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Imagine owning a Florida home in Hurricane Milton's path and choosing not to evacuate as the storm approached. This decision might seem incredibly reckless, but some homeowners in Florida's Hunters Point community saw their homes as the safest place to ride out the storm. That's because their community was purpose-built with hurricane-resistant features that allowed it to withstand Milton's fury. They fared surprisingly well.

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Hunters Point is an 86-unit housing community in Cortez, Florida, down the road from Tampa Bay. It was built with the understanding that devastating hurricanes would be a fact of life in Florida and that the only way to survive them was to build stronger houses. The developer, Pearl Homes, left nothing to chance, including the community's power supply. Each home is equipped with solar panels, which put power back into the energy grid.

Pearl touted Hunters Point as America's first Net-Zero housing community, which allows its residents to keep the lights on when storms knock out power to the area. However, that's only a small part of what makes this community so special. Every home in Hunters Point has a series of engineering and structural upgrades designed to allow it to survive a Category 5 hurricane.

One important feature was putting Hunters Point living spaces over the garage, 16 feet above ground level. Pearl Homes founder Marshall Gobuty told CNN, "The idea is that if water did come into the garage, which is fine because we have the flood beds which are specifically there for that, there's still nine feet of garage. That would have to be an impossibility (for the floods to enter). We knew that it would never happen."

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Even if a storm surge does reach the second level, the living space is also equipped with vents to let floodwaters pass through the house instead of getting trapped inside. Every Hunters Point home is also held down by steel-reinforced straps that run from the foundation to the roof. Even the solar panels are fixed to the roof so they are protected from extreme winds and highly resistant to being blown off.

After all, what good is a solar system if the panels get blown into the next county? This was a key design feature in allowing Hunters Point residents to ride out the storm at home. Gobuty said, "Everybody around us was completely dark at like five in the morning and you see the lights on in our houses. So, it really was a test of why we did this."

Gobuty and Pearl left very little to chance. The community is prone to flooding and local ordinance requires developers to use at least three feet of dirt fill. Hunters Point used seven feet, allowing the community's common areas to absorb much more water before flooding. Since its construction, Hunters Point has survived multiple hurricanes and one resident rode out Milton inside without losing power.

That's the good part. The picture gets a little more complex when you start talking about cost because all that net-zero, hurricane-resistant engineering comes at a significant price premium. Homes are available in Hunters Point, but they are listed between $1.4 million and $1.9 million, roughly two to three times the average home price for the area.

With that said, Hunters Point is probably a time capsule that illuminates what the future of Florida homebuilding will look like. As major storms continue to bear down and Florida home insurance premiums continue to skyrocket, the only way to mitigate that risk may be to build stronger than ever before. Hunters Point could well be the new standard in Florida.

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This article This Hurricane-Resistant, Net-Zero Florida Community Survived A Direct Hit From Milton – But The Innovation Comes At A Price originally appeared on Benzinga.com