"Atlanta has seen 77 tornadoes in the four counties of Clayton, Cobb, Dekalb and Fulton from 1950-2013. This is a density of 0.94 tornadoes per year per 1,000 s

"Atlanta has seen 77 tornadoes in the four counties of Clayton, Cobb, Dekalb and Fulton from 1950-2013. This is a density of 0.94 tornadoes per year per 1,000 square miles." 1,000 sq mi is about 640,000 acres, so that's .0000015 tornadoes per year per acre. If I've got my math right, that's about a 99.9% chance that your 1 acre plot will not be hit by a tornado in 1000 years, if you live in the Atlanta area, which is only a middling high-probability area. (https://weather.com/storms/tornado/news/tornado-odds-of-being-hit https://weather.com/storms/tornado/news/tornado-odds-of-bein...) Hurricanes are generally only a coastal problem, although flooding is a fairly large issue everywhere. (Don't get a house in a low lying area. Please.) Earthquakes are mostly a West Coast thing, modulo New Madrid (pronounced "mad-rid") and various oil drilling operations. But then there's fires and termites and everything else. There are plenty of hundred-year-old houses all over the US, as well as plenty of newer ones that could last more than a century with proper maintenance. Few houses today are built to last that long, though, because it's more expensive but doesn't add anything to the purchase price like granite countertops. Stick frame on slab construction is pretty close to mini-maxing housing construction as the article describes (even in areas where slab foundations are geologically idiotic). Anyway, when you get down to the second-to-last section of the article, remember that, past a certain point, efficiency is the enemy of resiliency.