West, a retired builder from Colorado who had specialized in energy-efficient homes using insulating concrete forms (ICFs), felt the tug to devise a solution—inspired all the more, he says, when people would tell him: “If you don’t do something about this, it will be another 20 years before someone has the technology.”
So West and his son, Robin, began researching forensic engineering to see if they could modify the energy-efficient concrete homes they developed in Colorado to make them hurricane-proof.
Three years later—with Hurricane Katrina’s decimation of New Orleans in the interim—the Wests introduced GreenFire Homes. They say the design is so certain to be hurricane-proof, they will guarantee to replace for free any GreenFire Home that is destroyed by a hurricane or tsunami.
The high-profile, and highly destructive, hurricanes of recent years have inspired a new level of interest in concrete homes—thus creating a major market opportunity for concrete home builders in the region.
But not every consumer who wants a stronger home is necessarily ready to go concrete. Just because a home is concrete is not necessarily proof in the consumer’s mind that it would withstand a hurricane. The same is true with some experts.
“As an engineer, the challenge is not so much how to design a hurricane-resistant home on paper,” says Kurt Gurley, professor of civil engineering at the University of Florida. “The challenge is to design a hurricane-resistant home that’s cost-effective. If you built every house of out of solid marble, you would not have many problems.”
Gurley says that concrete homes have a well grounded claim to being hurricane-proof, but no building material guarantees a hurricane-proof home if the method of construction is not effective.
“It’s the sum of the parts that makes a home wind-resistant,” Gurley says. “If you’re using concrete block homes with the correct density, you’re going to have very strong walls. But if you’re dealing with a home that was built in the ’80s and doesn’t have proper roof-to-wall connections, and your roof blows away—that’s not a hurricane-resistant home.”
Gurley says building codes are becoming increasingly demanding in Florida as public officials seek to ensure that as many homes as possible can withstand hurricanes—and he believes builders are following suit.
“My opinion is that the culture of the contractors I’m seeing indicates a real progressive attitude in trying to make houses truly hurricane-resistant,” Gurley says.
Melbourne, Florida-based Mercedes Homes touts its use of solid poured concrete walls, but Stuart McDonald, the company’s vice president of operations, acknowledges that a contractor can always do more to make a home truly hurricane-resistant.
“A lot of people will do the parts and pieces, but we feel we have to have the entire assembly,” McDonald says. “For example, typically, your exterior door swings in and invites you into the home. We turn the door where it swings out, so in a storm, the pressure seals the door tighter. We’ve also reinforced the solid wall so it doesn’t just sit on the slab. It’s reinforced in the concrete.”
Joe Redburn, owner of Fort Meyers, Florida-based RFB Homes, says inquiries about his concrete homes are on the uptick since Charley and Katrina, but adds that this does not always translate into sales.
“There’s a slight increase in demand,” Redburn says. “There’s an awful lot of interest. But the market in Florida is all based on price point, and people want to know how much it costs to get into the house—how much the monthly payments are going to be. That’s 95 percent of it.”
Redburn says his homes can withstand a Category Five hurricane, a claim generating enough interest that he is currently quoting two-to-four homes each week, even though he says the housing market is otherwise dead.
“Before Charley, there was no interest,” Redburn says.
McDonald says Mercedes Homes saw a dramatic spike in interest in concrete homes after Charley in 2004 and Katrina in 2005, which was followed by a 40 percent increase above the spike. Now, he says, the interest is leveling off, possibly because no major hurricanes have occurred in 2006 or yet in 2007—among other reasons.
“Some of our competition are taking masonry walls and trying to fill those solid with concrete and say it’s the same or as good,” McDonald says. “We did a prototype of these walls during a project with HUD and BuildAmerica, and they did well, but there’s nothing like a solid cast-in-place piece of concrete. But the volume has also dropped off a little bit with not having storms. We were supposed to have an active storm year last year, and it didn’t happen.”
But the memories of Charley and Katrina will not soon recede from the nation’s memory, and that is even prompting calls from consumers to the Portland Cement Association, in the hope that PCA staff can answer questions about the storm-resisting potential of concrete homes.
“We’re getting more inquiries from members of the general public who are wanting to build their homes, and they want to make sure they’re in a safe or energy-efficient house,” says Jim Niehoff, PCA’s residential program manager. “One of the factors is going to be insurance companies. Will they issue new policies in those areas? And if they do, are there going to be certain criteria the buildings have to meet? The other thing is codes. Florida has pretty stringent building codes. Louisiana passed one after Katrina. Some of the coastal counties in Mississippi have stronger building codes.”
Since concrete structures meet the codes more easily than wood, Niehoff says interest in concrete is growing.
As for actual construction, however, some areas are farther ahead than others. While New Orleans is only just beginning its post-Katrina rebuilding, Mississippi is considerably ahead of the curve. Armory, Mississippi-based American Shelter Corporation recently announced the start of a 62-unit, all-concrete-home subdivision on 13.5 acres in Jackson County.
But the development’s average home price of $170,000 earned a small rebuke from Jackson County Planning Commissioner Larry Hammonds, prompting American Shelter Corporation spokesman David Hawkins to defend the prices on the grounds that lower insurance rates and utility bills would make up the difference.
West, on the other hand, has no intention of apologizing for the prices of the GreenFire Homes he and his son will produce. The prices will be high.
“I have a quarter of a century of marketing experience on this,” West says. “When you get into the average home or lower-than-average home, people are more interested in the price of the home. And they say, ‘Can you take off the solar panels? Can you take off this or that?’ You really have to start your market in the upper range of homes. This is a Mercedes Benz, not a Kia.”
Among the features of GreenFire Homes will be rooptop solar panels, rooftop terraces with gardens and 8,000-gallon rainwater tanks. These characteristics are designed to go beyond hurricane-resistance and make GreenFire what West calls “the first global warming home.”
But hurricane-resistance remains the key to the design and the marketing effort.
“We do a compacted-earth foundation,” West says. “Florida is an average of 10 feet above sea level, and the coastal areas are five and six feet, so we go down with an eight-inch concrete foundation with footers, down to median sea level, which is five or six feet below the ground, and we go five feet above the ground and bury the foundation. That foundation is compacted earth, and it serves to anchor the building.”
West describes his homes as vertical rather than horizontal, and says they are designed to minimize damage from storm surges by having foam inserts that blow out during a storm surge, causing water to run under the building instead of concentrating all the pressure on the wall.
“The second level above ground is the living quarters, and that’s where we have the kitchen and so forth,” West says. “We also use concrete bridge beams for our floors and our roof—capped with post-tensioned concrete slabs, plus an impervious roof.”
GreenFire has yet to actually build one of its homes, but is aggressively pursuing a contract to build what West says would be a 5,500-home subdivision on a 75,000-acre site in Florida. GreenFire is also pursuing contracts with Katrina-ravaged cities like New Orleans and Gulfport to do spot rebuilds where individual homes were destroyed.
West expects the first GreenFire home to be built this year, and plans to build 20 model homes in different Gulf Coast region localities over the course of the next three years.
For Mercedes, which has built more than 4,000 homes—many in the Melbourne area—McDonald says the company is always on the lookout for ways to reduce costs, and has a goal of being able to offer homes made of any material the customer chooses, all for the same price.
“Given that choice, who would not take a solid wall over a block wall?” McDonald says.
But Mercedes still has to work on some process improvements before it can make such an offer.
“The eight- and nine-foot walls, we can stand up and do in a single pour,” McDonald says. “When we go higher than that, we have to add another form to it, so now we’ve almost doubled our labor. There are some efficiencies we have to get better at.”
McDonald is also careful to give nature it’s due, which is why Mercedes Homes never uses the term “hurricane-proof,” always being careful to use the less presumptuous “hurricane-resistant.”
“Mother nature can dish some things out,” McDonald says.
Yes she can. And the more effectively builders’ concrete homes can resist what Mother Nature dishes out, the more the industry should prosper as a result.