The Marshall Fire swept through Boulder County, Colorado, in December 2021, destroying 1,233 homes and 35 businesses, making it the costliest wildfire in the state's history. After the fire, local officials created the Rebuilding Better program—an incentive-based initiative to encourage homeowners to voluntarily reconstruct their homes to higher energy-efficiency and resiliency standards rather than rebuilding to existing codes. So far, 70 percent of eligible households have participated in the program. This case study describes the Rebuilding Better program and key lessons learned by recovery officials about its design and implementation.

Why This Matters

Disaster recovery presents a unique opportunity to improve the built environment. The repairing and rebuilding of hundreds or thousands of structures provides a chance to upgrade the quality of construction, reduce carbon emissions, and increase resilience to hazards. However, disaster survivors typically prioritize speed and certainty over experimentation, which means that voluntary-improvement programs sometimes can be more practical than mandatory ones. The Rebuilding Better program demonstrates how thoughtful partnerships, generous financial incentives, and clear communication can transform disaster recovery into community resilience without imposing undue burdens on traumatized homeowners. The lessons learned have implications for recovery leaders nationwide who may face similar decisions as climate-fueled disasters become more frequent and severe.

What We Found

The Rebuilding Better program offers nine key lessons:

• Strong multisector partnerships are essential to program success. The coalition of local and state government offices and officials, nonprofit organizations, and the electric utility that designed and implemented the Rebuilding Better program was able to leverage partnership to solve critical issues at every step of the program.
• Leveraging existing programs and infrastructure can help program leaders accelerate recovery. Rebuilding Better’s use of Xcel Energy's existing rebate program allowed leads to launch the program within three months of the fire, rather than having to build new administrative infrastructure from scratch during a crisis.
• Substantial financial incentives drive participation in voluntary programs. The Rebuilding Better program offered $7,500 to $37,500 in utility rebates, depending on which energy efficiency codes and standards households rebuilt to, along with additional state grants. These generous incentives—stacking to as much as $57,500 per household—were fundamental to transforming households’ rebuilding intentions into concrete action.
• The structure of incentives matters, but there are tradeoffs. The Rebuilding Better program was unusual in that it provided incentives directly to homeowners rather than builders, to empower them in their recovery decisionmaking process. This made homeowners more directly involved in decisionmaking about energy efficiency, but also placed additional burdens on families that were struggling to recover.
• Jurisdictional differences can create equity challenges. Designing a program that works for survivors across a large and complex disaster will often mean working in multiple local government contexts. The Rebuilding Better team had to work carefully to assure that the program didn’t penalize early adopters of high energy codes and standards.
• Uncertainty is a critical barrier to sustainable rebuilding. Public confusion about the costs of rebuilding created fierce opposition to adopting more stringent energy codes. Homeowners in Boulder County were unwilling to adopt unfamiliar standards without clear cost information, and Rebuilding Better leaders emphasized that uncertainty needs to be combated early and often in the recovery process.
• There are important opportunities to consider equity. The leaders of the Rebuilding Better program described opportunities to better serve renters and economically vulnerable households. Future programs could focus on reducing upfront costs to homeowners, blending resources from multiple sources including philanthropies and community foundations, and extending eligibility for the program to households and nonprofit organizations committed to building permanently affordable housing.
• The message you lead with matters. Rebuilding Better leaders found that messaging focused on the personal benefits of constructing to higher standards was more effective than messages about climate or sustainability. The most engaging messages centered on the comfort, health, and safety benefits of high-performance homes.

How We Did It

We conducted interviews with recovery leaders, officials, and partner organizations involved in designing and implementing Rebuilding Better. We also reviewed program documents and analyzed performance data on rebuilding permits and participation rates through October 2025 and synthesized these sources to develop project findings.