I don't think it is as simple as not building in hazard zones. Mostly it comes down to engineering. Buildings can be built to survive undamaged expected activity on most earthquake zones and not kill their occupants even in the worse case. There may be locations where hazards beyond earthquakes may make building structures cost prohibitive, but those locations are pretty few and far between. Floodplains are hard to justify building on because the water rises every year and they often have better use as farmland. Floodplains are usually quite fertile. Something to keep in mind as the price of oil drives up cost of chemical fertilizers.

When it comes right down to it pretty much every location has issues. Earthquakes, tidal waves are big news now but in a few months it will be something else. Come June down here it will be hurricane season. Blizzards, wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes hailstorms, the undead rising from the grave, Republicans ... every place has it's hazards. But good engineering can deal pretty well with most of those.

I'm also a bit nervous about any sort of designation that declares a location safe. I can see it for floods simply because water collects in the low spots so there are clearly safer, and less safe, zones. But earthquakes are a little different. Pretty much every location on earth has had them at one time or another. The lack of an earthquake for a long time is no guarantee that a previously dormant fault won't come alive.

And it isn't just earthquakes. On a building forum I was discussing building codes in Florida and how they have over time jacked up the requirements for resistance to wind damage down here. A builder in the Midwest was telling us how it was good he didn't have to tie down his roofs with metal straps because they didn't get much wind. A week later a line of strong thunderstorms the power of a minor hurricane came through and the same guy noted that while none of the homes he built had lost their roof he was thinking he just got lucky. He talked about finding out how we build in Florida and adopting some of the methods. He though it might give him an edge to tell his customers that his houses met Florida wind standards.

He was pleased to learn that the difference in cost was just a few hundred dollars, a small fraction of the cost of the building. He also thought his customers might get a break on insurance if he had a stronger roof structure and tie-downs.

Point here is that for residential buildings the difference in designing for resistance to earthquakes or not is often a few hundred dollars spent on shear walls and strapping. That the main impediment to building resistant buildings, no matter what you are resisting, is often the simple fact that they haven't built them that way there historically.

There is simply no practical reason why a single family home can't be economically built to be resistant to wind storms, wildfires, earthquakes, blizzards, and most anything else. Even tornadoes can be managed. Pretty hard to design a conventional home to resist a tornado unscathed, but a safe room can be built in it that will provide good, if not perfect, protection for anything short of a direct hit by a very strong twister.

In Key West there were small ranch homes built in the early 50s that included a central windowless safe room. The exterior walls had scads of jalousie windows, as befits a tropical climate in a time before air conditioning, but smack in the center of the home was a room, typically six to eight feet square, that was built like a bunker. Usually that is where the heating unit and water heater was. Most people living in them now don't realize what that small room in the middle of their house was. They get used as storage rooms and closets. Some may have noticed the heavy plank door with steel brackets on the inside that allowed you to bar it quickly by dropping in a set of irons or 2by4s.

Building houses to resist local conditions is nothing new. A smart move considering that it wasn't until the mid-60s that people in Key West could count on a significant warning.