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Is the world becoming uninsurable?

(charleshughsmith.substack.com)
476 points spking | 1 comments | 17 Jan 25 00:32 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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Animats ◴[17 Jan 25 04:28 UTC] No.42734092[source]▶
Not 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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_tariky ◴[17 Jan 25 06:24 UTC] No.42734644[source]▶
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.

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1. munificent ◴[18 Jan 25 00:47 UTC] No.42744757[source]▶
> As a foreigner, it seems to me that Americans prioritize building cheap homes over constructing better and more resilient ones.

"Americans" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

It would probably be more accurate to say "It seems to me that the history of American culture and economic systems have led to a system whose emergent behavior is to prioritize building cheap-but-easy-to-modify homes over constructing smaller-harder-to-modify-but-more-resilient ones."

Sure "we" need to take action, but the machine is very large and we are all very small gears in it. A twenty-something buying their first house doesn't have a magic wand to wave that will summon cinder block houses into being that don't physically exist. A builder who wants to build cinder block houses doesn't have a magic wand to rewrite city building codes that presume residential construction is mostly wood. A city council member who wants to modernize building codes doesn't have a magic wand to get enough constituents to prioritize this over housing costs, homelessness (but I repeat myself), jobs, etc.

Everyone's problems seem easy when you are very far away from them.