Recently, Ken Topping wrote an Invited Comment entitled Mitigation From the Ground Up, emphasizing disaster resistant community design (DRCD) as a long-term strategy for natural hazard mitigation. He stressed that DRCD is a concept that will push communities to factor the complex relationships between natural hazards and the built environment into the community development process. Topping also advocated a strategy combining land use and building code mandates and incentives to encourage mitigation activities. This is a wonderful idea. Unrelated to Mr. Topping's proposal, a discussion at the November 1996 annual workshop of the Central United States Earthquake Consortium (CUSEC) noted that some barriers to mitigation include: (1) political hurdles, (2) diffuse responsibility for mitigation among many public and private sector organizations, and (3) weak local technical and organizational capacity related to hazards. The purpose of this article is to discuss how hazard mitigation professionals can both develop a political constituency for mitigation by identifying DRCD roles and responsibilities among a wide spectrum of functions and identify strategies to overcome the sort of barriers described at the CUSEC session so that mitigation measures and incentives can be implemented.