Witnesses urge home hardening, neighborhood mitigation and program changes to stabilize insurance markets
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Summary
Insurance experts, fire officials and lawmakers told the committee that scaling home-hardening, consistent defensible-space standards and targeted financial incentives are necessary to keep properties insurable in high-risk wildfire areas.
At a House Natural Resources hearing, insurance and fire-safety experts urged federal, state and local policymakers to expand programs that harden homes and reduce neighborhood ignition risk to stabilize insurance markets and lower recovery costs after wildfire.
The hearing focused on the interface between structural vulnerability and insurer decisions. Roy Wright, president and CEO of the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS), described simple, evidence-based building measures — class A roofing, ember-resistant vents and clearing combustible materials within 5 feet of structures — and neighborhood actions such as spacing between houses and removal of connective fuels. "These mitigation elements form the foundation of IBHS's Wildfire Prepared program," Wright said, adding that for many builders and developers the incremental cost of wildfire-resilient construction is small and improves marketability.
Wright and other witnesses said four policy pathways would help: (1) address fuel loads on federal, state and private lands; (2) provide tailored financial incentives, such as tax incentives, grants or disaster savings accounts to help homeowners make retrofits; (3) deliver consistent public messaging on key mitigation steps; and (4) strengthen state and local building codes and neighborhood standards where appropriate. Several witnesses and members said one program limitation is that the Community Wildfire Defense Grants historically could not be used for home-hardening projects; the senate version of the Fix Our Forest Act was described as widening eligible uses to include built-environment measures.
Lawmakers and witnesses tied the insurance market response to measurable mitigation: insurers look for documented risk reduction, and several witnesses recommended public registries or dashboards that show what fuel treatments have been completed and when maintenance is scheduled. "Homeowners want their community to survive, and they want it to be insurable," Roy Wright testified. He urged consistent, verifiable documentation of mitigation work so insurers can more accurately price and offer coverage.
Members also raised equity and funding questions: who pays for retrofits, how to encourage adoption in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, and how to structure incentives so that both individual homeowners and community-scale projects can be sustained. No new funding was enacted in the hearing; members asked witnesses for technical follow-ups and evidence on cost-effectiveness and program design.