[_tariky]

In Yugoslavia, in 1969, one of the biggest earthquakes occurred, destroying several cities. After that, the country’s leaders decided to change building codes. Even today, although Yugoslavia no longer exists, the countries that adopted those codes have homes capable of withstanding earthquakes up to 7.5 on the Richter scale.

My main point is that if we face major natural disasters, we need to take action to mitigate their impact in the future. As a foreigner, it seems to me that Americans prioritize building cheap homes over constructing better and more resilient ones.

[Panzer04]

Why bother building a better home when it's cheaper to buy insurance and rebuild later?

This is why prices are important - sometimes it's sensible to build cheaper houses without these safeties if the risk isn't there, but if the risk does exist then it needs to be priced right to provide that incentive.

[vasco]

The key thing to understand is that you don't get to choose when the house gets destroyed or get advanced notice. Which means you might be in there, or your kids, or all your belongings. But yes, after you're dead in the rubble someone else can rebuild your house and it might be cheaper.

[Almondsetat]

How about the cost of your life? If the house resists the earthquake and you are inside it, you don't die.

[miohtama]

Maybe be there is no longer "cheap" and that's the issue

[poisonborz]

Maybe people don't like to restart their lives like that if it's avoidable, even if it costs more.

[consp]

Only you also take into account your cheap home will likely accelerate the problem. Which never happens.

[bgnn]

in case of earthquakes: to not to die.

[thisoneworks]

Hah financialization strikes again. Try explaining this to a person from a third world country, they would say "what are you talking about". Also they would have better health care than your average American.

[willvarfar]

(Recently there was a major public building collapse in Serbia: the porch of the Novi Sad railway station collapsed, killing 15 people. This has really focused attention on corruption and caused massive protests.)

[trinix912]

What collapsed was the newly rebuilt part of the porch, not the old one built to those codes. It has nothing to do with insufficient building codes, hence a corruption scandal.

[Theodores]

In 1666 London had a bit of a problem with fire, after that some building codes were introduced. Buildings made entirely from wood were not allowed and roofs had to have a parapet.

If you don't know what a parapet is, take a look up to the roofs on London's older buildings, the front wall rises up past the bottom of the roof. If there is a fire in the building then the parapet keeps the burning roof inside the footprint of the building rather than let it 'slide off' to set fire to the property on the other side of the street.

The parapet requirement did not extend to towns outside London, which makes me wonder why.

The answer to that is to see what goes on in the USA. After a natural disaster they just pick themselves up and keep going. Florida was obliterated in 2024 but nobody cared after a fortnight. Same with the current wild fires, nobody will care next week, it will be forgotten, even though having one's home destroyed might be considered deeply traumatic.

I think that the key to change is to not have too many natural disasters, ideally nobody has living memory of the last fire/flood/earthquake/pandemic/alien invasion/plague of locusts so that there is no point of reference or 'compassion fatigue'. Only then can there be a fair expectation of political will and the possibility of change.

[andsoitis]

> Florida was obliterated in 2024

That’s an huge exaggeration. FL was not obliterated in 2024.

Stats:

Total storms 18

Hurricanes 11

Major hurricanes (Cat. 3+) 5

Total fatalities 401

Total damage $128.072 billion

(Third-costliest tropical cyclone season on record)

[SturgeonsLaw]

> ideally nobody has living memory of the last [...]

Funny, I would have said the exact opposite. If people forget how bad things were, they seem more likely to repeat them.

Nazism, for one. And the rise in antivax sentiment - people today have never come across an iron lung, which is a testament to medical technology, but it means some silly opinions get way more traction than they should.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana

[munificent]

> As a foreigner, it seems to me that Americans prioritize building cheap homes over constructing better and more resilient ones.

"Americans" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

It would probably be more accurate to say "It seems to me that the history of American culture and economic systems have led to a system whose emergent behavior is to prioritize building cheap-but-easy-to-modify homes over constructing smaller-harder-to-modify-but-more-resilient ones."

Sure "we" need to take action, but the machine is very large and we are all very small gears in it. A twenty-something buying their first house doesn't have a magic wand to wave that will summon cinder block houses into being that don't physically exist. A builder who wants to build cinder block houses doesn't have a magic wand to rewrite city building codes that presume residential construction is mostly wood. A city council member who wants to modernize building codes doesn't have a magic wand to get enough constituents to prioritize this over housing costs, homelessness (but I repeat myself), jobs, etc.

Everyone's problems seem easy when you are very far away from them.

[euroderf]

> Americans prioritize building cheap homes over constructing better and more resilient ones.

It's all considered disposable, much like strip malls.

[arp242]

Reading up on this a bit, it seems it was the 1963 earthquake that precipitated the change in building regulations? The 1969 one seemed comparatively mild(?)

[johnisgood]

Yeah, I'm surprised that the damages of the LA fire occurred, because it was known beforehand that California had a fire problem (and also have an earthquake problem I think).

I'm here in Eastern Europe and our buildings can withstand a lot of things.

> we need to take action to mitigate their impact in the future. As a foreigner, it seems to me that Americans prioritize building cheap homes over constructing better and more resilient ones.

As an European, it baffles me as well.

If this doesn't happen to "cheap" homes here, why does it happen in California, to rich people's houses?

[yieldcrv]

All the properties that survived in those LA neighborhoods all had some pretty basic and intentional fire resistance

I’m curious about how many others did that burned down too

But so far the ones highlighted had super obvious mitigations that its astounding to see were not more common

[wakawaka28]

The fire problem can be managed by burning or removing some of the dead wood, and building adequate water storage. Apparently California has been neglecting those two problems for decades.

[nobodywillobsrv]

The government banned insurance companies from raising prices. They used tax payer money to subsidize this for a while which increase home prices. Eventually insurance companies stopped offering insurance.

When state actors even dabble in socialism disasters happen people die.

[spicyusername]

The problem always becomes, who is going to pay for that action.