With natural disasters striking communities across the U.S. at an accelerating pace, the question of how to build homes that can endure them has never been more critical.
New research spanning political science and civil engineering shows that the answer could lie at the intersection of smarter regulatory systems and stronger structures. While neither approach is sufficient on its own, together they offer a promising path toward safer homes.
University of Notre Dame political scientist Susan Ostermann and civil engineering professors María J. Echeverría from California State University, Sacramento and Abbie Liel from the University of Colorado Boulder have identified the building code features that have the biggest impact on hazard resilience and translated those features into tangible, practical building solutions. The findings from their National Science Foundation-funded study were published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.
A dual approach to resilience
Ostermann and Liel say that housing resilience is both a governance issue and a technical problem. Building codes, as written, already contain nearly everything one needs to build safe homes — but in many places, implementation remains a barrier.
"Regulations support the goals of safe, resilient housing, but they can also get in the way," said Ostermann, associate professor of global affairs and political science at Notre Dame's Keough School of Global Affairs . "We need to understand how culture and local building practices interact with regulatory processes."
A locally informed approach to regulation was especially important given the site of the study: Anchorage, Alaska. Geographically isolated from the continental U.S., its independent-minded population often distrusts governmental rules. Even after more than 750 homes were destroyed or damaged by a magnitude 7.1 earthquake in 2018, many Alaskans have retained their libertarian-leaning views. In other words, simply strengthening building codes does not guarantee safer construction if the codes are not followed in the first place.
"People everywhere share a desire for safe housing, but communities vary in the degree to which they regulate and enforce building codes," Ostermann said.
A pragmatic approach to regulation
To gain local expertise on the key features of hazard-resilient housing, the researchers conducted interviews with nearly 40 experts including structural and geotechnical engineers, builders, regulators, inspectors and others. Underlying this approach is regulatory pragmatism, a concept Ostermann developed to help governments regulate more effectively in places where traditional, top-down models fail.
"It suggests that we need to understand the context in which we regulate, and that we need to design regulation for that context — which means sometimes doing things that are a little bit weird," Ostermann said.
The sheer complexity of building code poses a challenge in and of itself.
"If you were to print it out, it's multiple volumes," Ostermann said. "It's too big to be comprehended by almost anybody, whether it's the government using it or a contractor trying to meet the code."
Because few people can realistically utilize the entire code, Ostermann and Liel argue that local officials and other stakeholders must prioritize a smaller set of features that matter most for hazard safety in their particular environment.
Engineering insights: Why homes fail and how to fix it
Echeverría and Liel's computational structural engineering analysis showed that many homes in Alaska do not perform well in hazardous conditions because key structural elements are missing due to lack of compliance.
In many two-story homes built over large, open garages — a common design in Alaska — the mass of the second floor sits on a first floor with limited lateral support. "You're basically missing one side of that box," Liel said. "That overstrains the other sides and creates a twisting torsion problem, so these homes do not perform as well during an earthquake."
Echeverría and Liel identified a list of critical structural features that should be prioritized to maximize compliance and hazard resilience:
- Shear walls — walls that are designed to withstand lateral forces such as wind
- Proper framing around garage openings
- Hold-downs — steel connectors that anchor a wall to the foundation and keep it anchored amid shaking
Liel emphasized that these solutions are neither exotic nor expensive, but homeowners and builders often do not recognize their significance. Echeverría and Liel's findings provided the very list of "critical features" needed to inform Ostermann's pragmatic regulation.
Ostermann and Liel are studying housing not only in Alaska, but also in Puerto Rico, which is still rebuilding eight years after Hurricane Maria, and Lahaina, Maui, which suffered widespread damage during a 2023 wildfire.
"When communities, engineers, builders and policymakers work together, resilience stops being an abstract ideal and becomes a place people can safely make their home in," Ostermann said. "If we keep listening, learning and adapting, we can build homes that not only endure the next disaster, but also give families the security and stability they need to plan for the future."
