While other Gulf Coast states incentivize resilient home construction, Texas remains the only one without such programs, leaving it vulnerable to costly weather events.
When Hurricane Ike swept across Galveston Bay in 2008, 110-mile-an-hour winds peeled away roofs and flattened homes. But in a small community on the eastern point of Galveston Island, Travis and Daryl King’s three-story home remained standing, undamaged. “I feel very confident in this house,” Daryl King told a reporter with ABC News .
Inside the costly new reality of insuring a home in Texas Their home had been built using a new construction standard developed with support from the insurance industry and designed to withstand hurricane-force winds. Since then, homes certified through the program, called Fortified, have proliferated across the Gulf Coast — except in Texas.
The home insurance crisis straining Texas homeowners But Texas as a whole has among the worst building codes of Atlantic and Gulf Coast states, according to the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, or IBHS, the research institute that developed the Fortified standard. The state doesn’t enforce a blanket residential building code, and while cities are required to adopt and enforce code, counties can opt out.
How Texas lawmakers could help homeowners build stronger roofs Experts say that’s the reason the state has so many Fortified homes — and a healthy insurance market. Alabama now has 50,000 homes built or retrofitted to Fortified standards, most of them in risky areas along the coast. Insurers are no longer fleeing the state or refusing to write new policies. And enrollment in the state’s insurer of last resort – for homeowners rejected by private insurers – has plummeted.
HURRICANES TEXAS HOMEBUILDING RESILIENCE INSURANCE
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