WASHINGTON – President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has pledged to help communities prepare for the effects of climate change. A new demand for stricter building standards could put this commitment to the test.
On Wednesday, two influential organizations advocating stronger measures to combat natural disasters, the Defense Council for Natural Resources and the Association of State Floodplain Managers, filed a petition with the federal government demanding stricter building standards for homes and infrastructure along rivers and coasts are required.
These changes would protect millions of Americans better if climate change worsened, and they reflect the kind of policy changes experts say the United States will have to adopt to deal with the effects of global warming. But they would also make houses more expensive to build and risk the annoyance of local governments and builders, which is why previous administrations were reluctant to make similar changes.
“The American dream of home ownership turns into a nightmare when houses are built in flooded areas,” said Joel Scata, lawyer for the NRDC water and climate team who worked on the petition. “Affordable housing shouldn’t mean a cheap house in an unsafe place.”
The 58-page petition has both legal and political implications. The two groups argue that federal law requires the government to update its rules to “reduce flood damage as much as possible”. Filing a petition is a first step towards possible future legal challenges.
In particular, the involvement of the NRDC could make it difficult for the new government to ignore the petition. The group’s president is Gina McCarthy, who was chosen by Mr Biden to coordinate domestic climate policy within the federal government. Through a spokesman for the Biden transition team, Ms. McCarthy declined a request for comment.
The push is a preview of the challenge facing Mr Biden, who has made tackling climate change a central part of his campaign and now must decide what Americans are willing to accept in order to achieve that goal.
This challenge is particularly acute when it comes to preparing for the effects of rising seas, worsening storms, the spread of forest fires, and other consequences of a warming planet. This part of the climate change agenda is particularly tense, according to current and former officials, because it means telling Americans to change where and how they live.
“It’s really messy,” said Alice Hill, who oversaw resilience planning on the National Security Council during the Obama administration and is now a Senior Fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations. “They can upset a lot of voters.”
Perhaps nothing demonstrates this challenge better than the rules for flood insurance. The National Flood Insurance Program, subsidized by taxpayers in 1968, was set up to ensure people in areas deemed too risky by private insurers receive flood insurance. However, the insurance guarantee had the unintended consequence that construction work was encouraged at these locations.
Even if climate change increases the likelihood of flooding, construction in high risk areas will continue to increase, often without adequate safety standards. In many coastal states, the areas hardest hit by flooding saw more residential construction increases than the rest of the state, according to 2019 data.
By 2045, more than 300,000 existing coastal homes will be regularly threatened by floods, the Union of Affected Scientists concluded in 2018. By 2050, more than 800,000 homes worth almost half a trillion dollars will be at risk, according to real estate data firm Zillow. In Florida, sea level rise seems already to be hurting property prices in vulnerable areas.
However, previous attempts to reduce housing construction in flood-prone areas have largely failed as voters and industry were pushed back.
In 2012, Congress passed legislation that would have increased flood insurance premiums to better reflect risk. But two years later, public backlash caused lawmakers to turn around.
Then President Barack Obama ordered that government-funded construction in flood areas should be built to stricter standards, such as higher above the ground. President Trump reversed that order under pressure from builders worried about increased construction costs.
The National Association of Home Builders, a Washington-based trade group, declined to comment.
The petition submitted on Wednesday calls on the federal government to be even more ambitious.
To gain access to federal flood insurance, municipalities must follow federal regulations to limit their flood exposure. These rules revolve around a single key requirement: local officials must ensure that the first floor of a new or renovated building is at least as high above the ground as the likely height of a major flood.
In their petition, the NRDC and the Association of Floodplain Managers argue that it is necessary to update these standards as climate change is making floods worse. You have requested that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which runs the flood insurance program, impose new requirements on the communities that want to use this program.
These changes include building new or renovated homes higher from the ground – two feet higher in areas exposed to river floods and four feet higher in coastal areas. The two groups also want FEMA to ban the construction of hospitals, police stations, sewage treatment plants or other critical infrastructure in high-risk flood areas. And they want FEMA to update their flood maps to show future risks from rising sea levels that would hamper construction in these areas.
Mr. Scata called the standards in the National Flood Insurance Program “obsolete” and, as a result, “unintentionally put people at risk”.
A FEMA official confirmed receipt of the petition and said the agency would look into it.
Meeting these new requirements could increase residential construction costs by as much as 4.5 percent in flood-affected areas and 2 to 7 percent in coastal areas, based on data released by FEMA in 2008.
However, according to Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, these additional construction costs tend to be outweighed by lower flood insurance premiums, reflecting the reduced risk of flooding. The petition asks FEMA to provide homeowners with new funding to build existing homes. This is more expensive than raising a house the first time it is built.
Local officials are likely to object that the new standards would affect home construction in their areas, Berginnis said. But he said some cities and counties across the country have voluntarily started raising their standards, and their economies have not suffered as a result.
“We have enough success stories to show that one can develop healthily in a community and meet high standards,” said Berginnis. He said the new standards would encourage cities and towns to push new inland developments further away from the water.
“It will certainly be a difficult discussion,” said Berginnis. But under the current rules, he added, “People are not safe.”
Comments are closed.