Collaborative Research: Regulatory Pragmatism and Building Codes for Hazard-Resilient Housing

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Few aspects of life are more important to people than their homes. Building codes are a major form of regulation and one of the primary mechanisms by which states and societies try to make their homes safe in the face of hazards like hurricanes and earthquakes. This project advances the science needed to understand and improve compliance with key hazard-resistant practices in the design and construction of housing. It approaches this challenge using the concept of regulatory pragmatism, which argues that improving housing stock resilience and reducing disaster impacts for housing may necessitate prioritizing those aspects of the building code that allow builders to most cheaply and effectively reach these goals. Through engineering assessment, combined with interviews and surveys of builders and residents, this project is collecting the data necessary to design useful interventions to increase code compliance with key hazard-resistant building practices and, in so doing, protect human life and the built environment from the effects of a disaster. Despite the fact that building codes touch the lives of many, there is little research studying how regulatory strategies and sound engineering can together reduce disaster risk.Project work aims to examine compliance with key hazard-resistant building practices among builders and households, and explore the factors that influence compliance, including household and builder attitudes and experiences, local regulations, perceived and real costs, and local building practices. Crucially, in parallel, the project will use performance-based engineering methods to quantify the benefits and risks associated with complying with hazard-resistant building practices in terms of housing safety and post-event housing occupancy. These findings will be used to identify and prioritize key building practices based on their effectiveness in reducing disaster risk and their achievability (e.g., in terms of cost and compatibility with local building practices). Building on initial findings, the project will then consider the design and assessment of a pragmatic, compliance-fostering intervention. The project is conducted in two multi-hazard U.S. contexts, Alaska and Puerto Rico, providing a most-different comparison to explore how building practices, compliance, and intervention outcomes differ based on community characteristics. It will also involve interdisciplinary training of students supporting the development of a workforce trained to address regulatory and engineering challenges associated with disaster resilient housing.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.