. But it would make all that back on energy, roofing, and insurance costs- probably at the point the conventional home would need a roof replacement.
Builders don’t build such houses unless a client or building code mandates it.
Other sources say the house wasn’t a passive house but did have fire rated walls.
It seems like a lot of fire resistance can be created just by focusing on defensible space and having a concrete or metal fence. Then protecting the roof ventilation from fire (there are special screening materials that can be bought). Then using class A rated materials on the roof and then the exterior. Then metal framed windows instead of vinyl. Actually doesn't cost that much more- they should require it in building codes in these areas. The issue then is retrofit- insurers should probably require a defensible space in these high risk areas.
https://youtu.be/yZe-TlYxm9g?si=Uuqy6rhrhUb8l-_c
> The trouble is, brick isn't earthquake resistant. Not without steel reinforcement.
It's just a matter of throwing a couple hundreds $ of metal and cement every few rows of bricks, like this: https://www.pointp.fr/asset/27/07/AST212707-XL.jpg when you see how much american spend on houses it's a drop in the ocean.
FYI a two storey 10x10m house will run you less than 10k euros in bricks for the external walls, and that's with 30cm wide honeycomb bricks which probably provide enough thermal insulation as is for LA. Add 10k of rockwool insulation and you're good to go for most places.
You use wood for simple reasons: it's widely available, that's the only thing your workers are trained on, it's cheaper so builders make more money, it's faster and allow crazier design (mcmansions). Same thing for asphalt shingles, nobody uses that, it needs constant replacement, but it's cheaper, easier/faster to install.
In europe we mostly build rectangles with simple two pitch roofs, ceramic tiles that last 50+ years, most of them are made of bricks, even in seismically active countries like Italy.
Europe: https://www.philomag.com/sites/default/files/styles/article_...
US: https://www.reviewjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/950...
And skill, likely in low supply, and labor. I'm sure some in the Pacific Palisades could afford this no problem, but many in altadena inherited their homes and their homes were the majority of their net worth.
Admittedly not very knowledgeable about this stuff but I feel like a lot of these types of comments are greatly trivializing this problem
I'm curious how the roof is constructed on your cinder block house. That kind of cinder block construction seems obviously superior to me, but I can't think of any roof that would be so obviously superior.
There are a LOT of fireproof roofing materials; the US is quite strange in covering most houses with these asphalt shingles. Clay/concrete tiles are pretty standard; slate or metal also options. There are presumably different ways of dealing with the gaps and ventilation to keep out embers.
Tokyo has high earthquake and moderately high fire risk, people here tend to go with steel reinforced concrete but wooden buildings remain common as well.
> brick isn't earthquake resistant
This is an extreme that is not true. Bricks are harder to make earthquake resistant but it's perfectly possible to build houses that have SOME bricks in it that are also earthquake resistant. There are permutations of materials that are both more fire resistant and more earthquake resistant to the required level at a certain height of the building.
They clearly qualified it with "Not without steel reinforcement."
Anyways the difference in labor costs between wood and reinforced brick would be massive in LA county not to mention the additional cost of materials.
Much more practical solution is more aggressive defensible spaces, cracking down on gardens, and proper management of fire reservoirs
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In northern Italy, the rebuilding of mountain villages in brick and stone after devastating fires had destroyed many of them was ordered in the nineteenth century. It's absurd to claim you can't do anything against fires and the world has become uninsurable in the 21st century and in the world's richest country, while you keep building everything in the cheapest and lightest wood. The sight of the houses burned to the ground except for their fireplace and chimney in the middle is both sad and infuriating.