alt Hacker NewsNot 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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.