New study looks at chronic flooding risk in coming decades from climate warming with subsequent sea level rise and tidal flooding.
Even as President Donald Trump downplays the importance of climate change, there are signs that Americans may be taking it more seriously—at least when it comes to buying a house.
Between 2007 and 2017, average home prices in areas facing the lowest risk of flooding, hurricanes and wildfires have far outpaced those with the greatest risk, according to figures compiled for Bloomberg News by Attom Data Solutions, a curator of national property data. Homes in areas most exposed to flood and hurricane risk were worth less last year, on average, than a decade earlier.
Attom Data looked at the annual change in home prices and sales across 3,397 cities around the country, then divided those cities into five groups based on their exposure to various types of natural disasters. What they found suggests the threats of climate change are beginning to register.
On average, home prices across the cities analyzed by Attom Data increased 7.3 percent between 2007 and 2017. That figure masks deep drops in vulnerable areas.
“Natural disaster risk is certainly not the only factor consumers are considering when buying a home,” said Daren Blomquist, Attom Data’s senior vice president for communications. But he said the figures provide “some evidence real estate consumers are responding to natural disaster risk, albeit somewhat erratically.”
Most people check out Zillow, a popular online real estate app, for information on how many beds and baths a house includes, or the quality of local schools, or how long a home has been on the market.
But climate experts at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) saw Zillow as just the kind of big data needed to better inform assessments of the risks of flooding to properties around the nation’s rim. And looking at the app through that screen, they have turned up some troubling visions.
Property losses in the United States could run into the hundreds of billions of dollars unless rapid action is taken to bring climate change under control, they warned in a study released Monday.
The owners of more than 150,000 existing homes and commercial properties, worth $63 billion, could find their assets at risk from repeated flooding in the coming 15 years. That risk could double by 2045.
This is, of course, homes that are often people’s single biggest assets,” said Rachel Cleetus of the UCS. “This is about entire communities that might find much of the property in their community gets inundated, and that might affect their community tax base.”
By the end of the century, if seas rise by 6.6 feet—a high, but not worst-case projection in the 2017 National Climate Assessment—the damage could be staggering. Continue reading “Climate Will Have Real Estate Impacts -and Soon”
