In February, a group called the Resilience Action Fund, which seeks to promote community resilience, wrote an open letter to the Biden administration calling for additional actions such as requiring minimum resilience standards for federally funded buildings and requiring such standards for buildings that get loans from federally backed mortgage organizations.

Aris Papadopoulos, the group’s chairman, argued that it’s important to have such federal standards, saying it’s unsustainable to continue the current “patchwork” under which “everybody does what they locally want” and then asks the government for help when it fails.

“You can divide the country into a handful of regions and say for these regions, we should have consistency of codes and standards,” he said.

Papadopoulos also said that the focus should be on homes, which he referred to as the “weak underbelly of our communities.”

“If you look at a single home, it’s less important than a bridge or a school or hospital, but if you multiply one home times hundreds of thousands or millions, that’s a big problem,” he said.