Barrett Highlights Need To Balance Disaster Resilience With Housing Affordability

Washington, D.C. - Today, during a Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing on disaster resilience and emergency preparedness, Congressman Tom Barrett (MI-07) discussed balancing disaster resilience in construction permitting with housing affordability. In an exchange with U.S. Chamber of Commerce Vice President for Environmental Affairs and Sustainability Chuck Chaitovitz, Barrett highlighted the need for Congress to strengthen new construction against disasters while ensuring building requirements do not price ordinary Americans out of homeownership.

Click here or the image above to watch Rep. Barrett's testimony.

Below are highlights from their conversation.

Barrett: Mr. Chaitovitz… I know you talk about resiliency and kind of preventative nature of things being an important and critical piece of this. Not directly under the jurisdiction of this committee, but certainly in front of us as members of Congress is this issue of housing affordability and the ability to get people into homes. We're short the number of homes that we need for the number of people that have demand for homes, and that's become a very critical concern for all of us.

One of the challenges with that, I think, is - we talked a little bit here on this panel about the building codes and building to the next highest level of building code that evolves over time, but within that is sometimes things that are not related to resiliency. They're related to energy efficiency or other things like that. Can you speak to that tradeoff a little bit? Because I think we want resilient homes that are not going to be vulnerable to natural disaster without over-regulations and things unrelated to that resiliency that are going to drive up the cost of homes and price out ordinary Americans.

Chaitovitz: Well, thanks so much for the question. I really appreciate it, and I'll go back to how I focused on the economic growth argument for resilience, and I'll turn to, Mr. Fugate mentioned the Alabama study, and there's specific numbers that building to the fortified standard would save in claims about $105 million in that area, and then reduce the amount of deductibles that homeowners would have to pay, and so if you're building to those higher standards, you are getting the economic payback. That also is very consistent with the study that we talked about before.

$1 invested in preparedness gives you $13 in reduced losses in economic savings. That doesn't mean you're going to eliminate those losses, but for income, GDP, and jobs, that's going to mean more communities are able to respond and recover more quickly, and the same goes with homeowners. I think there's a good analogy there.

Barrett: Sure, and I think that resiliency and maybe sturdiness of a home or a building, whether it's a public municipal building or whether it's an individual home is one aspect, certainly, but I have concerns that we're layering on additional burdensome regulations unrelated to the resiliency of a structure. Is that something that you think we can parse through and make sure that the regulations that we are asserting are ones that are actually designed to make homes more resilient but not unaffordable for people?

Chaitovitz: Well, a really important point in the FEMA Act is the permitting reform measures there that will allow you to repair and recover homes more quickly. That eliminates the delays that are typically found when you're looking to rebuild a home, and that will help homeowners get back in their home more quickly.