Climate researchers with the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) have decided to use the incredibly lucrative real estate industry in an attempt to educate the wealthier/ruling classes in our country. As sea levels rise, coastal areas will see more regular flooding; and so while you might still have a few decades before your beachfront property is completely submerged, you are still going to have to reckon—financially—with climate change’s effects.
Titled “Underwater: Rising Seas, Chronic Floods, and the Implications for US Coastal Real Estate (2018),” the report discusses what the researchers call “a threshold of disruption.” This is when flooding on the coastal areas begin to occur 26 times a year, every two weeks, not caused by storms. At this point researchers explain, “normal routines become impossible and coastal residents, communities, and businesses are forced to make difficult, often costly choices.”
The team’s findings are very practical reminders to the wealthier in our society that they lose too when it comes to climate change.
- More than 300,000 of today's coastal homes, with a collective market value of about $117.5 billion today, are at risk of chronic inundation in 2045—a timeframe that falls within the lifespan of a 30-year mortgage issued today. Approximately 14,000 coastal commercial properties, currently assessed at a value of roughly $18.5 billion, are also at risk during that timeframe.
- By the end of the century, homes and commercial properties currently worth more than $1 trillion could be at risk. This includes as many as 2.4 million homes—the rough equivalent of all the homes in Los Angeles and Houston combined—that are collectively valued today at approximately $912 billion.
- The properties at risk by 2045 currently house 550,000 people and contribute nearly $1.5 billion toward today's property tax base. Those numbers jump to about 4.7 million people and $12 billion by 2100.
- States with the most homes at risk by the end of the century are Florida, with about 1 million homes (more than 10% of the state's current residential properties); New Jersey, with 250,000 homes; and New York with 143,000 homes.
The reverberations across our economy will be … rough, to say the least. If I were more cynical I would begin an insurance company for “climate change,” then never pay out by citing bogus right-wing anti-climate change propaganda.