3. Environment
It's Nature's Way
Floods and fires. Record-high temperatures. An average of more than 900 tornadoes a year. To borrow a phrase from 1984’s Ghostbusters, we’ve had a lot of real wrath-of-God stuff this decade. That’s why “resilience” is likely to become a common phrase in the home builder’s and remodeler’s lexicon.
Resilience basically means the ability of a home to not only withstand nature’s fury but also remain livable after the storms have passed. Think of hurricane-rated windows that can let in air after the winds die down but power failures have shot down the air-conditioning. For homes near where wildfires break out, resilience likely will come through designing homes to cut the odds of catching fire from embers.
This problem will persist as long as Americans escape to woods and waters. Indeed, a 2014 study in the journal Land Use Policy predicted that, in California alone, 645,000 to 1.2 million homes will be built from 2000 to 2050 in areas at high risk from wildfires.
On the coastlines, you’d think the constant waves of news about rising sea levels and hurricanes would lead people to abandon the idea of erecting a house that could be wrecked within 10 years. But a September 2017 study by two economists from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that, while there is mounting pessimism regarding the wisdom of living on the coast (and, indeed, there’s increasing evidence this pessimism is affecting home prices), there are more than enough people who love watching the waves—and/or who doubt climate change talk—to keep development going.
The study’s authors, who surveyed property owners across Rhode Island, “found that 40% of flood zone respondents were ‘not at all’ worried about flooding in the next 10 years, even though the average property in their sample has a one in seven chance of flooding annually after just 1 foot of sea-level rise,” CityLab’s coverage of the study said. With attitudes like that, either resilience concerns will rise or a lot more buildings will fall.
Dangerous Liaisons
Are building material dealers unwitting conspirators in making their communities sick? You certainly could expect LBM executives to protest that allegation. But mounting evidence does show that living in an American home can be harmful to your health. And over the next 30 years, one question for dealers is whether they’ll play a role in solving the problem.
What’s commonly referred to as Sick Building Syndrome is a toxic brew of building systems, products, and Americans’ living habits. The results are unsettling:
- Indoor air quality (IAQ) can be up to five times worse than what we breathe outdoors, and people spend up to 90% of their time indoors.
- Children’s bedrooms can often be the most polluted rooms in the house.
- The percentage of Americans with asthma has increased from 3.1% in 1980 to 5.5% in 1996, 8.2% in 2009, and 8.3% today, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control says. And a study by a German research institute, the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics, concluded that living in damp and moldy houses raises by 40% the chance of getting asthma.
- Headaches, sore eyes, allergies, and other health complaints all have been linked to conditions in homes.
Experts blame part of the rise in home-related health issues to ever-tightening energy codes. In essence, we’ve worked so hard at sealing homes that we’ve kept bad air from escaping the way it did in older, leakier houses. One of the first places the problem cropped up was in manufactured homes, which began to be subject to federal construction quality codes in the late 1970s. At the time, urea foam formaldehyde insulation (UFFI) was common, as was the use of formaldehyde in resins for particleboard. UFFI was banned in 1982, and formaldehyde-based resins have pretty much gone away, but manufactured homes continue to have problems, as occurred when people living in so-called “Katrina Cottages” after the 2005 hurricane began complaining of headaches and more.
Bad air literally made Bill Hayward and his family so sick that he moved them out of their house. It also prompted him to hand over Hayward Lumber to trusted managers so he could launch Hayward Healthy Home, devoted to helping people live in better houses. He recommends that home builders create systems in which fresh, filtered air gets circulated throughout the house; rooms get sealed to prevent air getting in from unfiltered, potentially moldy or polluted places behind walls; nontoxic materials be used whenever possible; and rugs, upholstery, and carpets be deep-cleaned as often as possible—or not used at all.
Hayward is one of the few LBM executives spreading the IAQ gospel. Some companies are doing the same, particularly window maker Velux, which produced a devastating video called “The Indoor Generation.”
One question now is whether construction supply companies—places that pride themselves on doing good things for their communities—will decide it’s their duty as building experts to help contractors build and homeowners live in homes that actually are good for their health.
Stream of Contention
“Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting,” the old Western saying goes. And, as long as global warming causes waters to rise and never-ending development paves over land, you can expect decades’ more battles over what people are allowed to do when water touches land. Much of that fight will be over how to define what the federal Clean Water Act means by “waters of the United States.” Home builders and developers have been contesting a 2015 definition of the so-called WOTUS rule that they regard as too expansive. Court battles have raged for years, and one result has been that, at present, half the states follow one set of rules while the rest follow others.