our climate is changing. why aren’t our homes?
Glimpses in my recent articles may have shown you a couple of things: a) I have a cofounder named Valkyrie, b) I’m CTO of a company called Faura, and c) I’ve recently built a tiny house. Formally, now that we’ve finished our pre-seed at around $400k, got into an accelerator, and are starting our first pilot in Hawaii, I wanted to write about why I joined Faura, and why I think the problem we’re solving is essential for our future.
Obviously, I have a large financial stake in this, so take this with a grain of salt.
While building my tiny house, I did an absolutely obsessive amount of research on materials, prices, and more. I took Internachi’s home inspector course to learn how to build better, and did everything I could to maximize my tiny house’s energy efficiency, resilience, and more.
I wrote in “the brutalization of becoming”, about how my dreams got crushed in the Bay Area and flattened me like a dropped egg roll on the side of the 5. What I didn’t publicly share was that I was, at that point, pretty much leaving the tech industry. I was absolutely done, did not have the stomach for it, and didn’t really feel tangibly as though my skills working on software for social good were tangibly turning into social good.
Here’s why I didn’t leave.
After I gave up on my tech industry ambitions, signed up to be a Data Entry specialist for Multnomah County’s Joint Office Of Homelessness to keep the lights on, and started the process of financial aid to become an EMT, I saw a post on r/wildfires.
In our call, Valkyrie told me the insane fact that we could actually protect homes from wildfires. After living in the SoCal mountains for my childhood, and then Oregon for a bit in adulthood, I heard A LOT about wildfires but not anything that we could actually do to prevent them from being worse than they already were.
The concepts of defensible space and home hardening were game changing to me. Defensible space is removing things that fire would consider to be fuel around your home, so that wildfire is less likely to spread to you. Home hardening is upgrading the materials outside and around your house to make it un-ignitable. The two combined create homes that are less likely to catch on fire, and spread wildfires as a whole.
Given the context of knowing the weaknesses of materials from my home inspection stuff, I began to see the world in an entirely new light.
After our call, I remember driving through neighborhoods and looking at houses. Similar to what fire sees, I tracked paths to flammability with my eyes. I saw how, after meeting her and learning about the state of the average American home, it became abundantly obvious that our homes are not prepared for climate change, in any sense of the word.
Because of that, not only did I join as the CTO, but we (me, Valkyrie, her boyfriend, and my 2 cats and one fish) all packed up our shit and lived in Oakland for the summer last year, and I’m part time commuting to NY for the foreseeable future for us to work on this. We spent most of our summer spending every day talking to fire officials, homeowners, government agencies, insurance companies, and anyone else who had anything they wanted to say.
It became increasingly clear they saw what I did: a world saturated with risk that we couldn’t even begin to comprehend.
While in Oregon, we faced a heatwave that killed a small number of people, because our homes had never been built with air conditioners. There was a very tangible wave that washed over me, of “our housing is not ready”.
Insurance companies know that our homes aren’t ready. That’s why they’re pulling out of markets and blanket uninsuring people.
When we did product research while in Oakland, we found people who knew they were in harm’s way, but had NO idea what they could do about it. Everywhere we went, homeowners said a version of “I vaguely know my risk but I don’t know what I can do about it”.
Often, when insurance companies issue a ‘no’, there isn’t concrete reasons or steps the homeowners can take to reduce that risk. Starting that research from scratch takes HOURS just to understand what needs to happen, let alone searching for grants, how to tackle the projects, or anything else.
Eventually, XPrize’s head of wildfire took our beta wildfire assessment on her home and failed.
Fundamentally, if you look at the problem, it is a people issue and not a tech issue.
We already have the information on what makes a home ‘at risk’, what can be done to mediate it, how much that can cost, the grants and discounts available, and what people can do themselves. All that Faura does is combine that into one place so that people can find out what they need to do in 10 minutes, not hours after research.
And that’s why I decided to join Faura.
In layman’s terms, we build digital natural disaster inspections for homeowners. You walk around, answer our questions, and we tell you your home’s resilience to natural disaster, and what you can do to improve it. You can take it on your own, or an insurance company might send our inspection to you to better understand your property’s survivability.
So, when I say “our homes aren’t ready”, what does that actually mean? It boils down to a couple of things. Natural disasters have specific ways they behave, and if we look at homes, we can pretty easily imagine how things can play out given a set of circumstances.
When we do wildfire inspections, for example, we look at the flammability of materials on the home, the amount of debris and vegetation surrounding the home, if there’s any high risk plant species around that might burn particularly hard, and so on. For hurricanes, it’s things like if you have an open foundation, have unanchored furniture, garage door bracing, and so on.
I believe the data and knowledge of what buildings can survive natural disasters become the most valuable information we collect in the next 5–10 years.
Deciding to buy a home in a high risk wildfire area? We can tell you what it needs to be insurable, and safe for your family. Government looking to figure out what policy incentives to put in place to increase resiliency? We can tell you exactly what parts of people’s homes is the most commonly at risk, by region, zip code, and more.
More than insurance or homeowner education, Faura’s future to me is about determining and building the next generation of infrastructure to keep our homes and families safe.
The more mitigation work we do on our homes, the more we help protect our neighbors from damage by our homes turning into kindling on the way to theirs, or by damaging their homes because our kid’s trampoline goes flying.
If we think the housing market is horrific right now, imagine how much worse it will be when large swathes of homes are completely destroyed by cascading domino effects of damage. If we think insurance is hard to get, think about what could happen if the homeowner insurance industry collapses as a whole because the risk of insuring in these areas isn’t financially viable.
We are now, as cliche as it is, at an inflection point for our homes and infrastructure in America. If we do not prepare our homes, we will lose them.
