Three cement trade bodies have put up a website telling homeowners how to rebuild in concrete. It’s a marketing asset, and it’s also the clearest consumer-facing comparison of non-combustible residential systems anyone has published.
The Resilient Rebuild Hub, launched under the Building with Resilience initiative, covers six home building methods anchored in cement-based materials: insulated concrete forms, concrete masonry units, precast, 3D-printed construction and others. Each gets a landing page explaining the system, and each links to architects, engineers and contractors who work in it.
Timing is the point
The launch is aimed squarely at the thousands of homes lost in the January 2025 Pacific Palisades fire, where replacement construction is now running at volume.
CNCA executive director Tom Tietz announced it on a panel at the 2026 Western Cement Summit in Newport Beach. “Families rebuilding after wildfires or building in high risk zones shouldn’t have to become fire science experts overnight just to make a good decision for their home,” he said.
Steve Crosby, a panelist who lost his own Pacific Palisades house, put the argument more bluntly: “We cannot simply rebuild; we need to proactively rebuild in a way that slows and prevents future wildfires.”
Janek Dombrowa, principal at the Los Angeles firm JTD Architects, added a caveat from the design side that the initiative’s own backers might not love: “Building with resilience is more than building in concrete.”
Read it as what it is
The hub is funded by the California Nevada Cement Association, the California Construction and Industrial Materials Association and the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association. Every material claim on it comes from organizations that sell the material, and the commercial interest is in displacing wood framing from the residential market.
That doesn’t make the underlying physics wrong. A CMU or ICF wall assembly does not contribute fuel, and in a wind-driven urban conflagration the failure modes that matter are ember intrusion at vents, eaves and windows, and radiant ignition of the cladding. Wall system choice is one variable among several, which is roughly Dombrowa’s point.
What the hub doesn’t put front and center is cost, and that’s the number that decides most rebuilds. ICF and CMU residential construction carries a premium over stick framing in most California markets, and in a fire rebuild the insurance settlement is usually sized to replace what burned, not to upgrade it. Anyone using these pages with a client should get to the delta early.
The contractor-referral side is the more useful half. Residential crews trained in ICF or CMU are thin on the ground in Los Angeles County, and a directory that surfaces them is worth more to a homeowner than another materials brochure.
Source: Concrete Products; the hub is at buildingwithresilience.com.