alt Hacker NewsThere should be a way to build fire resistant buildings to reduce the cost of insuring them, likely this would be the solution in California without price caps.
You can build out of concrete and use fire resistant materials like metal or tile for the roof and your house is nearly fireproof. These buildings would be realistically insurable in both California or Florida. They would cost more to build, not THAT much more though especially if land costs many millions, an extra 50k - 100k to build out of concrete is a very reasonable expense.
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Since you mentioned FL, we have mostly solved hurricane level wind resistant building codes. Hurricane ties are cheap and they work. Anything built post hurricane Andrew has these. There's also materials like Hardi Plank siding, which does add a bit more cost, but effectively surrounds the house in a thin layer of concrete. Flooding is a mixed bag. My house is built substantially up and off the ground above the '100 year flood line'. Even if a flood didn't enter the dwelling proper, it would still be devastating.
The problem is storms are getting bigger and more frequent from climate change and hitting areas they normally don't.
I've been collecting a bunch of links on what things a homeowner can do. Probably the simplest thing is the clear a 5 foot ember resistant zone around the home. So remove greenery and replace wood chips with stone for example. Use fire resistant vents so ember does enter attic or crawlspace. Use Class A fire rated roof (which you can also get for asphalt shingles). If you have wood siding, replace with fiber cement siding...
https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/200-wrr/Safer-from...
https://readyforwildfire.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Low-...
https://osfm.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/fire-engineering-and-inv...
> You can build out of concrete and use fire resistant materials like metal or tile for the roof and your house is nearly fireproof
Just like exactly the rest of the world? We, the non-USA folks, are looking yearly at either fires or hurricanes destroying these wooden houses there and people keep rebuilding them. Insanity.
> There should be a way to build fire resistant buildings to reduce the cost of insuring them
There is:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZe-TlYxm9g
But when a lot of your housing stock is multiple decades old that was built before modern building codes, there's a lot of kindling out there.
Steel frame, flame retardant insulation and cladding, rammed earth, .. these are all options.
Flammable trees well away from a leaf free clean guttered (or no gutter) house are also no compromise requirements.
See: https://research.csiro.au/bushfire/ and https://www.csiro.au/en/work-with-us/services/testing-and-ce...
for the rabbit hole of Australian Bushfire housing certification and testing.
Burning Down the House: Trial by Fire CSIRO- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBtawn7IAnI