As climate change strengthens the storms hitting the Gulf Coast, efforts to strengthen the homes of residents have suffered a series of legislative setbacks. This is due to home builders pushing to hold off new building code improvements, and anti-regulation state governments eager to help them do it.
A report being released on Monday shows Florida isn’t alone in easing up on building regulations even as the effects of global warming escalate. The Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety examined building policies in 18 Atlantic and Gulf Coast states and found that despite the increasing severity of natural disasters, many of those states have relaxed their approach to codes -- or have yet to impose any whatsoever.
"There’s no longer the automatic assumption that codes are good," Julie Rochman, the head of the institute, said in an interview. "We just have an incredible capacity for amnesia and denial in this country."
The problem, as always, is money; while reliably hurricane-tossed Florida updated its building codes every three years in response to expert recommendations, the largest home builders have resisted those codes since approximately forever, citing increased building costs and, therefore, increased housing prices. They successfully pushed the Florida government last June to abandon that plan in favor of updating them only as deemed necessary by the Florida Building Commission—and were able to do so over the objections of real estate dealers, insurance companies, government experts and all other invested parties. As the report demonstrates, it is part of a general pattern in the region of deregulation in service of slightly cheaper houses—and, when storms come, slightly more deaths.
In South Carolina, where Hurricane Irma damaged or destroyed more than 16,000 homes, the Legislature is considering a bill that would slow the rate at which the state updates its codes, shifting the cycle from three years to six. North Carolina made a similar change in 2013.
And those are the states that bother to have mandatory statewide codes at all; Texas, famously, does not. The premise in more libertarian-minded statehouses has been that if you purchase a home from a builder who doesn't want to tie the roof down in a certain way or bolt your new home to its foundation in accordance with the practice in other states, it sucks to be you and whoever fishes your corpse out of the debris afterward can feel free to file a lawsuit to express your post-death indignation. It is the age-old balance, in America; spend a hundred extra dollars in the off chance that it will save a life someday, or keep the hundred dollars under the assumption that you'll be long out of Dodge before your product is put to the test.
On the Gulf Coast, it seems the memory of recent storms is less vivid than the business demand to deregulate anything that can be deregulated, and so here we are.