- Some Florida real-estate developers are building what they call hurricane-resistant communities.
- Techniques used include tying homes down with steel straps and reducing flooding with "smart lakes."
- While no home can be hurricane-proof, these strategies can minimize potential damage, experts said.
Hurricane Milton was barreling toward William Fulford's front door. The mayor of nearby Tampa, Florida, was pleading on television for area residents to leave or die. Still, Fulford, a 76-year-old retired homebuilder, was staying put.
"A lot of people would say I'm crazy," Fulford told Business Insider by phone on October 8, as the storm gained strength in the Gulf of Mexico. "But my house is great."
In 2022, Fulford bought a $1.25 million home in Hunters Point, a community in Cortez, Florida, where properties are raised 16 feet above the ground and tied together with steel straps. Fulford, whose home suffered minimal damage from Hurricane Milton, told Business Insider he believes his home is "hurricane-proof."
More than a few developers are betting on Florida's future by building hurricane-resistant communities like Fulford's. Hurricane season officially ends on November 30, but the movement toward resilient homes has increased as the climate crisis drives fiercer storms.
The prospect appeals to Florida homeowners grappling with stress and uncertainty as home insurance premiums and homeowners' association, or HOA, fees rise and the risk of severe storm damage mounts. After Hurricanes Helene and Milton in September and October, respectively, the state suffered an estimated $21 to $34 billion in damages to commercial and residential properties, including uninsured properties, according to real-estate analytics site Corelogic.
About two hours southeast of Hunters Point is a development called Babcock Ranch, which bills itself as "The Hometown of Tomorrow." Its builders made efforts to protect its 4,000 homes on about 17,000 acres from storms, including moving utilities underground and avoiding paths of natural water runoff.
A rep said that in the days before Hurricane Milton, Babcock Ranch saw a 390% increase in daily visits to its website. Hunters Point's developer said that two new homes have sold since last month's storm.
Three building experts told Business Insider that no home can be hurricane-proof. However, Leslie Chapman-Henderson, the president and CEO of the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes, said that Hunters Point and Babcock Ranch are good examples of what hurricane resiliency can look like.
Building entire resilient communities — instead of one home with beefed-up protections on a block with regular homes — can protect neighborhoods and property values against Florida's unsettled future, she added.
"Our wish is to see all developers do this because they're on the leading edge," Chapman-Henderson said.
Hunters Point homes are high off the ground and air-tight
Hunters Point is in Florida's last working fishing village an hour south of Tampa.
The resiliency of its homes begins with their height. Located on a peninsula jutting out into Sarasota Bay, the development is just feet away from the coastline and vulnerable to storm surges like those seen during Hurricanes Helene and Milton, which reached almost seven feet.
To counteract that risk, Hunters Point homes — which were developed and tested in a warehouse for 18 months — are built so that the bottom floor is a garage and storage, the middle floor is the home's first floor, and another level above has bedrooms — all connected by an elevator.
"You don't step into the house until you're 16 feet above the flood zone," developer Marshall Gobuty told Business Insider.
Currently, 31 of the 86 planned units at Hunter's Point have been built, with homes ranging in price from $1.45 million for nearly 1,700 square feet to $1.69 million for over 3,400 square feet.
Another feature of the homes is an extra-fortified base, in which the slab and foundation are poured together as one piece. The homes' walls are built with 2x6 beams instead of 2x4 beams to increase resiliency and allow for more insulation. The sides of the walls, the ceilings, and the roof are then filled in with closed foam to make the home airtight.
Every level is reinforced with metal straps all the way down to the foundation to hold the home together.
These connections — roof to walls, walls to each other, and walls to foundation — are fundamental to building a house that can withstand hurricane-force winds.
Chapman-Henderson said the real innovations built into these homes are the fortifications against the wind: the walls bolted into the foundation and the sturdier wood in the frames.
Any vulnerability in those structural connections could doom the whole house. When that happens, "usually roofs blow off first because they're not connected well to the walls, and then the walls don't have any lateral support, and they go, and you've lost the whole building," Mike O'Reilly, a licensed engineer and construction instructor at Colorado State University, told BI.
In Hunters Point homes, though, "everything is connected. There are no seams," Gobuty told BI. "Every house is built like a Yeti cooler."
Babcock Ranch uses "smart ponds" to manage flooding
Babcock Ranch in Punta Gorda, Florida, is built on land 30 feet above sea level, far from the coast.
So far, 3,752 homes have been built out of a planned 19,500 units. The development functions like a city, with an elementary school, a middle school, a high school, a shopping district, a recreation lodge, and dozens of hiking trails. Homes on the market range from a two-bedroom condo for $255,000 to a four-bedroom single-family home with its own pool for $1.695 million.
When developer Syd Kitson purchased the land in 2006, his team spent hours poring over maps dating back to the 1940s to find the property's natural flowways, which are how excess water naturally runs out of the area during flooding.
The team intentionally sacrificed building thousands of units to leave that land untouched.
"That's part of working with Mother Nature, rather than working against Mother Nature," Kitson told BI.
Babcock Ranch also has "smart lakes," or man-made bodies of water throughout the development. These lakes have solar-powered pumps with predictive analytics that raise and lower the lake's height when a storm nears. If the area expects major flooding, the smart lakes will lower to prepare for the increased rainfall.
"Our philosophy is to do everything in our power to be as resilient as we possibly can," Kitson said.
Babcock Ranch welcomed its first residents in 2018. It faced its first major test in 2021 when the eye of Category 4 storm Hurricane Ian brought 150 mph wind gusts to the development. The property only sustained minimal damage, including fallen trees and a few broken solar panels, Kitson said.
Downed power lines and dayslong blackouts often affect large swaths of the state following major hurricanes. Babcock Ranch placed all utilities, including water, electricity, and wastewater, underground to prevent that.
"You won't see a single utility pole in Babcock Ranch," Kitson said.
The submerged power poles are built in concrete tubes designed to withstand 165 mph wind gusts.
Chapman-Henderson, of the nonprofit that advocates for safe homes, called the smart lakes and buried utilities "innovative" and added that recent storms have proven these strategies are effective.
Babcock Ranch is so well regarded for its safety during a storm that the elementary school's fieldhouse serves as a state- and county-designated evacuation center. Built to withstand 150 mph wind gusts, the fieldhouse provided shelter for 1,300 Floridians during Hurricane Milton.
"We're not a place where you evacuate. We're a place where people being ordered to evacuate come," Kitson said.
Hurricane resistance is the future of Florida homebuilding
Hunter's Point and Babcock Ranch are part of a growing movement for more resilient homes.
Chapman-Henderson warned, however, that residents shouldn't let their home's sturdiness make them complacent. They should still evacuate if authorities call for it.
"We can build to withstand these events, but we should never say it's absolute without fail," she said.
Calling a house 100% hurricane-proof is "like calling the Titanic unsinkable," O'Reilly said.
Though there isn't a single national standard for hurricane-resistant buildings, Fortified — a program run by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, an industry-backed research group — evaluates one of the most critical structures for a home's resiliency: its roof. Fortified grants certifications to homeowners who strengthen their roofs through different methods, such as using grooved, ring-shank nails instead of traditionally smooth ones.
More homeowners are requesting to have their roofs certified as stronger-than-average, Fred Malik, managing director of Fortified, told BI. Fortified certifications have risen from less than 1,000 in 2016 to nearly 12,000 last year, bringing the grand total to nearly 70,000 over the program's lifetime, Malik added. The program anticipates adding another 17,000 by the end of this year.
Though Hunters Point and Babcock Ranch have not yet participated in Fortified, Malik said the measures their builders are taking seem effective.
"I get really nervous when anybody refers to anything as something 'proof,'" Malik told BI. "But they are making some really good decisions."