Zillow Doesn’t Care If Climate Change Destroys Your New Home
For homeowners, failing to consider climate risks could be catastrophic—in fact, it already is. Almost half the homes in the United States are at serious risk from the climate crisis, whether due to flooding, wildfires, hurricanes, heat, or bad air quality. Adding to the problem, while potential homebuyers struggle to obtain data to guide their decisions, the insurance industry does not suffer from challenges of this kind. Insurers are making rational decisions in their own interests, leaving homeowners with insurmountable costs, or even uninsured. State Farm canceled 72,000 home insurance policies last year, leaving those homeowners unprotected in future disasters. And Hurricane Helene inflicted some $200 billion in damages last year, of which, Grist reported, almost none were covered by insurance. While in some cases insurers are refusing to cover risky homes, in others, they are setting prices so high that millions are going without, or getting cheaper, less comprehensive insurance.
The result of all this, the Senate Budget Committee warned a year ago, will be “a collapse in property values with the potential to trigger a full-scale financial crisis.” Early this year, First Street, the firm that provided climate risk data to Zillow before last month, predicted that over the next three decades, Americans would lose nearly $1.5 trillion in assets due to the damage that climate change would wreak on our homes. For many American homeowners, this is a quick path to financial ruin: Their home is their most valuable asset, with home equity accounting for 45 percent of their net worth. The percentage is much higher for Black and Hispanic homeowners, who tend to have much less wealth overall than white homeowners.
You could end up losing much more than an asset. Far from stereotypically risky locations like Tornado Alley or the Gulf Coast, severe weather events exacerbated by climate change now threaten people’s lives everywhere from Brooklyn basements to the Pacific Palisades.
