Research Brief: Community-Informed Building-Scale Resilience Assessment

Abstract

It is widely known that natural hazards, like hur­ricanes, cause tremendous levels of damage and that hazard mitigation can significantly curb natural haz­ard-induced losses. However, necessary investments are still needed for the widespread implementation of hazard mitigation practices. We believe that this lack of invest­ment stems from the underestimation of potential losses by present tools, which discount the effect of community characteristics on losses accrued by individual house­holds. This brief presents a framework that incorporates community characteristics like urban texture to enable a community-informed building scale resilience assess­ment. With this framework, stakeholders will be able to capture the true value of hazard mitigation practices.