Business
Creating resilient communities to avoid the next housing crisis
We’ve all seen the numbers. Growing dislocation between what consumers pay and expenses incurred by insurance carriers. Challenges accessing affordable insurance solutions. Consumers in Florida and Louisiana paying multiples more for insurance. Replacement materials suffering from run-away inflation. But don’t be fooled; these statements are about auto insurance, not homeowners insurance.
So why is there no national auto insurance crisis? In part because about 50 years ago the auto insurance industry established a risk management framework that started with data and ended with safety standards. In between were certain government mandates, narrowly targeted government risk pools and enough consumer demand that even Saturday afternoon truck ads are full of references to 4-star insurance safety ratings.
If we hope to avoid a housing crisis in America, we need to do that again for the rapidly escalating risks posed by wildfires, hurricanes, extreme heat and flooding.
The first step – again – would be establishing one source of credible, publicly verifiable data that deepens our collective knowledge of the risks. In other words, we need a crash test dummy for homes, communities, and watersheds to inform and improve local decision-making. Once we have those community-level insights, we can bolster the case for dramatically expanding the effective yet sub-scale deployment of home safety standards like the Institute for Business and Home Safety’s (IBHS) Fortified or Prepared home designations.
The government, particularly at the state level – where insurance is regulated – should use the same data to steer various forms of capital to the right resilient infrastructure. They should embrace innovation in every form. And they should only put taxpayer funds at risk to address true market failures, not cheap forms of capital.
But the biggest change we need is cultural. We need to instill a consumer demand for home safety that’s at least as effective as the one for cars.
Climate literacy
Changing the culture starts with greater awareness. For example, there is a significant knowledge gap around flood insurance—96% of U.S. homeowners lack flood coverage, either because it’s excluded from standard homeowner’s policies or because the binary nature of flood zones gives at-risk homeowners a false sense of security. As a result, too many consumers only realize flood damage is not covered until after the event.
Take the recent floods in Texas as an example. FEMA estimates that only 4% of homeowners nationwide have flood insurance, even those in risk-prone areas. In Kerr County, the area hardest hit by flooding, the percentage of homeowners with flood insurance was even lower. Only 2.2% had policies in place. Many in Texas thought flood insurance was an unnecessary expense or only discovered their lack of coverage after the flood waters receded.
The notion of a “once in a hundred-year storm” is a fallacy. Too many families mistakenly believe that surviving one natural catastrophe means the odds of facing another are low. The reality is far more complex. Regardless of recent disaster history, every event should be seen as a critical opportunity to rebuild stronger and smarter.
Once we all understand the true threat that today’s severe weather poses, we can come to a collective plan of action more effectively.
Risk mitigation
In many cases, the best offense is defense. The Natural Hazard Mitigation Save Report shows that it’s six times more cost effective to mitigate for a risk than for recovery after an incident.
Facilitating scaled reconstruction at the IBHS standards will better equip homeowners and communities to withstand natural disasters like wildfires and hurricanes, thus enhancing their economic stability. Our first line of defense will always be the tried-and-true structure hardening techniques that have relatively low cost, yet high return, like creating defensible space around homes, upgrading roofing, installing impact-resistant windows, adding backup generators, and deploying low-temperature sensors.
And like automobiles, there’s also a wave of modern technologies that need to be assessed, scaled and deployed – across consumer and industrial markets – in a similar three-to-five-year market segment cycle that evidenced the adoption of reverse cameras and blind spot monitors as standard equipment.
Public-private partnership
Insurability equals affordability – with affordability offering peace of mind and financial stability for the individuals and families that make up our communities at large. For communities that fail to adapt, the economic consequences will be widespread and profound.
At the end of the day, we need to replicate the value chain approach that made the auto safety framework so successful. Builders, like the OEMs of old, need to embrace safety as a core customer demand. Architects, structural engineers, and developers, like auto parts suppliers from all over the world, need to make resilient design the standard, not bespoke. And realtors, like car dealers pushing the newest safety features, need to understand how to navigate the various analytical tools and disclosure approaches in a quest for greater risk and pricing transparency.
We’ve seen this type of public-private partnership work in the energy efficiency space. Companies work together with communities to audit homes, and communities incentivize homeowners implementing that advice with rebates. The same could work for resilience. Imagine, resilience audits that when implemented not only lower homeowners’ insurance rates, but make the entire neighborhood safer and more insurable.
Most importantly, though, we need to replicate the safety-first mindset that car manufacturers and insurers created in the 1970s. After all, if we can make truck owners demand a 4-star safety rating, we can do it again with homeowners.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
