HOUSING RESILIENCE

CHALLENGES AND BEST PRACTICES

While communities wrestle with how to rebuild better and how to avoid being the next victim of wildfires or wind and water, best practices are worth examining.

Illya Azaroff, FAIA, founding principal of +LAB Architect PLLC with offices in New York and Los Angeles, is a leader in climate adaptation, mitigation, resilient planning and regenerative design.

“The question we often hear is how can we afford to pay for resiliency? When the reality is we cannot afford not to,” he said.

Azaroff, the president-elect of the American Institute of Architects, worked on rebuilding after Hurricane Sandy. 

He said a lot of working-class people, with modest savings, never expected to be ravaged by the type of storm normally associated with the tropics, but Sandy devastated a lot of small 1950s and 1960s houses in the Far Rockaway neighborhood in Queens, N.Y.