Washington D.C. – February 10 – The SmarterSafer Coalition submitted the following letter for the hearing record to the House Committee on Financial Services.
Dear Chair Hill, Ranking Member Waters, Chair Flood, and Ranking Member Cleaver:
SmarterSafer is a national coalition that includes a diverse chorus of voices that champion environmentally responsible and fiscally sound approaches to natural catastrophe mitigation and public safety. The coalition focuses on several policy areas, including flood and wildfire risk, extreme heat, infrastructure investment, environmental protection and conservation, and overall responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars.
We appreciate the opportunity to submit this letter for the record in advance of the House Financial Services Committee hearing entitled “Priced Out of the American Dream: Understanding the Policies Behind Rising Costs of Housing and Borrowing.”
As the Committee examines the policies driving rising housing and borrowing costs, it is critical to account for the growing financial toll of natural disasters on homeowners, renters, lenders, insurers, and the federal government. Floods, wildfires, hurricanes, and other increasingly severe hazards are damaging housing stock, displacing families, challenging insurance markets, and contributing to higher housing and borrowing costs nationwide.
While constructing more resilient residential housing may increase upfront costs, extensive evidence shows these resilience and mitigation measures deliver significant long-term savings by reducing disaster losses, lowering insurance claims and premiums, and limiting the need for taxpayer-funded disaster assistance. The Smarter Safer Coalition’s taxpayer paper, Resiliency and Pre-Disaster Mitigation: Investments that Benefit American Taxpayers (attached), highlights that proactive investments in mitigation reduce disaster losses, stabilize insurance markets, and decrease reliance on federal disaster assistance.¹ In the paper, we highlight a key statistic from the 2024 Climate Resiliency Report, published by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Allstate, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, which highlights that investing in resilience and disaster preparedness can significantly lower the economic impact of disasters. The study found that every $1 spent on resilience measures can reduce a community’s post-disaster economic costs by $7.²
Furthermore, according to FEMA’s 2020 fact sheet on its report titled, Building Codes Save: A Nationwide Study of Loss Prevention, adopting hazard-resistant building codes is a cost-effective way to protect communities, with FEMA noting that such codes reduce casualties, limit property damage, and speed recovery, with modern codes potentially preventing at least $32 billion in disaster losses over 20 years.³
With these facts in mind, and in order to address rising housing costs while reducing long-term risk, the Smarter Safer Coalition urges Congress to consider the following priorities:
- Strengthen NFIP Minimum Building Criteria. Congress and the administration should support efforts to require smarter building criteria to reduce flood risk, such as higher elevation standards in the special flood hazard area, incorporating standards to safely site and design critical infrastructure, encourage the retention of natural floodplain buffers, and remove incentives for ongoing fill and build practices.
- Incentivize Community Preparation and Smarter Construction. Policymakers should create incentives to encourage state, local, and Tribal governments to improve land use planning, adopt and enforce building codes, and utilize code-plus designs such as the IBHS FORTIFIED program, while increasing the accessibility of federal grants for wildfire risk reduction efforts. Additionally, Congress should incentivize innovation in affordable building material design, subdivision design, landscape architecture, and safe, sustainable building practices to create more ignition-resistant structures and communities.
Housing affordability and resilience are inseparable. Policies that prioritize short-term savings over long-term risk reduction ultimately increase costs for families and taxpayers when disasters strike. Investments in pre-disaster mitigation and resilient construction reduce long-term borrowing costs, stabilize housing markets, and protect federal resources.
Thank you for the opportunity to submit this letter for the record.
Sincerely,
SmarterSafer Coalition
¹ The SmarterSafer Coalition, Resiliency and Pre-Disaster Mitigation: Investments that Benefit American Taxpayers
² U.S. Chamber of Commerce et al., The Preparedness Payoff: The Economic Benefits of Investing in Climate Resilience (June 25, 2024), https://www.uschamber.com/security/the-preparedness-payoff-the-economic-benefits of-investing-in-climate-resilience
³ Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Building Codes Save: A Nationwide Study of Loss Prevention (Apr. 30, 2025), https://www.fema.gov/emergency-managers/risk-management/building-science/building-codes save-study