[Editor's note: Wildfires in Los Angeles. Hurricanes across Florida and the Southeast. Floods, extreme heat, and severe weather events are no longer rare occurrences—they’re becoming the new normal. The homebuilding and residential development industries face an urgent reckoning: how to build homes, neighborhoods, and communities that can withstand the increasing severity of climate-related natural disasters. This interview is another installment in a series from The Builder’s Daily exploring the choices, challenges, and solutions shaping the future of resilient housing.]

Fred Malik has been managing director of FORTIFIED, the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety's resilience program, for the past 16 years. He has seen the devastation fires and hurricanes have inflicted on U.S. housing over that time and the rising costs in replacing and repairing homes.

KB Home recently announced a deal to build a first-of-its-kind fire resistant neighborhood in Escondido, California, that will be the nation’s first application of a new neighborhood-level wildfire certification IBHS has developed.

Rising insurance costs have been a major concern in California and Florida because of ever-increasing risks with weather patterns and wildfires growing more ferocious and damaging.

Contributor writer Richard Lawson and Malik recently discussed the challenges and how IBHS’s FORTIFIED program expands resilience. Malik touches on why it pursued fire resilience, cost challenges with resilience, building codes, and how the non-profit organization addresses damaging storms now reaching deeper into the country.

Richard Lawson

How has something like what you did with KB Home been applied in hurricane-prone areas?"

Fred Malik

As far as designation programs go, at IBHS, our FORTIFIED program was sort of the predecessor of what we're doing with wildfire. We've been working on hurricane, high wind, wind-driven rain and hail. I took over the program 16 years ago, so we've been working on that. Our bread and butter is wind, wind-driven rain and hail.

So, the wildfire community is sort of something that we have been working on. We’ve doing house-to-house sort of combat with making individual houses more resilient. And we've been longing for a way to really look at how can we affect durability on a community wide scale, and sort of wildfire community is our, sort of our pilot in that realm, if you will, saying, okay, we know what we want to do on the house to house, but how can we then wrap that around in the community. It's challenging in both, whether we're talking about wildfire or we're talking about hurricane, because it requires individual property owners to make a set of decisions and everybody has a lot of different influences that go on. We can tell people, these are the things that you need to do and this is the kind of thing that will make your community more resilient. But at the end of the day, with properties the way they are, the property ownership is the way it is, it takes a lot of collaboration and persuasion to have everybody see the benefit to them individually as well as at a community scale.

Alabama is a market where we have a long history of activity in the fortified program, and we had about 18,000 homes in the two coastal counties there, Mobile and Baldwin, that were hit by Hurricane Sally. And you could see at the community scale, where you had concentrations of fortified homes in that community, how much better they fared than non-fortified communities. Having tangible proof point like that, especially immediately after an event, tends to get people's attention. Our market share continues to grow in Alabama and be inspirational in places like Louisiana and North Carolina."

Richard Lawson

You're talking about selling the consumer. If you get with a builder that creates an entire community where somebody has a choice of buying into that community, that would make it an easier sale."

Fred Malik

That certainly is the hypothesis if we can get with the builders at the front end, who are involved in making critical decisions about the infrastructure. So, the way the community is, the lots are divided up in the community, the way the streets lay out, how you control through mechanisms like the HOA, how you can control fuel loads from things like storage of outdoor items, or policing of landscaping, things like that. There's a balance, because people don't necessarily like a ton of regulation and enforcement. But if you can build it into the communities, call it the community DNA from the beginning, it's part of what the community is about. Then you're right; people opt in because they have a desired end goal. And so, we're really excited about our work with KB. We think that will be a great way to influence folks on a larger scale on how we can help folks be resilient. And wildfire is such a unique peril, too, because fires that are burning a mile or so away can generate embers that can flow into the community. And I think people are starting to wake up to the fact that the fire doesn't have to be next door for it to be a problem for you. It can be out of sight and still create a challenge for you. And so you want your community to be prepared so it doesn't get to your next-door neighbor or your house. We're hoping to tap into something good with the wildfire community and working with builders like KB Home."

Richard Lawson

Cost is one of the challenges with resiliency because of the materials. There's a premium on the front end, at least for now. Once you hit scale, the price will come down. But it's a tougher selling point to convince people to pay more on the front end so they can save on the back end over time, such as lower insurance costs."

Fred Malik

That's one of the things that IBHS is uniquely positioned to provide. You're right, the dollars make a difference. Every day I'm out there talking about resilience, and it always comes back to the same question, what is the value for me, whether I'm a builder or I'm an individual homeowner, and if I'm going to make the decision to spend my money, how do I know that the money I'm going to spend is actually going to deliver the result that I'm after? You want to make sure that you're spending those dollars wisely, and we have intentionally used decades of research we've done to create our designation programs of fortified and wildfire prepared so that we are systematically orienting the actions that you should take based on what's most likely to occur. Let's spend money to address that first, and then we can work on the other things that might happen. But these things are the things that we can really say with certainty that are vulnerable. So, for example, in the fortified program, we have three levels of designation. We have three levels of resilience. Everything starts with the roof. We've closing in on 80,000 homes and businesses in the U.S. that have fortified roofs on them, and regardless of the level of designation, all of them have the fortified roof.

That's because the research is very, very clear, the most vulnerable system on your home that's going to stand up to the wind and the rain is the roof. Spending money on other things doesn't make sense until you've addressed the roof. And so getting back to your point, we can say, when you invest in resilience, this is what you should invest in, so that we know you're going to get the outcome that you're after."

Richard Lawson

What's the biggest challenge when it comes to building codes?"

Fred Malik

There are a couple of things that are inherent in the code process. Building codes are, by and large, a consensus process. Lots and lots of stakeholders contribute to that conversation, and there's a lot of give and take, and builders play a critical role in that. Builders are a for-profit business. They've got real, logical concerns about regulation and what the impact is on cost and affordability for end users. But we must keep in mind that houses are supposed to be a shelter. That's the business we're in, providing shelter, and that shelter needs to perform when that bad day happens. And so that consensus-building process can be a challenge in code enforcement if small municipalities don't have the budget to fund a robust and proper code enforcement capability, leaving folks to police themselves — I’m going to do it the right way because I'm a builder, that's what I do. You know, unfortunately, there are lots of opportunities for folks who maybe aren't motivated by doing the right thing to take advantage of homeowners. That's part of the reason why regulation is necessary.

The other thing is understanding the risk. Are we just doing something because we feel like it will be the right thing to do, or are we doing something that has been proven to deliver results? And sometimes, through that consensus-building process, we may end up more in the category of, “Hey, this looks nice, and it sounds good, so maybe that's the right thing to do, versus, “Hey, this is sound decision-making based on research.”

In our case, we work alongside the building code with our designation programs. Our intention is not necessarily to replace the building code. The building code is designed not necessarily to preserve the use of the building, but to preserve life safety, give the occupants enough time to get out of harm's way, and then let whatever is going to happen, happen. That's generally speaking, the orientation of the code. What fortify does is it says, okay, life safety, by and large, will be taken care of by the code. Now, how can we preserve the usability of that building, or make it so that it can be repaired less and be reoccupied faster? We offer the ability to pay attention to those key details, like the roof, that will make the difference in getting people back to normal faster.

Keeping water out of the house, for example. If you have lots of water inundation, that can lead to loss of the physical property inside and mold growth, especially if there's a prolonged and protracted loss of power. If our goal is to keep the water out, it doesn't mean that the house isn't damaged, say, on the outside, it doesn't mean we don't have roof cover damage or siding loss, or something along those lines. It still needs to be repaired. But if we can keep the water from getting in, we can keep the value of the loss and the impact on the occupants way more manageable, and that's been proven to be the case both in our research in the in the lab and in our research center in South Carolina and the field."

Richard Lawson

We’re coming up on hurricane season, and the seasons seem to worsen. Storms are becoming more violent and damaging. How has that changed your business?"

Fred Malik

I worked for a national builder for 15 years and then as part of a small family company developing commercial and residential real estate. I come from that background. I took over the FORTIFIED program 16 years ago, and it was a really hard sell. We had to be out there communicating about this stuff and be prepared for it to take a while.

People are looking at resilience and saying, 'I really need this as a homeowner, as an emergency manager in a community. We need to preserve workforce housing, for example, or we need to make sure that if this bad day happens in our community, that we can bring people back and get people going back to normal as quickly as possible.'

Fire is a devastating peril. If your house catches fire, reusing it will be challenging, especially if it is fully engulfed. So, there is something to be said for preventing anything from happening whatsoever when it comes to the fire peril. When it comes to wind and wind-driven rain, we can mitigate the severity of the impacts.

You can have many well-intentioned conversations about why certain things are happening in the climate. But it's getting warmer and wetter, and storms are intensifying faster. They're achieving higher northern latitudes than they ever have, putting a lot more people at risk, and they recognize that they don't have to live within a mile of the coast for a hurricane to be a problem. Folks, unfortunately, in western North Carolina learned that to a significant degree. Many wind speeds have been recorded above hurricane thresholds in places like Indiana and Illinois, and some recent hurricanes that penetrated deep into the heartland.

It's a peril people are waking up to and saying we need to pay attention to this. The other part of that, which is economically driven, is that there is growing awareness that it is very difficult to insure properties at this point because of how they perform in these different hazards. Part of the reason I made my house fortified, even though I live in Florida and there's a really good building code and code enforcement in my area of Florida, is that I need my house to be more insurable to afford to live here. How does it influence insurability? Well, the owner needs to show people they took precautions, mitigated these risks you're insuring for, and have a certificate of compliance that says these are the things in the house. A third party has verified them, giving the insurer more information to decide whether the home is a reasonable risk. That economics is starting to be felt away from the hurricane coast, for sure, in places like Oklahoma, Minnesota, Kentucky, those communities are also starting to feel the impacts."

Richard Lawson

You talked about your work in Alabama, but what about Florida?"

Fred Malik

We don't have a large footprint in Florida, yet. We've got an increasing level of interest here. However, the reason for that is that we contributed a lot of our subject matter expertise to building code development here in Florida and wind mitigation efforts here in Florida long before we even had the FORTIFIED program. Hurricane Andrew in 1992 was an eye-opener here in Florida. Since, the building codes here and the code enforcement have been effective, mainly for more recently built homes to resist those perils as they increase in intensity. We know these things are working in Florida.

The older your home is, the more likely it is that it wasn't built under one of the more recent, well-enforced building codes. As your home ages, it's likely to have damage. You can be vulnerable if you're not keeping up with maintenance or staying on top of roof cover replacements.

Florida has been a good laboratory for understanding that. We can then bring that to other communities that haven't necessarily kept up, and that's why we have such a significant presence in Alabama. Hurricane Katrina did a number on Alabama. Louisiana has had a ton of landfall hurricanes in the last five years, and it's been getting devastated. It's now our fastest-growing market. We've got a presence up in North Carolina. We’ve got 15,000 homes along the Carolina coast, because North Carolina has been getting many storms that go across Florida or skip Florida and then slam up into the East Coast."

Richard Lawson

What’s the next big step?"

Fred Malik

Wind as a risk for consumers and homeowners, along with hurricanes, isn’t a tough sell along the coast. We still have to overcome the economics or ensure the value proposition is clear.

However, wind-related phenomena, like severe convective storms and straight-line wind events in the inland portions of the country, also affect the built environment more. We are pushing up into the inland portions of the states. We have established epicenters of activity in Oklahoma. Oklahoma has some of the highest property insurance rates based on weather risk compared to anywhere not on the coast. We've got a grant program that we'll be helping launch in Minnesota around putting fortified roofs on Minnesotans' houses. Kentucky had a rash of devastating tornadoes a couple of years ago, so a grant program is also coming to Kentucky."